"The Cave": a netherworld
where homeless people live
Pearl Mibbs, who lives in the Cave, gives her dog Queenie water before making herself some coffee.To reach the secret place they call the Cave, its denizens must climb a ladder toward a small, hard-to-notice opening in the tall concrete slab that helps hold up the 10 Freeway. They must squeeze beneath a rusty metal grating, balance on a ledge and descend a second ladder into thick, dead air and darkness. This is home, a vast, vault-like netherworld, strewn with garbage and syringes.
Richard Dafoe likes it here, even with 3-foot cobwebs and the constant thrum of freeway traffic overhead. For the decade or so he has lived here, he has found it a reliable sanctuary against daylight, police and other people.
"It's basically a safe place to be because the cops can't get into it," said Dafoe, 56, known as the Wizard for his ample white beard and wild hair. "They're scared."
Authorities are clearing out the Cave, evicting the people who live there and trying to close it off for good.
Read the
Los Angeles Times report
here.
As my colleague Steven at
Stone Soup Station says: "It's simple, really; when we can't provide housing to those on the lower rungs of our society, we end up with ... dungeons like this one."
Another picnic in the park
Tonight's dinner at Lake Eola: fruit salad (mangos, peaches and apples), garden salad with croutons, hearty vegetable soup with lots of lovely vegetables, Mexican rice, mashed potatoes mixed with carrots, and honeydew melon slices.
There was a big crowd, and the food went fast. I didn't get to even taste any, because I never eat until I'm sure that everyone who really needs a meal has eaten.
Homeless sue St. Petersburg,
claim abuse of constitutional rights
Six homeless people backed by a handful of advocacy organizations have filed a
federal class-action lawsuit against the city of St. Petersburg that challenges the constitutionality of a series of ordinances that target homeless people.
The city has passed six ordinances that restrict some behaviors associated with street homelessness in recent years, including measures that limit where and when the homeless can sleep and the amount of personal belongings they can keep by their side.
"What has been happening in St. Petersburg over the past couple years is one of the worst examples nationally of widespread abuse of homeless persons' civil and human rights," said Tulin Ozdeger, civil rights director for the
National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, one of three organizations representing the city's homeless.
The lawsuit, filed in Tampa, claims the city's ordinances violate various constitutional protections, including freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, freedom from unreasonable searches and free speech.
Read the
St. Petersburg Times report
here. See previous post
here and check out the
post at
End Homelessness.
What companies can learn from the homeless
"I'm homeless. I'm hungry. I've got 6 kids. I've got AIDS. Please help. God bless," reads the handwritten cardboard sign sitting in front of the homeless man.
Sometimes we are drawn to give and sometimes we're not. Regardless of what you may think is happening that sign he are holding is in fact a piece of marketing. The question is, is it an effective piece of marketing?
With a new sign (better marketing), one panhandler's take increased from $20 to $30 over the course of an 8 to 10 hour day to $40 in 2 hours.
So what did the new sign say?
Check out the
post at
Re:Focus.
Family dumps elderly aunt
at homeless shelter, goes to Disney
Investigators say a woman did not want her elderly aunt to go with her to Disney World so she dropped her off at a homeless shelter.
Officials say Beverly Edwards dropped off her 96-year-old aunt, Ruth Smith, at a Salvation Army Center in Bradenton.
The fragile woman who has medical conditions was left with all of her belongings in trash bags, and her niece said she was not coming back to get her.
Read the
Orlando Sentinel article
here.
Apparently in Tampa, it's OK
to run over and kill the homeless
In the case of a hit-and-run driver who struck and killed a homeless woman three months ago, all roads lead to a posh home on Davis Islands, police say.
That's where, Tampa police say, they found the maroon SUV that they think hit 33-year-old Melissa Sjostrom as she limped across a street on Feb. 8.
A paint chip from the damaged vehicle matched one found at the scene like a "jigsaw puzzle," a detective wrote in his report.
A teenager living at the house told her parents she had been involved in an accident, and video from the Selmon Crosstown Expressway put the SUV - undamaged, at the time - near the scene of the hit and run a few minutes before it happened.
Jordan Valdez, 16 at the time, was never charged in connection with Sjostrom's death, though she was cited for careless driving. On Tuesday, even that fell through: A judge dismissed the citation when no one from the Tampa Police Department showed up to testify.
Read the
Tampa Tribune article
here.
Thanks to
spacecoastweb (well, actually
@spacecoastweb) for the link.
Rain doesn't stop the food-sharing
Despite today's rain, dinner was served at Lake Eola tonight.
