Unhoused people are using the margins of California’s waterways for temporary accommodation. Those familiar with historic settlement and land use patterns in North America will appreciate the use of rivers and canals as local and national highways.
For an example of water-influenced pattern of housing development, look to Québec, where land allotment was laid out along these riverine highways. The pattern is still evident today. Many communities stretch for miles along riverbanks, or substitute a lengthy roadway rather than clustering houses about a village or town centre.
No great surprise then to discover that the banks of waterways are featured in stories about communities of people who are homeless in California. The following article takes something of a sensational approach to the phenomena, having ‘discovered’ cave-dwellings dug into river banks. Read more at VICE: Housing Crisis Update: Unhoused People Are Living In Elaborate Cave Networks Now
Invariably, communities that wish away people who are unhoused find reasons that encampments are dangerous. In the above case, saving the unhoused from themselves means destroying subterranean shelters that might collapse. Quirky homes with quirky dangers!
Water quality is a more conventional concern. Recently, Fresno California has taken action to save unhoused people from themselves by removing encampments beside a waterway. Where will they go? Who knows, but it’s not safe for them here.
Any faith in the benefit of such action has begun to erode. People who are unhoused are moving back beside the waterway. An activist gives a succinct reason why. Read more at the Fresno Bee: Unhoused moving back to Fresno canal. They have nowhere else to go, advocate says
Fresno’s experience is an example of a national, indeed worldwide, problem. Programs to act upon dangers to people who are unhoused (or any other group of citizens for that matter) may claim to save them from themselves, but simply do not address the problem: lack of housing. They are doomed to failure because of it.
