We Got What We Wanted

(Photo by Phil Masturzo/Beacon Journal/Ohio.com)
Supporters and residents filled City Council chambers and two overflow rooms for our first chance to be officially heard by a government body.
The room erupted in applause and cheers when the 5 person planning commission unanimously agreed to hold off on their decision of whether we should stay or go until next month.
While a small step, the mere fact that people in official positions would agree to at least consider the plight of the most extremely poor was a massive victory.
The homeless are the voiceless and the invisible.
They know all too well what the heavy stigma of homelessness means.
Homelessness means broad brush strokes of stereotyping and generalizations.
Homelessness means people not ever looking at you or talking to you day in and day out.
Homelessness means you have crashed through every social and family safety net until you are left penniless and without anywhere to go.
Homelessness is choicelessness.
Homelessness is the great shunning from the richest country in the world.
It is heart-breakingly beautiful and sad and lovely to see the homeless get the official word that important people will at least consider their plight for one more month.
Of course they wouldn’t be able to hold back their cheers and applause when they heard the word that a group of important people said they would “think about it.”
No one has ever thought about them before this.
And then there is this: Doug Livingston of the Akron Beacon Journal reported in his article, First public hearing on homeless tent city in Akron draws large crowd:
“If I would have voted today,” said Ken Jones, a former councilman and commission member who made the motion to postpone a vote until the next meeting on July 13, “I would have said to council and the [Mayor Dan Horrigan] administration that this is an issue you have to fix.”
That’s just down right astounding. In fact, that’s the Holy Grail.
That’s all we ever wanted this to be: a conversation. This tent city was meant to be a proof of concept. Homeless people do indeed live in the woods. Now they live in my backyard. Let’s talk about this.
This is incredible.
But it was not all good.
Privately, after the event, I was met with several people filled with fear and worry.
In one case I was sent a formal letter by a significant supporter that they are seriously thinking about withdrawing all their support.
For some people they didn’t see success. They didn’t hear the stories of hope and love and life saving community.
All they heard were the detractors. Again, as Doug Livingston reports on the issues of the people against our tent city:
“They [the detractors] said villagers have been stealing electricity from outdoor outlets, leaving used needles and condoms on the ground, loitering and talking too loud at night. They brought photos from the fall and winter to illustrate their grievances.”
That was the entire story for some.
It filled some people with fear and worry and anger.
That was enough to call it quits on this movement.
I was not prepared for that response initially.
But I’m prepared for it this morning.
Sewing seeds of discontent is how detractors win.
The FBI did everything in their power to undermine Martin Luther King Jr’s legitimacy. They called him a communist, a Marxist, a womanizer.
The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover was nearly obsessed with smearing Dr. King.
JFK File: FBI Monitored Martin Luther King’s ‘Abnormal’ Sex Life of Orgies, Hookers and Joan Baez

Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s antipathy to King is well documented, and he went to extreme lengths, including authorising breaking into and bugging King’s home and offices, to destroy his reputation. The zeal of the FBI’s campaign against King has been outlined in tens of thousands of declassified FBI memos from the 1960s, and Congressional hearings on the FBI’s harrassment of King in the 1970s.

