Volbeat I Been Walking the Streets Again
Over the final three weeks, three homeless women died in plain sight in downtown Santa Barbara. One was murdered, one walked in front of an oncoming car, and the other'south basic life functions simply came to a stop on the 1200 block of State Street. For those in the trenches trying to expand the telescopic of options for people experiencing homelessness, these are sobering realities. The stories of these three women remain more guessed at than known. In the same historical moment, nevertheless, those in the same trenches took small merely definite strides to meliorate connect with those on the streets and to provide some actual housing for those accounted most vulnerable.
After not i but 2 ribbon-cutting ceremonies, commitment was finally made for the 33 pre-fab, popular-upward tiny homes that will before long become the Dignity Moves housing court. This new complex will be located in a county-owned parking lot on the m block of Santa Barbara Street. Although the project remains several months tardily, occupancy is expected to take identify one-time this June. The actual pop-ups — which are now beingness assembled — were manufactured in Bahrain. The logjam of cargo ships backed upwards in Long Beach harbor slowed down commitment considerably. The nagging jurisdictional question at present is how eligibility for these coveted spots will be determined. Stay tuned.
THE MISSION FOR AN EASTSIDE NAVIGATION CENTER: With considerably less fanfare, there was one small but ebullient ribbon-cutting ceremony early concluding Wednesday morning presided over by at least i elected official at the Santa Barbara Rescue Mission. It was for the thousand opening of the new Neighborhood Navigation Center that will now operate at the site every Wednesday morning.
This brings the grand total of Neighborhood Navigation Centers within city limits to three. The 1000 opening was marked by a decidedly festive and energetic vibe. More 50 people were served hot breakfasts of eggs, toast, hash brown potatoes, and sausage. Doctors Without Walls was on hand, as were volunteers with the Santa Barbara Support Network — "We're Hear to Heed," their sign read — as well as outreach workers with the county's Department of Behavioral Wellness. Many of the people taking reward of the heart's one-stop-store opportunities were guests of the Rescue Mission; many, all the same, were not, coming from the many freeway undercrossings located throughout the city'due south Eastside where unhoused people congregate.
Terminal Wednesday, there was no shortage of people perambulating nigh with the aid of crutches, walkers, canes, and wheelchairs. A cluster of bikes was parked out front end. Jeff Shaffer, Barbara Andersen, and Rich Sander — the trio running SB ACT, a city sponsored nonprofit defended to getting people off the street and into housing — were happily on hand for a moment they said was six months in the making. In the back of the room — which typically functions as the Rescue Mission's chapel — in that location were a couple racks brimming over with donated clothes.
The biggest line, however, was the ane operated by the city library. Library workers were on hand to provide books, videos, and fifty-fifty laptop services. But their ace in the hole was the help they offered those in demand in filling out the forms needed to obtain a Social Security carte, become their birth certificate, or fill out a host of government forms without which no services tin be obtained. In contempo months, the library has begun dispatching its mobile van to the three navigation centers that SB ACT has got upward and operating. Without the necessary paperwork, information technology'south incommunicable for people on the street to become jobs or to think well-nigh qualifying for the limited housing that's bachelor. "Everyone hates dealing with authorities agencies and filling out forms," said library administrator Molly Wetta. "Fifty-fifty for people who have college degress, jobs and roofs over their caput, it'southward difficult for us. Only hither we're dealing with people who'se lives are precarious enough as it is. To await them to stand in line at some centralized government office building is not really reasonable. For them it'due south not merely aggravating, as it might be for us. It'southward a huge impediment."
Busily signing affadavits of homelessness was Kevin Carroll, the Rescue Mission's Director of Homeless Services. With these affadavits, applicants can obtain their birth document gratis of charge. Depending on the state or the county of origin, birth certificates would otherwise price anywhere from $35 to $fifty. For many, that would be an insurmountable hurdle.
