Commentary: Opportunity for a homelessness solution
Special to The Enterprise
With COVID surging and a stay-at-home order, most of us are sick and tired of staying home. But how would you stay safe if you didn’t have a home? As homelessness and the pandemic become more dire, we need creative, long-range community solutions, and an alliance has recently formed to invent them.
When I was 6, my grandmother Maybelle died. She grew up in a physically abusive household with few house rules. She was a brilliant pianist but two of her children died in infancy. Her husband repeatedly committed her involuntarily and later divorced her, and she lived in poverty with her two younger children. Later, she’d hitchhiked between west and east coasts to visit her children. But when arrested for vagrancy, she was committed again and died there. Each person experiencing homelessness has his or her own story, each unique and compelling.
City, county pledge to cooperate on homeless camp
No issue in Davis has prompted more constituent complaints in the past year for Yolo County Supervisor Jim Provenza than the ever-growing encampment between F Street and the Cannery along the railroad tracks.
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No issue in Davis has prompted more constituent complaints in the past year for Yolo County Supervisor Jim Provenza than the ever-growing encampment between F Street and the Cannery along the railroad tracks.
Stretching from Covell Boulevard to the northern end of the Cannery are makeshift campsite after makeshift campsite some little more than open-sided structures, others far more elaborate and approaching the height of a two-story building. Here, a number of the city’s unhoused population have made shelters and more.
The Aggie
Organizations share their impact on the Davis and Yolo County homeless communities
While today’s “new normal” continues to change many aspects of life, issues like homelessness have remained present amid the difficulties of a pandemic. With rising health concerns, leaders in Yolo County continue to adjust in order to provide resources for the homeless community. Under normal circumstances, the Interfaith Rotating Winter Shelter (IRWS) in Davis provides the homeless community with shelter and a home-cooked meal. This involves a process of intake, transportation and arrival at the host site. A distribution of dinner follows before the guests go to sleep and are transported back to a drop-off site in the morning.
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