I’ve already experienced, on a much smaller scale, these kinds of attacks.
I’ve detailed many of these accusations in this article:
Every Rumor I Can Think Of
I am a drug dealer, pimp, failed business man who is just using the homeless to get rich and run for mayor.
This is how these things go.
There are many people who want to see our tent city fail.
And it’s not just neighbors. It’s people we’ve previously kicked out of the village who went against our code of conduct. It’s jealous “competitors” who would rather see all our work fail than see me, personally, succeed. It’s the mayor’s office of Akron.
These are powerful tactics.
Humans are easily scared. Our animal instinct of fight or flight kicks in at the first sign of danger. We don’t seem to be able to lose our natural animal instinct of fighting for life or death on our own in the wild.
But we must fight those instincts.
For society to get better we must push back our lessor instincts. We are not animals. We are humans.
And be warned. It will get worse.
Now that we’ve won the tiny step of being told people will think about our cause, the detractors will become louder and more dangerous.
They will try to divide us. They will try to undermine us. They will try to destroy us.
Make no mistake, what we are doing here is worlds better than what we had in Akron Ohio 18 months ago.
And as for the neighbors, they are top on my mind.
They have every right to live in peace and to feel safe.
On Monday I’m going to setup a security booth in the front of our building. We will not allow our people to loiter in front of our building or on the sidewalk near the apartment building. We won’t likely have much luck telling non-residents to move on. But we have a lot of pull with our own residents.
And we have to do something about this back and forth bickering between some residents of the apartment building and some residents of the tent city.
I heard that the first thing that happened after the hearing yesterday was that an apartment building resident yelled something condescending out her window at our people. And I’m quite sure some of our people couldn’t resist to yell something back.
I have been thinking about trying some sort of canopy system that keeps both people from being able to see each other.
These ridiculous, childish back and forths must stop. I can’t do anything about the people in the apartment. But I can definitely do something about the people in our facility.
We have security cameras. But I’m going to see if I can add audio to those cameras as well. I will have no problem throwing people out of our tent city that can’t act respectfully and can’t treat our neighbors with the same dignity that they themselves have been given by living in our community.
We have a waiting list for our facility. We are a place where homeless people move forward in their lives. We do not have room for people who refuse to stop playing loud mouth street games in our tent city.
Yes. We have faults. Yes. We have work to do.
But at the same time we have come a great distance. We have created a highly desirable community for the homeless who are ready to re-enter society.
We cannot obsess about rumors and hearsay. They will continue come. We will continue to be threatened and undermined at every opportunity.
We cannot let the detractors divide us. That’s how every war is won. Flank the enemy. Get them to stop moving together in the same direction. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
We have come a great distance. Yet we have far to go. And the outcome is far from certain.
This will be difficult and scary. And you will hear terrible things along the way.
But our doors are always open. All are welcome. Talk to our tri-council. Talk to our security. Talk to the drug counselors who rent space from us in the building. Walk the tent city. See for yourself the truth.
The truth, will indeed set you free.
Don’t let fear be your ruler. Don’t let hate and anger destroy your love and hope. Be strong. Be brave.
We are doing God’s work.

Why Akron's Tent City Matters

We have our first public hearing that will ultimately determine our fate this Friday, June 15 at 9:00am.
These are the details:
AKRON CITY PLANNING COMMISSION
MEETING OF JUNE 15, 2018 – 9:00 A.M.
COUNCIL CHAMBERS, THIRD FLOOR, MUNICIPAL BUILDING, 166 S. HIGH STREET IN AKRON.
PLEASE COME TO THIS!
Please join us to support the homeless of Akron at this Public forum of the City Planning Commission. The public voicing support for our tent city is how we will win. Without your public support we will lose. It’s just that simple.

YOU CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT THE EVENT BY CLICKING HERE.

I’m endlessly swirling in my head about what I want these people to know.

