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Homeward Bound



I wish I was…

Got an interesting response to my recent item about homeless people being bussed off. “Silverspringwoman” writes:

I work for a homeless shelter in a rural California county;one of the latest “trends” for dealing with the homeless is to put them on a bus going somewhere else. Our agency has done it several times; we send people back to their home states if they want to go.

She also pointed readers to an article on the SF Gate backing her story up. It reads, in part:

San Francisco welfare officials struck an agreement Friday with their counterparts in Humboldt County to reassure them that the city isn’t dumping homeless people in the woodsy, far-northern county — resolving a spat that kicked up this week after Humboldt learned San Francisco had sent 13 homeless people there on one-way bus tickets over the past year.

From now on, the city will inform Humboldt whenever it sends homeless people over its borders through the Homeward Bound program, in which city counselors and police outreach workers give street people one-way tickets home as long as there are family or friends willing to help them on the other end, San Francisco officials said.

[…] On Friday, Rhorer said he agreed that in the future, San Francisco will notify Crandall’s department when it sends a homeless person to Humboldt — which sits 200 miles north, along the coast — and will verify beforehand that the person is actually from Humboldt.

[…] Since San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom created Homeward Bound last January, 964 homeless people have gotten one-way tickets back to family or friends in nearly every state of the nation. Several communities, including Sacramento, run similar but less comprehensive programs.

“We don’t send them unless our people can ensure that on the other end there are friends or family who will take care of them,” Rhorer said. “And we’ve had some very good outcomes.”

Seems like a very interesting program - to say the least. I’m not sure if they named the program after that Simon & Garfunkel song, but that’d be ironic if they did. Although not as ironic as if they named it after that movie with the talking animals: Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco.







3 Reader Responses

  1. Haeresis Says:
    February 21st, 2006 at 2:32 pm

    Kind of ironic when you consider just how many places send their own homeless to San Francisco.

  2. channel null Says:
    February 21st, 2006 at 9:44 pm

    There’s heresay about this in both DC and New York. Jason Louv claimed on Key 23 months ago to have seen video of a massive homeless arrest in the east village/lower east side, with the cops covering their badges, and the roundup shuffling everyone off to New Jersey or parts unknown being the frequent (not his) conclusion. Down in DC we’d frequently joke that all the NY homeless got shipped there… while DC might not top the nation for numbers of homeless, it probably wins per capita handsdown.

    Unrelated, but in Richmond VA we had a type of “homeless” known as the “Homebum”–there were so many abandoned houses that a lot of the indigent started squatting without worry, b/c the city is so broke no one cares.

  3. silverspringwoman Says:
    February 21st, 2006 at 10:48 pm

    When I worked the Reno Celtic Faire last year, the park that the fair was held in had a lot of homeless guys. As the vendors were arriving, the police came, did a sweep, and took them all away so we could get on with business. I wonder if they locked them up for the weekend, or if they just moved them somewhere else…



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