LETTERS from Gazette Readers - May 2017
Have a favorite memory of your Hippie days?
Please share it with us!
The West County Museum is creating a library of oral histories of Hippie days in West Sonoma County. We’d love to include your story. So, for an appointment to record your oral history please contact: Sue Pekarsky Gary (Co-Curator “The Hippies”) at 808-333-1113
Sonoma County Housing, Crisis and Hope, Part 1
Lesa O'Mara
Sadly, I think we will see the time...
...when there will be so many people here (I see 10-20 new people at the library each time I go) that food will be distributed from the back of a truck...that never slows down. I love the thought of the tortured finding comfort but there are just so many bums both male and female that have no plans of ever doing anything more than scooping up free services and getting high...it is perversely pervasive and it shows not a single sign of getting better, quite the opposite as everything anyone is doing only attracts more! This would be the message I would have shared at many a meeting had I attended. Raise the standards to receive any charity, sobriety needs to be the great divider, work-fare needs to be set into place and yes with entry level manufacturing jobs all but destroyed in this country as I have said before...send them out to pull the weeds cities have given up on, sweep the parking lots business entities have ignored...I have been around this town, recently to places I hadn’t seen in years...I am completely disgusted!
SFGate does a pretty good job of saying what is going on, the Feds need to step in and tap Vegas for 1,000 times what this paltry sum amounts to!
San Francisco residents wonder why the city streets are home to so many lost and forlorn mentally ill drifters. Now there’s a documented reason: Nevada callously shipped its unwanted psychiatric patients here to be rid of them.
In a tentative settlement, Nevada is agreeing to pay $400,000 to San Francisco to end a lawsuit over what has been called Greyhound therapy, the practice of shipping indigent patients elsewhere. In this case, a state psychiatric hospital in Las Vegas allegedly sent 24 homeless former mental patients to this city with one-way bus tickets and little else.
Marcos Zapatero, Santa Rosa
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If You Build it They Will Come
I jus picked up a copy of the Gazette (issue April 2017) having read all the blurbs from the local communities, I was struck with the fact that only TWO communities are having a homeless issue, Guerneville and Monte Rio. This issue has been discussed for over twenty years, countless meetings, proposals and four county supervisors. The result of all the time and money spent the problem is worse.
Now the county solution is to buy a 10-acre horse farm across from the Senior Center, blocks from the elementary school and near the entrance to Armstrong Woods State Park.
Have our supervisors looked at locations in Healdsburg (there is a large former lumber yard that would be suitable) and the homeless would have a short walk to the Russian River that being a consideration for the location. How about Sebastopol or Windsor or any other Somoma County location.
I am not saying not in my town, only asking why not another town.
Ron Smith, Guerneville
Thanks for your letter - I can answer at least part of your question. Yes - EVERY community has a homeless problem - just not as VISIBLE as Guerneville since the river is one block from downtown. The River has a lot to do with gathering homeless people since you will find that in all towns with rivers, homeless people camp by water for obvious reasons. But in most cases they remain invisible or less visible than in Guerneville.
They are also less visible in Monte Rio although still very much present. But Monte Rio has few places to purchase food and supplies compared with Guerneville. In Healdsburg and Windsor people camp along Dry Creek and along the old railroad tracks. In Santa Rosa it’s along the creek and used to be along the tracks until SMART changed that.
In Forestville it’s mostly along the river on both sides. In Sebastopol it’s along the Laguna. In Cloverdale by the river and under bridges. In Petaluma along the river and tracks. In Sonoma it’s along the creek. etc. etc. Each community has ways of handling their homeless populations depending upon who they are and how much of a disturbance they create.
Guerneville’s visible population is what is causing much of the concern, especially because this town relies on tourism for its economy. When you delve deeply into how each community handles its homeless population, you see that they do all have systems that work - or don’t work - for them one way or another. ~ Vesta