  • Women come crying to us thanking us for a safe place to sleep at night.
  • People that society has forgotten now have a place where they matter and are part of a community.
  • Closing our village will only send people back into the woods and onto the streets.
  • Senior citizens (in their late 70s) have a safe place to sleep.
  • This isn’t permanent housing. This is transitional, low barrier living to get people back into mainstream society.
  • Guardian study of two US cities finds crime is likelier to go down than up in neighborhoods that host city-sanctioned encampments. Read more here. 
  • We bring people to housing.
  • We have an addiction recovery group that rents space from us. Everyone that lives with us is required to take their drug assessment.
  • The health department comes regularly.
    • They inoculated us against Hepatitis A, a disease spreading through homeless populations throughout America.
    • They installed a hand washing station for us.
    • They bring us rubber gloves to handle food.
    • They bring us hand sanitizer.
  • Our main shelter in Akron is not ideal for everyone. Church service is required if you want to sleep there. Curfew is 8:00pm. Showers are in a wide open room with no privacy from all the other residents.
  • Agreeing to go to a shelter means losing many of your possessions. You have to pack what you can into a bag and leave the rest behind, to be stolen or thrown away.
  • Going to a shelter means giving up your pets and separating from your spouse. There are no co-ed shelters in Akron other than our tent city.
  • Our goal is to get people into housing.
  • If there was housing for everyone we wouldn’t need transitional facilities. But at the very least, it takes time to get people into housing.
  • People living alone on the street is worse for society.
    • They steal food.
    • They have nothing to do all day other than wonder aimlessly downtown.
    • They can’t get clean.
    • They rarely wash their clothes.
    • This spread disease.
    • Aimless homeless people downtown makes a city look bad.
  • We are part of the housing first model. We give people a safe place to live so that they can get back on their feet.
  • Being in a supportive community is what these people need at this time in their lives.
  • Being alone causes them to revert to higher drug and alcohol use.
  • We currently house nearly 50 people that would otherwise be on the streets, providing them a safe place to seek direct services, healthcare, and find jobs and housing.

It’s not like we are the first city in America to do this. These kinds of camps are springing up all over America.

More and more sanctioned tent communities are being established all over America because the need is real.

  • Las Cruces, NM, hosts a permanent encampment with a co-located service center.
  • Washington State permits religious organizations to temporarily host encampments on their property.
  • Vancouver, WA, permits limited overnight selfsheltering encampments on city property.

From the report by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty: TENT CITY, USA: The Growth of America’s Homeless Encampments and How Communities are Responding
“At the federal level, an increasing number of courts are applying the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to protect the rights of homeless individuals to perform survival activities in public spaces where adequate alternatives do not exist; the rights of homeless individuals not to be deprived of their liberty or property without due process of law; the due process rights of homeless individuals to travel; and their rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.”
We have come so far in the last 18 months at our tent city. If they close us down then we lose all the progress we’ve made.
We are the beginning steps of getting people off the street.
And that’s the thing we can all agree on. We want people to stop living on the streets. It is bad for them. And it’s bad for the city.

This Helps Akron

If the people in power do nothing other than say don’t do this and don’t do that then we can’t move forward.
This is what will happen if they shut us down: People will go back to the woods and abandoned properties. They will disappear. We won’t know where they are. We won’t be able to help them. They will just be festering like an untreated wound on the city.
It might make people feel better that we can’t see the homeless. But just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there and aren’t costing the city money and pulling us all down through crime and drug use.
Homelessness is real. And it’s not going away.
We aren’t asking for a single dime of money from the city. All we are asking for is the right to help the homeless.
If they close our tent city they will not have gotten one single person off the street. All they will have done is taken 50 homeless people and scattered them to the wind. They still will be on the street living in much worse conditions.
What we have created here is a HUGE opportunity for the good of Akron. We have shown that there is a need for a community for the homeless. We have shown that people will respond positively to this type of service who otherwise are service resistant. We are making them safer. We are making the city safer. And we are getting these people the help they need. Drug treatment, mental health treatment. Birth certificates. Photo IDs. Social Security cards. Food. Clothing. Internet access. Computers. Laundry. Showers.
This is a positive for Akron.
Please see that. Please see that we are making things better.
 

Community is Life or Death

I’ve been thinking a lot about how modern humans have lost touch with their world.
I’m eating apples for breakfast right now. I had corn on the cob for dinner last night. Pineapple is always available.
When, in Ohio, we should be eating cherries, beets, rhubarb and strawberries.

