this was the perfect response within comments to the puff piece posted above.
http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/02/25/3791199/homeless-workshop-highlighted.html
Gerry Bill explains EXACTLY what it is like to be homeless and what happens when you try to utilize the "successful" city service suggestions. You get the same runaround trying to place homeless mothers with children. Meanwhile privatized providers are making bank off of every angle in the poverty pimp industry.

Mr. Hostetter:

I read your thoughts on how the issue of homelessness is "gone," in terms of being an issue that still divides the city. I think you are quite wrong about that. You are making too much out of the fact that the various advocates for the homeless in Fresno chose not to make the city's workshop into any kind of confrontation--especially when it was not announced in advance that they would even be permitted to speak to the issue. Perhaps that was a mistake on their part--if they are not confrontational at every single opportunity, people such as yourself are likely to say that the issue has gone away.

I have quite a lot of contact with the homeless and recently homeless. I know for a fact that help for them is very difficult to find. I have tried calling, on behalf of a homeless person, the 2-1-1 number touted at the city workshop on homelessness. They referred me to another number, which referred me onto someone else, and on and on through six contacts, none of which had a place for him. I contacted Poverello House on a Wednesday, saying I had someone who needed housing that night. They told me to have him check back on Monday, five days later, to see if there was a place at that time. Where was he supposed to go in the meantime? Then, if it turned out they had no room on Monday, where was he supposed to go then? Another individual told me that he tried getting overnight housing at the Rescue Mission. He was told he would need to commit to a one-year treatment program in order to stay there. This is an individual who does not use drugs or alcohol at all. Was he supposed to pretend to have a drug problem in order to get a place to stay and then to go through a one-year treatment for a problem he does not have? I also know a homeless couple that has applied for subsidized housing; they have been on a waiting list for several months. The city offers such people no intermediate place to stay until permanent housing can be arranged (a practice soundly criticized in a Fresno Bee editorial a few months ago).
My biggest concern is with your comments about safe and legal campgrounds. Your argument seems to be that because a murder occurred at an illegal campground in Fresno, the same thing would have happened if it had been an organized and legal campground. That's a huge leap of logic. Most safe and legal campgrounds have a single, controlled point of access and who comes and goes is carefully monitored. That helps prevent outside criminals from coming into the camps and preying on the vulnerable people living there, which was what was happening in the three Fresno encampments you mention (but was not happening much at the Canal Bank encampment, which was also demolished). Safe and legal campgrounds do work well in some other cities, and the residents there are not murdered in their sleep.
Safe and legal campgrounds are not the only alternative. Other kinds of transitional housing can be provided, and that is done in some other cities. Something needs to be done to fill the huge gap between sleeping on the streets and moving into permanent housing. There are likely thousands of people in Fresno at the moment needing a temporary place to stay. An in-between place for them needs to be created so that they have some place to stay until permanent housing comes through for them."

those shiny objects are not the ball.
kill your keyboards and kick some ass.

Fresno. Where below average is "good enough. If I want to see something pretty, I'll go to Carmel."