Carroll grew up in the Modesto neighborhoods of Stanislaus County, merely he has worked the last three years for the Rescue Mission. In a previous incarnation he was a drug-and-booze advisor and before that a juvenile probation officeholder. He carries himself with the sturdy potency of someone who played offensive tackle for his high school football squad. The Rescue Mission operates pretty much the only shelter in boondocks that embodies the archetype first-come-first-served, come-every bit-yous-are shelter. Information technology has a maximum chapters of 120 beds, simply the night earlier, Carroll reported, the mission had 34 women guests and 72 men — so not quite full, but close. If Carroll has seen information technology all throughout his professional career — 16 years working with the homeless — he still comes across every bit someone for whom hope is not a four-letter of the alphabet word. "Yea, there are some bad apples amid the homeless. Merely most of these people, the people nosotros see, they're just struggling," he said. "A lot of these people were seriously traumatized." Commenting on his own life journeying, he said, "I've been blest."
Connecting the dots that fabricated this latest Navigation Centre really happen, withal, was Jerianne Gargano, a homeless guest service worker two years out of Westmont College. Jeff Shaffer and the SB Act crew had been beating the bushes on the city's Eastside for more than 6 months trying to find a third location before encountering Gargano, who offered up the Rescue Mission.
SB Human action had been getting nowhere fast. Some on the Eastside feel their neighborhood has washed more than its off-white share where the homeless are concerned, having had the shelter formerly known as Casa Esperanza crammed downward their throats. Dorsum in the day, in that location were no shortage of neighborhood complaints about collateral damage inflicted by Casa Esperanza. Those complaints quieted down when the shelter was bought out several years agone by PATH, a statewide shelter operation of considerable renown. But under PATH, the prototype shifted and the drop-in trade all but evaporated. In that location was considerably less space for guests non actively engaged in specific transitional programs. PATH has also struggled to find on-site management; shelters, it turns out are notoriously hard to run from afar or office-time. Just the loftier cost of living in Santa Barbara has made it even harder still to recruit experienced managers.
Luck met coincidence for Shaffer, who ran into the Rescue Mission's Gargano during a neighborhood stakeholder Zoom call. For Shaffer and SB ACT, the Neighborhood Navigation Center is the foundational vehicle for establishing connectedness and trust with a transient population that is notoriously short-supplied when it comes to trust or connection. Merely the centers allow service providers to get to know those who demand the assist. Most homeless people walk only and so far in a day, Shaffer noted. It's not reasonable to expect them to congregate at ane centralized service spot to get assist; instead, the city needs to sprout with decentralized spots — Navigation Centers — that provide such services. It's almost a tenet of the Shaffer ideology that every neighborhood needs 1.
Preaching is one thing, Shaffer has discovered; converting the Eastside skeptics and doubters quite another. Into this void leapt Gargano, suggesting the Rescue Mission might be open. Equally a site, information technology's a picayune minor; there's no infinite outside for the Shower of Blessings portable showers that makes the Navigation Center at the parking lot past Castillo and Carrillo so inviting to so many people every Tuesday. To provide shower services at the Rescue Mission's Navigation Center will require some logistical fancy footwork. Gargano said she'd visited the ii other centers and saw what services they provided. "I realized our guests could really do good from having one of these events more than accessible to them," she said.
According to SB Deed, these centers work, however much time it takes. In the past twelvemonth, Shaffer said, there were 98 "street exits" in the past yr that he attributes to the ii Navigation Centers already up and operating.
That's the skillful news.
NOT A HAPPY DAY: The bad news is that concluding Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors signed the bureaucratic equivalent of a expiry certificate for a promising 24-bed drug-and-alcohol rehab plan run past the Salvation Ground forces at its downtown shelter on Chapala Street. The programme opened in 2019 with much fanfare. MediCal would cover the costs of providing medically assisted treatment for those with serious addiction problems for upward to six months. On the South Coast, this was near unheard of. In 2020, the programme treated 282 people. Then COVID struck. Non only did fewer addicts want to take chances living in close quarters with other addicts, but there weren't enough licensed rehab workers. Because the program involved medical treatment — not but variants of the 12-step programs — bodily licenses were required. "Information technology'due south not the social model," stressed Salvation Regular army Manager Marker Gisler.