The menu: Mexican corn chowder (very tasty over rice), roasted asparagus and zuchini, sweet potato mash, green bean casserole, baked baby carrots, salad and corn on the cob.
Orlando Food Not Bombs hasn't missed a Wednesday dinner in at least three years (that I know of) ... and probably longer.
Blending in: Walk through a day
in the life of a homeless man
Finding food and clothing around town isn’t too challenging thanks to local missions, Tom Rogers says, but finding shelter is a big concern.Tom Rogers first spent a night without a roof over his head about a year ago. He'll never forget it.
He remembers feeling lost, but never worthless. Self-worth, prayer and laughter kept him going and still do. "I'm still the same person I used to be when I worked," he said. "The only difference is I don't have a roof over my head right now."
Rogers explains the basics of what it means to be homeless: what he does all day, where he finds food, how he stays clean (and blends in) and more.
Read the
Spartanburg Herald-Journal article
here.
Mango and green onion dressing
Sounds great, doesn't it? It could be something you'd pay quite a bit for at one of the nicer restaurants in downtown Orlando, but it was on the menu for the food-sharing at Lake Eola tonight.
The mango and green onion dressing was served over a salad of spinach, cherry tomatoes and avocado slices. Also on the
Food Not Bombs menu: potato and eggplant curry, rice, a variety of fancy breads, orange slices, grapes and strawberries.
The rice was gone by the time I ate, but I sopped up the curry with some onion bread, and it was fabulous.
1 in 6 Florida kids live at risk of hunger
One in six young children live on the brink of hunger in Florida.
That means about 178,000 children under the age of 5 -- about 16.4% of all Florida children -- do not consistently have access to the daily caloric intake needed to grow and thrive.
Florida is about in the middle of the states. Across the United States, 17.3% of children under 5 face hunger.
A new report, "Child Food Insecurity in the United States: 2005-07," includes the first ever state-by-state analysis of early childhood hunger, using data collected by the United States Department of Agriculture.
The numbers get a little better when the age is expanded to include all children, thanks to school breakfast and lunch programs. But even then, 15.9% of Florida kids -- about 638,000 children -- face hunger.
“Children are the engine for economic growth in the United States. Hunger creates unbearable, unsustainable costs that ripple through the economy and prevent economic success.” said researcher John Cook, Ph.D., of the Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine, a nationally-recognized expert on child hunger, who conducted the analysis. “If we fail to give them the nutrition and health supports they need in the first three to five years of life, our economy cannot fulfill its potential.”
Read the report
here.
If you're homeless, you can't renew your driver's license
An Indiana law has left a homeless man unable to renew the license he needs to drive the car he lives in.
Brian Wilkinson said financial and personal hardships forced him onto the streets of Indianapolis several years ago. Since then, the former correction officer has lived in his car, surviving on his food stamp allowance and help from a relative.
Now his driver's license renewal has been denied on grounds that he does not have a permanent address.
Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles spokesman Dennis Rosebrough said a 2007 state law putting Indiana in line with new federal guidelines requires a physical address to get state-issued identification. "We do not have the latitude to just waive the law and ignore it. So we must apply the law as written," he said.
Read the WRTV report
here.
Florida has a similar law, but at
IDignity, we've found some ways to deal with it. Need help? The next IDignity events are
May 14 in Sanford and
May 21 in downtown Orlando.
Jail inmate charged
in 2007 slaying of homeless woman
Orlando police have charged an Orange County jail inmate with murder in a 2007 killing.
Heath Helvey, 33, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Venus Martinez.
Martinez, 29, was found July 29, 2007, near the Orlando Lynx bus terminal alongside Interstate 4 near the intersection of Amelia and Garland. She was one of six victims of then-unsolved prostitute killings that year.
Helvey, who already was in custody at the jail on charges including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and assault of a law enforcement officer, admitted having a confrontation with Martinez, but denied killing her.
Read the
Orlando Sentinel report
here and Willoughby Mariano's Orlando Homicide Report blog post
here. And see previous post
here.
Homeless man dies with $100,000 in the bank
A homeless South Korean man died of cancer without being able to use a single penny of his life savings of $100,000 because he could not prove his identity to his bank.
Residents of the Yongbong district of Gwangju, in southwestern South Korea, knew little about the quiet man who had drifted into their neighborhood in 2007. He pulled a cart during the day to collect and sell scrap metal and other junk and slept in the cart or a shipping container. In mid-April, he looked so fragile that people ignored his protests and called an ambulance. He was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.
