Cities Try To Tackle Homelessness Conditions Made Worse By Pandemic
New York City says it will try to offer support for the people now barred from sleeping in the subway system. Los Angeles resumes its count of people without housing. In Sacramento, vulnerable people say there is not enough access to bathrooms and water to keep them safe from covid.
Albuquerque Journal:
NYC Mayor Pushes To Remove Homeless People In Subway System
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is making an aggressive push to try to remove homeless people from the city’s sprawling subway system, announcing a plan to start barring people from sleeping on trains or riding the same lines all night. The new mayor, at one point likening homelessness to a “cancerous sore,” said Friday that the city next week would deploy more teams of police officers and mental health workers to the transit network and start enforcing rules more strictly. (02/19)
Bloomberg:
New York City To Send Clinicians To Subways, Ban Sleeping In Stations
New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Friday announced a plan to remove New Yorkers without homes and those suffering from mental illness from transit stations, sending response teams into the subways to help them. The teams will connect people in need with housing and other support and take them to drop-in centers. The city will add NYPD officers, who Adams said “will enforce transit rules” prohibiting smoking, open drug use, fare evasion and sleeping on trains. Officials will also launch a marketing campaign that directs everyday riders to text or Whatsapp the MTA to report people in need. (Nahmias, 2/18)
Los Angeles Times:
Greater L.A. Homeless Count Resumes After Pandemic Hiatus
After a yearlong hiatus during the pandemic, thousands of volunteers will fan out across Los Angeles County this week to conduct the annual count of the region’s homeless population. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority canceled the event last year and then delayed it last month because of COVID-19 surges spawned by the Delta and Omicron variants of the coronavirus. (Vives, 2/21)
Sacramento Bee:
Sacramento Has 37 Portable Toilets For 10,000 Homeless People — And They Could Be Removed
Currently, Sacramento County has 37 portable toilets available for an estimated 10,000 homeless people. That’s about 270 people per port-a-potty. They could be removed in June when funding for their upkeep runs out, said county spokeswoman Kim Nava. The county’s portable toilet program is fairly new. It dates to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when officials put out 50 port-a-potties near homeless camps. Thirteen have been removed since then. The county also put out 50 water stations, but has so far removed 21. Some of the toilets and water stations were damaged or went missing, and the county did not replace them. (Clift, 2/21)
The Press Times:
'You Cannot Ignore It Anymore.' Pandemic Spotlights Homelessness In Brown County, Fueling Push For Solutions
Wisconsin in 2020 had an estimated 4,515 people experiencing homelessness, according to the most recent available data. In 2021, the Brown County Health and Human Services Department served 175 people who identified as homeless. For the housed, homelessness may seem foreign — something that could never happen to them. But all people experiencing homelessness have one thing in common. (Graves, 2/19)
Detroit Free Press:
From Stumbling In Snow, Homeless Now Have Refuge Saving Lives, Dollars
It was after several winters of sheltering the homeless men at night and learning they were increasingly stumbling around in the snow by day — sometimes sleeping out in it — that the plight of Jim and Gary came dramatically to Elizabeth Kelly’s attention. As their conditions deteriorated, Jim and Gary had been in and out of Pontiac’s main hospital, at that time called POH Medical Center. They first had their frozen toes thawed, next amputated one by one, followed by amputations of entire feet, and then ultimately came their pitiful deaths. (Laitner, 2/21)