With the onslaught of COVID, Gisler had a hard time maintaining anything merely the blank minimum of licensed workers. Then, not fifty-fifty that many. Past October, they could staff at only 60 percent of what country licensing required. Information technology all took a cost. There were fewer workers and more than relapses. State licensing gave Gisler and Salvation Ground forces 90 days to find staff. On January ten, their 90-day borderline expired. Final Tuesday, the county supervisors quietly canonical the paperwork to pull the plug and take the program off life support. In so doing, Salvation Army left $4.v million in canonical funding yet on the table. Unspent. That'southward a lot of addicts unserved. "It crushed me, to be honest," said Gisler. "It's not a happy day."
Iii DEATHS IN THREE WEEKS: All that is just the routine groundwork racket experienced by those seeking to accost non the consequence of homelessness but actual people who happen to exist homeless. Skilful news chases the bad. Bad news chases the good.
More drastic and dramatic are the three contempo deaths that underscore living a life on the streets. The outset to go was Theresa Carina, 50, who was strangled to decease early in the morning of March 14. Her defendant killer, Gabriel Zepeda — a 46-year-old drifter from Santa Maria — allegedly confessed to the crime. Carina, described by regime as a adult female afflicted with mental illness who slept regularly on the door step of Mountain Air Sports, a well-known business at the bottom of Land Street. Court records paint a protracted spiral downward over the years for Carina — divorce, unemployment, evictions — followed by multiple petty offenses. Authorities say she was polite and peachy, taking pains to leave her sleeping spot clean and vacated long before the shop opened for business.
Zepeda — recently released from County Jail and wearing an ankle bracelet tracker so he could see his ailing grandmother earlier she died—had his own history: multiple instances of spousal abuse, stalking, and, most recently, angry erratic beliefs on State Street. As polite as Carina reportedly was, she wasn't going to take whatever grief from Zepeda when the two first encountered each other. Words were exchanged. Then they got hotter. When it was over, Zepeda sought to truss Carina's arms and feet, ostensibly to booty her body away. He didn't get far when he thought meliorate of information technology and fled. Police would arrest him at about 2 in the morning on Stearns Wharf.
Terminal week, the body of a adult female known just every bit Christine was found on the 1200 cake of State Street. (Her last proper noun will be released upon notification of next of kin.) Christine was well-known to constabulary and businesses in the area; she was well liked. Many felt the impulse to look out for her; several sought to observe Christine a home. She never accepted. That's not where she belonged, she would explain. Fifty-fifty Jeff Shaffer of SB ACT, who knows many of the downtown homeless people by proper noun, never got to know Christine's dorsum story. She never let anyone get shut enough. The folklore amongst the police is that Christine had been pulled over when driving through town virtually twenty years agone. Her tags were expired. Her license had expired. She had no insurance. Her car, accordingly, was impounded. And she'd been living on the street ever since, sleeping behind a prominent downtown business. She was born in 1957.
Early on this week, a 57-twelvemonth sometime-woman named Debra Reynoso was struck and killed by the 31-year-one-time commuter of a Buick Le Sabre when she walked into the right-hand lane of Highway 101 headed south by Castillo Street. Co-ordinate to the California Highway Patrol, Reynoso had been walking forth the side of the motorway before entering the lane. The commuter stopped, called the law, and waited. At that place was no bear witness of drugs or alcohol. Reynoso had recently been arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon. The court record indicates that her mental health was sufficiently fragile that a psychiatric exam was ordered. She'd been homeless for several years.
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Source: https://www.independent.com/2022/04/09/dying-in-plain-sight-on-the-streets-of-santa-barbara/
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