Walk a Night in Their Shoes But in Santa Cruz You Also Have to Sleep in Them

It is a full time job being homeless. It is a full time job being poor. That’s what those who complain that the less fortunate should just go out and find work and housing fail to understand. The homeless have a job already and that job is surviving. You have to get in line early for food and even earlier for a place to sleep. You carry everything you own on your back and when your clothes wear out you spend your all your time searching for replacements. You have only so much energy to expend because you have only so much food to fuel your body. Most of the time you’re tired and you’re sore and your clothes are damp.

If the cops find you sleeping on the street they move you on or give you a citation you can’t afford to pay or both. If you’re lucky, they give you a ride to the shelter. But if there are no beds free you go back out onto the street because at least there you can lie down in the dark and, with luck, you’ll sleep. Each day is the same and with each passing day you get a little older and a little more tired.

And sometimes at night you recall who you once were. You were a kid that played with other kids. You had a mother and a father. You wanted to be an engineer or a firefighter or an astronaut. You were loved and loved in return. You were a family. And in your darkest imaginings you could never have seen yourself come to this place.

These are the facts of life for the more than 1000 men, women and children who will be without a safe place to sleep tonight within the 12 squares miles that is the City of Santa Cruz.

In my opinion this is one of our greatest failings as a modern society. Heaven knows we have failed people experiencing homelessness in countless other ways but we have failed utterly in providing for this most basic need. And that is the need we have gathered here tonight to address.

We are here tonight because we are all concerned about the lack of safe places to sleep. I am here tonight because I believe that a housing first approach to homelessness, however well intended, cannot meet this need. In point of fact, the institutional response to homelessness and the need for emergency shelter has been nonexistent.

The need for a safe place to sleep is immediate and must be addressed immediately. Whether it takes the form of an expansion of the Faith Community Shelter model currently being operated by local churches or the development of a true year round walk-up shelter or the creation of Safe Spaces RV Parks or the establishment of a Camp of Last Resort, we must do something now.

My hope for a camp of last resort would be the inclusion of portable showers on site so that folks could get themselves both rested and ready for a new day. A camp of last resort can be a place that shelters people experiencing homelessness from the physical toll that lack of sleep inevitably causes. But it can also shelter them from the long arm of the camping ban and from the public scorn that may be the unkindest cut of all.

So tonight, let us begin to do what we can to create safe sleeping spaces for people experiencing homelessness and perhaps help them move a day closer to whatever they wish their life to be and not another day farther away.