And then there is all the light pollution that makes it so we can’t see the sky.
Here’s a person star gazing in Hocking Hills:

We truly have lost touch with our surroundings.
Perhaps the greatest loss is our understanding of community.
“Community” has become a series of institutions. Fire, police, medical, utilities, trash service. That’s what community is for us today. It’s such a smooth operation that we have lost touch with what community truly is: community, at its core, is life or death.
For all the complaining we do about this or that department of society, we’d be living a much different life faster than you might imagine, if any one of our community services failed.
We see community in its most pure form every single day at The Homeless Charity Village.
Young people help old people put up their tents. Individuals buy milk to give to the group. Divisions of labor have developed. Jimmy takes out the trash. Brett watches over the day center. Willy cleans the bathrooms. Our elders bestow wisdom and structure for all of us.
There is no money to hire these things done. There is only community.
But community becomes everything.
Community at The Homeless Charity Village becomes absolutely apparent at the life or death level.

This weekend we had an overdose.

A young man had injected Fentanyl in his tent.
It was at this point that most people here believe the only reason that young man is alive today is because of divine intervention.
We have a newer resident: Ethan. He’s on our security team.
The laundry attendants asked Ethan to go back to the tent city and see if he could find some missing clothes baskets. Sometimes people leave them in their tent after doing laundry. (I’ve never heard of this being done before. It was just a “random” request.)
Ethan had a couple tents he was going to check. He certainly couldn’t check all 50 tents.
He said that he had no intention to go to one woman’s tent. But she was standing outside of her tent. He walked over to her to ask her if she had a clothes basket.
As he was walking towards her he heard the most faint moan.
He asked the woman he was talking with if she heard it. She said no.
Ethan called out to the head of security, Brandon. Because Ethan is new, he didn’t know the protocol. Was he allowed to open a tent if he felt something was wrong? Brandon told him he most certainly could.
Ethan unzipped the tent.
Inside he found a young man laying across his bedding. His back was arched slightly backwards making his head and feet below his chest.
He was foaming at the mouth. He was making an almost imperceptible gurgling noise. He was purple.
This was Sunday.
Two days earlier, on Friday, we had a Narcan training class. Ethan was part of that class.
Not only was Ethan trained how to use Narcan, he also was carrying it with him.
He administered two doses of Narcan in hopes of bringing the man back.
It didn’t work.
Brandon then came over. He also had been certified on Friday for using Narcan. And he had his Narcan with him.
The third dose was administered. It didn’t work.
The fourth dose was administered.
The man began to breathe on his own. He slowly moved his wrist.
Ethan and Brandon saved this man’s life.
During all of this they also had called 911. The paramedics and fire department came to continue helping this man.
It was discovered that he had overdosed on Fentanyl.
Fentanyl is significantly more powerful than heroine. It’s very easy to overdose on it.
But Narcan can revive people who overdose if they administer it in time.
This is community.
This man would most certainly have died if he was living in a tent in the woods.
This is why we all need each other.
And most importantly, this is why these people, who have absolutely nothing, need each other.
Humans can’t survive alone. But together we can prevail. Together we can do amazing things.
Society has lost its understanding of what community is.
We have a mentality of “we got ours.” And “it’s either our way or the highway.”
If people don’t fit into the one size fits all society we lose interest in them very quickly.
This is early society mentality. The weak and old either need to keep up or they will be left behind.
America does not need to live in such a brutal society.
We don’t need to leave the weakest among us to die alone in the gutters of America.
And what’s worse, these people at our tent city aren’t asking for anything from the city other than to exist. They aren’t asking for handouts or special dispensation.
All these people are hoping for is that someone who has all the power will say, “You can live.”
But right now that’s not what the people in power are saying.
All across America the powerful are saying:
“Don’t feed the homeless. You are just encouraging them.”
“Don’t give the homeless a place to pitch a tent. You are making them too comfortable.”
We are lead by people who think they are still living in dog eat dog times where if we give a person a place to put a $50 Walmart tent we are risking too much as a society. They must either get on board with the system or…
Or what?
I’m pretty sure the unspoken answer is: “Or just crawl away and die.”
Ethan was holding this revived man in his arms as he came back to life.
After the paramedics came and took over, Ethan stepped away.
He began to sob.
He had never experienced holding someone in his arms that was so close to death.
He had never experienced helping someone come back to life.
He had never experienced the fundamental core and power of what it means to be part of a community.

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