Friends on the Street, confined to a corner, keeps rolling In its 7th year, volunteers peeved but undeterred by fencing around City Plaza

by Leslie Layton
posted April 3

Chico’s Patrick Newman and a small cadre of volunteers continue to serve unhoused community members coffee and donuts every Sunday — seven years after the project began — gathering quietly on the southeast corner of the fenced-off City Plaza in downtown Chico.

Some five months after the City fenced off City Plaza to erect a wintertime ice rink, the fence remains even though the rink has been dismantled. Still, Friends on the Street serves coffee, donuts, sandwiches and cheese sticks to several dozen unhoused community members, gathering outside the chain link fence. Newman says Friends ran through $50,000 in cash donations in six years.

As Susanne Malloy sipped coffee this morning, she told ChicoSol that as an unhoused person, the gathering has been more than just a source of food.

“What is important is the people paying attention to your emotions,” Malloy said, telling ChicoSol that if someone is feeling blue, others will notice and ask how they’re doing. “It’s extensively more healing than going to Enloe.”

An unhoused man at the gathering, who only identified himself as “David,” commented on the upcoming opening of the pallet shelters along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway that are designed to be a step toward managing homelessness in Chico. David said he doesn’t like the fencing that surrounds the site and worries that the City will run it like a “detention camp.”

David predicts that the City will hire armed guards at the site, and said if it does, “That kills it.” He worries that pallet shelter residents will have to go “in and out of a checkpoint” and that the administering Jesus Center will ban any use of alcohol, including indulgence in a single beer. He said he won’t use the site if it resembles “county jail,” and would prefer the autonomy that a campground would provide.

“Maybe it will work, but I don’t really see it filling up,” David said.

Newman, meanwhile, an outspoken advocate for the homeless, said there have been a series of six Saturday protests over the fencing at City Plaza, which he says has been left in place to keep unhoused people from using the plaza.

“The fence is an act of violence,” Newman said, adding that the City is “cutting off resources to the poorest people.”

Friends on the Street passes out fliers to passersby explaining their mission. “Whereas homeless residents of Chico have no property … they have a right to life-sustaining, community-provided food supplies,” the flier says. The flier also says homeless people have a “life-sustaning ‘right to rest’ in public spaces.”

Leslie Layton is editor of ChicoSol.