A growing number of people are living in their last real possession - their vehicles. A unique program in Santa Barbara offers a creative solution. The organizer calls it “the last safety blanket before falling into complete homelessness.” These “half-homeless” are allowed to stay over night in unused parking lots at non-profit organizations and city office buildings. They can enter at 7:00 pm but must leave at 6:30 am. We get an intimate look at living on the edge.
Update November 22, 2006
Tiana moved into a new apartment in September 2006 and is celebrating the little things, like having a mailbox. She is still working at the beach.
Linda, the woman who lives in her van with “Danny” the cat, received a membership to the YMCA and is now able to take showers every day. It was a gift from a couple who watched her story on California Connected.
- Safe Parking Program and other Outreach Programs, New Beginnings Counseling Center
- National Low Income Housing Coalition
- National Coalition for the Homeless
- “Survival Guide to Homelessness”, blog by Mobile Homemaker
- National Alliance to End Homelessness
- National Law Center on Hunger and Poverty
- Housing California, statewide coalition of affordable housing and homelessness organizations
- Western Center on Law and Poverty, legal services organization for low-income Californians
- America’s Second Harvest, national foodbank network
- Share our Strength, working to fight childhood hunger
- Jess Jessop, featured in this story
- Homeless with Housing, Jess Jessop’s organization for the mobile homeless
- Overnight Parking Program in Eugene, OR
February 16th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Ms. McCree:
Thank you for your important feature on the “half-homeless”.
Something has happened to this country, its culture, the people that live in it. How could it be that the viewer somehow feels positive that our fellow citizens are at least able to live in parked cars? Clearly our standards, expectations, and quality of life have declined badly.
I cannot comprehend how dispassionate, souless, and desensitized this so-called advanced affluent culture has become.
Still, I appreciate that you and California Connected covered this moving story. The story matter-of-factly lets the people speak for themselves about their plight in all of their quiet dignities.
I sort of stumbled onto this story, though I am aware of your program because I frequently watch KCET.
I am thinking that you have a powerful program maybe because it is low-profile, below the radar, and it doesn’t shout out at the viewer.
In any event, I am going to be watching your program hereforth and will tell the people I know about it.
L.A. needs this type of locally focused program.
Once again, thank you for your excellent show tonight on the homeless.
From a concerned viewer
(intended to be sent to L. McCree.)
February 24th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
As a caring person I am a volunteer for the St. Vincent de Paul conference in my area. It is so difficult to call attention to the plight of the homeless. We continue to stress they are not all addicts. Many in this great nation are a paycheck away from being homeless. It is so
heart wrenching to see the lack of concern for those less fortunate. I have had personal contact with many women like those on your show. They tell me they are shunned and looked upon as almost less than human.
February 28th, 2007 at 12:56 am
Dear Miss McCree:
I enjoyed your story about the brain damaged program in Palo Alto.
All the things they are doing are good but there is much they could do that would help substantially that they are not doing.
What a shame to not give our heros the best.
Dr. Tootie
March 5th, 2007 at 11:01 am
The New Beginnings Safe RV Camp Program has been a self-promoting failure and has created more blight and unregulated RV living all over this city. You provided a very biased report.
You failed to include the total disaster this overnight parking program has been to the neighborhoods it has invaded.
And now your overly sentimentalized version has made all these neighborhood problems a political hot potato everyone wants to pretend are not happening. Thanks alot.
Next time try and give a balanced view of what this failed program has really done to this formerly nice town. It is now a major RV magnet. So stop patting yourself on the back.
RV drivers are not the marginalized poor. They are squatters who now aggressively feel intitled to live for free at public expense in this town. Don’t blur the lines on this issue.
These are people who choose a life style to live in their RVs and now demand someone else take care of them. They never should be included the general society duty to protect the poor. They play a public con-game and you have only made the problem worse glamorizing them implying society has a duty to enable this chosen lifestyle.
Do you park your California Connected RV anywhere you want on any street you want? Or do you follow the rules and park only where you are permitted to set up housekeeping in your RV?
Why ask anything less of this group of RV drivers who instead conned you into thinking society owes them something?
They can take their gas bills, their insurance bills, their RVmaintenance bills, their cell phone bills, their satillite TV bills, and sell their RV and go a long way to getting off the streets along with a minimum wage job.
Maybe this will not let them live in Santa Barbara, but not everyone gets that privilege. Why make exceptions just because some one lives in an RV. I don’t get it.
March 21st, 2007 at 11:51 pm
I enjoyed your article and although there is much more a society such as our who can spend billions in Iraq but still allow poverty and homelessness to exist on the scale that it currently does reflects poorly on us.
As to those poor folks living in RV’s ..Well maybe it hasn’t occured to the obviously affluent pompass %^* who accused you of failing to take into consideration how it has ruined Santa Barbra. Possibly he should relocate to be with others of his ilk. France or Iran come readdily to mind!:) I think you do a good job of helping folks whose plight would otherwise be unknown. Mr. PA dosen’t realise that but for that cheap lil RV often worth less than a cpople a grand they would be sleeping under a bridge.
Anatole France once said the Law in it’s majestic equanimity, forbids equally the rich and the poor. From begging in the streets, staeling bread and sleeping under bridges!