Without a House Doesn’t Mean Without a Home

To sleep or not to sleep? It’s that time of year, when it gets cold and communities try to deal with those people who are houseless.

Rick Pearson, executive director of Project Understanding, says the people you see on the street are not homeless, just houseless. They do identify with a community or a neighborhood while sleeping on the street or under railroad viaducts or wherever they bed down. That is their home. What they lack is a physical building they can call their own.

The houseless, similar to the poor, have always been with us. It is difficult to get data on this segment of the population because of its fluidity. In previous decades and centuries, they have been called panhandlers, deadbeats, paupers, temporarily displaced and street people. Societies have ignored them and blamed them for their own condition.

Several programs in Ventura County are working to meet the needs of those without food and shelter. In Simi Valley, the organization Public Action to Deliver Shelter hosts a shelter at a different location each night. In Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Fillmore, Santa Paula and Ojai, various churches will open their doors to the less fortunate from now until March or April.

In the west county, the Salvation Army is operating a nightly shelter at the National Guard Armory in Oxnard, supported by $43,000 from Oxnard, $40,000 from Ventura and $5,000 from Camarillo; county officials are considering contributing another $53,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Administration.

Catholic Charities is coordinating the transportation of Ventura’s houseless to Oxnard each night and back to Ventura for the day.

It would seem that this process is flawed. Why would people want to return to Ventura for a few hours, only to return to Oxnard for food and shelter? Pearson and other advocates say the houseless return to familiar surroundings the same as those with shelter go to their neighborhoods.

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I understand that instinct. When I was an administrator at old Oxnard High School, I encountered several men who typified that behavior. In the mornings when I arrived at the campus several hours before school began, I found them sleeping in various places on the grounds. When I asked them why they didn’t sleep at the armory, which was a block away, they said they wanted to be by themselves away from others. This was their neighborhood. They had grown up in Oxnard and this is where they wanted to stay.

They never bothered anyone and were gone well before staff and students arrived. Most people never knew they were there. This flies in the face of the argument that if you provide a shelter, all the houseless people will flock to it.

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Besides, not only do individuals subscribe to the “not in my backyard” philosophy but cities also hold that belief and their policies reflect it.

Project Understanding is embarking on an ambitious plan to build and staff a permanent homeless facility somewhere in western Ventura County. Unfortunately, the completion of this endeavor is several years away.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., in his book “Homesick in Heaven,” said, “Where we love is home.”

Let us here in Ventura County apply that philosophy to our lives.