This Week in Poverty: Fresno to Homeless People—Get Out

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/167132/week-poverty-fresno-homeless-people-get-out

In 2008, the City of Fresno and California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) paid a hefty settlement of $2.3 million for seizing and destroying homeless residents’ personal property and signed an agreement on how to deal with homeless encampments in the future.

But according to nine lawsuits filed last week on behalf of twelve homeless residents, the city and Caltrans have resumed a policy of “demolition and destruction of dwellings and personal property” since October of last year. Central California Legal Services (CCLS) has interviewed over 100 people and more legal action is expected in the coming weeks.

“Starting last September, the city clearly made a decision to try to get rid of all the homeless encampments that there are in Fresno,” says Chris Schneider, director of CCLS, where he has worked for nineteen years. “They started doing what they call ‘cleanups’ but it’s really just destructions of the encampments. The city comes in and says, ‘You’ve got to get out of here.’ Then as soon as people set up somewhere else the police come and tell them to move on from there too. There is just less and less space to go to, while the number of homeless have risen in the bad economy.”

The city claims that it stores people’s belongings, and while Schneider says that’s true for a lucky few, there are plenty of others who either watch their property destroyed or have gone to retrieve it only to find it’s not in storage as promised. Some homeless people manage to acquire new belongings, only to have the process repeated again—chased from their next dwelling and their property again destroyed.