The man then told the officials that his name was Na Hae-dong.
He had 128 million won in a bank account opened under his name decades ago. But in 1993, South Korea introduced an anti-corruption law that required an account holder to prove that the account had been opened under the holder’s real name before withdrawing money. People were given a grace period during which they could transfer their money to real-name accounts.
Apparently, Mr. Na had never heard of the law. But he had continued depositing his few earnings into the account. When he went to his bank after the cancer had been diagnosed, however, he could not take out his savings because, officially, he did not exist.
Local officials filed for court approval to give him an identity. But before the court ruled, Mr. Na died in the hospital on April 28.
His savings were expected to be donated to the state. He had no other belongings except his cart, a wristwatch and a quilt.
Read
The New York Times article
here.
Some rare good news from the Florida Legislature
The conference committee on
Senate Bill 1718, the court funding bill, just agreed on the bill -- and it includes the restoration of filing fee waivers for indigents. (Yay!)
I'm told that only the Governor could derail things now and there is no indication that there are any problems.
For more info, check out the
post at
Florida Civil Legal Update.
Take the pledge:
Never to judge a homeless person
Contemplate the reality of the situation. You do not know it.
You do not know what that person has been through or why they are in that position. Instead of jumping to the conclusion of judging them and placing the blame on their shoulders, why not make it just that little bit easier and encourage, rather than berate them?
Take the pledge
here.
"They took the food right out of my hands
before I could get it into my mouth"
"They took the food right out of my hands before I could get it into my mouth," Reverend Cocomo Rock of the 191914 Ministries said on Sunday at an aborted Food Not Bombs shared meal. "And then he told me he was going to throw all of it in the garbage."
Rock, who is unemployed, and who has not been able to get food stamps after applying seven weeks ago, claims the Sunday meal fills an important gap for him, and for other hungry residents of Middletown, Connecticut.
Sunday, soon after members of the local Food Not Bombs chapter set up tables and placed pots of jambalaya, mango chutney, collard greens, stuffed peppers and more on the table as part of a meal they share with the community, all the food was confiscated. One Food Not Bombs member was issued a summons to appear in court for the commission of a misdemeanor, distributing food without a license.
Food Not Bomb members vowed to continue sharing meals.
"If the health department can't prevent me from buying and smoking cigarettes," said Fred Carroll, who was cited last week. "Don't worry about them protecting me from vegetables."
Food Not Bomb members vowed to continue sharing meals.
The group chooses to share the food publicly -- rather than at someone’s house, for example -- as a means of drawing attention to issues of hunger, said Dan Schniedewind. “We do it in as public a place as we can because we feel these issues are very important,” he said. “It’s a demonstration against a society with misplaced priorities.” And that's why a federal judge in Orlando
ruled that sharing food with hungry and homeless people in public spaces is protected by the First Amendment.
Read
The Middletown Eye report
here and the Middletown Press report
here. And see previous post
here.
The new homeless don't fit old stereotypes
Kenneth and Stacy Dowdy can't afford a place to live in Charlotte, North Carolina. Neither can Charles DuPree. But if you passed them on the street, you might not recognize them for what they are: Homeless.
They are among a growing number of newly homeless who don't fit old stereotypes. Many of them work regular jobs, or did until recently, nursing the sick, caring for other people's children, vacuuming offices, driving cabs.
They lived in apartments or houses, surviving paycheck to paycheck. One thing went wrong in this bad economy, and they didn't have far to fall before they ended up on the street.
Read the
Charlotte Observer article
here.
Food Not Bombs to continue
sharing food without a license
Food Not Bombs has been cited in Middleton, Connecticut, for distributing food to the public without a license, but plans to continue sharing food despite the possibility of more citations.
Fred Carroll, one of two Food Not Bombs members cited, said he plans to plead not guilty in Superior Court in Middletown. "The worst-case scenario is I'll have to pay $100," he said.
Police ticketed Carroll after a city inspector observed the group's offered meal of rice, salad, a bean and macaroni casserole, sweet potatoes, quinoa casserole, and honeydew melon and brownies.
In addition, the city has issued Food Not Bombs a cease-and-desist order. The group is appealing the order.
Food Not Bombs, made up mostly of Wesleyan University students, has been sharing food with the public for about 10 years. City officials first learned about the group's activities about eight months ago when a member of the public asked whether the group was licensed.
Read the
Hartford Courant report
here. Check out the Hartford IMC report
here. And read the blog post at The Middletown Eye
here.
