By Hauren Hepler : calmatters – excerpt (includes detailed graphics)
The records catalog the chaos inside California homeless shelters.
In Salinas, internal emails say the staff at one brand-new shelter grabbed the best donations for themselves and helped friends and family jump the line for housing. In Los Angeles, court records show a leading nonprofit hired a man who was convicted of attempted murder to work security at a shelter, where he committed three sex crimes in one day.
Then, buried deep within thousands of pages of shelter reports, there are the stabbings in forgotten corners of Silicon Valley, the child abuse in Fresno and black mold in Oakland. Just about everywhere, a hidden epidemic of shelter death lurks.
Even if residents of the state’s roughly 61,000 emergency shelter beds endure the gauntlet, they’ll likely get stuck in housing purgatory. New state data obtained by CalMatters shows that fewer than 1 in 4 residents who cycle through shelters each year move into permanent homes, far below what many shelter operators promised in their contracts with public agencies…
Unsafe Havens
Read the entire series:
- ‘A volunteer jail:’ Inside the scandals and abuse pushing California’s homeless out of shelters
- 7 takeaways from our investigation into California homeless shelters
- How to file a complaint against a California homeless shelter
Please read more on the site and leave comments here.
For some time I have been wondering why we need to spend so much time and energy on temporary housing and why it takes so long to fill the “permanent affordable” housing. Why so much is empty all the time. These articles seem to answer some of my concerns. Instead of housing homeless people, the goal seems to be to manage the non-profits managing the housing operations.