Should violent acts targeting unhoused be treated as hate crimes?
By Peter Schurmann | Posted February 7, 2023
photo by Manuel Ortiz, EMS
Jimbo Slice
The Eaton-Cohasset homeless encampment sits on Chico’s northern edge, a motley assortment of weathered tents, a couple of dumpsters and a port-o-potty that juts up from the muddy gravel.
With hate crimes targeting racial, religious, and sexual minorities on the rise nationwide, residents here say they’re being targeted for another reason: because they’re homeless.
“There’s some guy who drives around with a loudspeaker and a mask on saying, ‘Get out of Chico or get killed,’” says Jimbo Slice, 29. A native of Paradise, about 12 miles east of Chico, Jimbo -— he declined to give his last name -— is among the thousands who were left homeless by the 2018 Camp Fire that devastated the region. “He drove by three times yesterday.”read more
The city’s court-ordered pallet shelter project is close to completion, and advocates for unhoused people are hopeful but cautious about its chance for success.
The proposed code of conduct and the operating standards for the site are now being finalized. The city, plaintiffs and the judge must agree on these standards in order to finalize insurance and open the site on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway, said Jesus Center Executive Director Amber Abney-Bass.
Advocates for the unhoused are cautiously optimistic, but have concerns about how the management style will affect use of the site. One question some have is whether there will be armed security.read more
Chico police block media from watching; upset citizens decry policy
By Leslie Layton | Posted February 17, 2021
photo by Karen Laslo
An officer tells a homeless woman at Humboldt and Forest to be out by evening on Feb. 16 as she stares into a small mirror.
Chico Police Department today blocked the media from Boucher Street as officers informed homeless people camping there and at Forest and Humboldt streets that they had to move.
Unhoused people at both sites had been given 72-hour eviction notices that had expired. And as the rain ceased and the sun broke through today, police moved in on the encampments.
At Boucher and Wisconsin streets, community members offered to help campers load tents and possessions into trucks and move them if they had someplace to go. A few people chose to move to beneath the Highway 99 overpass in lower Bidwell Park. But with no shelter space available in the city, many didn’t know what to do.read more
Guest commentary says Council meeting disruption was necessary
By Dan Everhart | Posted September 18, 2018
photo by Leslie Layton
On Sept. 4, a group of local human rights advocates, organizing under the name “Housing Not Handcuffs,” expressed their outrage over Chico City Council’s consistent and enduring ineptitude on the matter of homelessness by disrupting the meeting in protest over conservative enthusiasm for criminalizing our unhoused neighbors even further.
The rich enjoy more polite means of gaining Council’s attention, the rest of us must purchase it with speech amplified enough to be heard above the deafening roar of their wealth.
A serious problem has grown steadily worse for years and still no viable solutions are blossoming from local government despite such fertile circumstances. Elected officials reject all research, reason and experience in response to the common modern social problems of wealth inequality, economic exploitation and housing affordability. For many years now, Chico’s General Plan has described deepening shortfalls in affordable housing. For even longer, City Council has done nothing to reduce the problem or to forestall its projected worsening.read more
On this past Sunday morning, Charles Withuhn of the Chico Housing Action Team (CHAT), along with a retired contractor and nine Chico State students from the Tiny House Club, showed up behind the university’s Langdon Hall to get to work on the first tiny house in Chico. (Click on arrows to see slideshow below.)
Work begins
Students volunteer
On flatbed
Frame up
Their goal for the day: To put up the framed walls they’d previously hammered together at another work session.
Withuhn said they were building the tiny house because of the many “unsheltered” people in our community. The goal is to house for the least amount of money as many people as possible and as soon as possible. read more
