When his retirement dream of living on a boat didn’t turn out to be as much fun as he had imagined, Charles Withuhn came ashore and put his boots on the ground to become a proactive and vocal advocate for the homeless people in Chico.
Last week, Donn Harris and I took a field trip to Chico as part of the Sierra Roots/No Place to Go Project’s commitment to the Upstate California Creative Corps to operate regionally. Donn is the former chairman of the California Arts Council and a current board member of Nevada County Arts Council, which is the administering agency for the Upstate California Creative Corps.
We met with Withuhn twice. First, at a coffee shop in downtown Chico, and second, we encountered him again at the Eaton and Cohasset (E&C) homeless encampment on the outskirts of town. I don’t think he expected to see us there.
We didn’t expect to see what we saw there.
Squalor
Jammed up against a busy boulevard, the E&C camp is a fenced-in compound with green fabric covering the fence to hide the camp from view. Two Porta-Potties servicing 50 people are outside the gate, squeezed between the fence and the roadway. A water dispensing station is next to the toilets.
Inside the shadeless camp, it looked and smelled like an occupied garbage dump. It is what former Nevada County Supervisor Dan Miller would call a “tent slum.” Tents, tarps, cars, lean-tos comprised whatever shelter the residents could devise for themselves. Some campsites were relatively neat. Others were literally surrounded by garbage. One tent looked like a chop-shop for bicycles.
No one seemed to be in charge. Nobody looked at us or challenged us. Although it was a bright, sunny day, the feeling in the camp was dark, depressing, quietly desperate.
A shower of love
The day we were there, the entrance was dominated by an eight-foot-high industrial-size dumpster, which was where we found Withuhn.
Withuhn was worried. The dumpster was blocking the way the shower trailer usually was driven into and back out of the camp.
Every Friday, Withuhn and volunteers from the North State Shelter Team bring a shower trailer they built to the camp for the residents who live on the bare, dirt ground. Muddy in the rain and dusty in the near-constant wind.
Skin diseases, rashes and infections are a high-risk factor for unhoused people. Showers can reduce that risk. So, living up to the reputation of his 2013 Chico News & Review “Local Hero” award, Withuhn organized community volunteers and donors to build a mobile shower trailer from the ground up for $19,000.
The Respectful Revolution Project, a nonprofit, filmmaking organization, won a 2022 My Hero Humanitarian Award for their short film on how Withuhn and the North State Shelter Team built “A Shower Trailer on a Budget … of Love” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX5Tyo_SVfI).
Sweep alert
Perhaps the most shocking thing, to me, about the E&C camp is that it is “run” by the city. Only people vetted by the city are given the privilege of subsisting in these primitive conditions.
The reason the dumpster was there, Withuhn said, was because the city was about to scrape bare some campsites with heavy machinery and load up the dumpster. People who were squatting there without the city’s permission would be required to leave.
I am an advocate of safe camps – but not this unsupervised, underserved refugee camp (ghetto?) for homeless citizens. This is not acceptable.
It’s not acceptable to Withuhn either. Earlier this month, he presented a two-page list to the Chico City Council and staff calling for improvements to the E&C camp.
The list includes more Porta-Potties, an on-site stakeholder/manager, lighting, perimeter and gate* security, trash service, better access to running water, personal storage lockers*, tent decks*, mailboxes*, case management*, community building* and more.
What is admirable on Withuhn’s list is that some items on the list are tagged with an asterisk to indicate the North State Shelter Team is willing and able to help on those items. They understand that it takes a village.
“This is a call to ethics and action!” Withuhn is telling the Chico community, urging them to contact their elected representatives.
Grant’s pass fail
As I keep saying: Until we own the homeless problem, we are the problem. They are not “the” homeless. They are “our” homeless.
Withuhn gets that. Maybe the city of Chico should listen to him.
Here, in Nevada County, to my dismay and disgust, both Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Rep. Kevin Kiley (R) are associated with amici curiae briefs before the Supreme Court supporting Grants Pass, Ore., in Johnson v. Grants Pass. The city of Grants Pass wants to criminalize homelessness by fining, arresting and jailing people for sleeping on public property even when they have no place else to go.
Both Newsom and Kiley seem to be driven by political expediency – and an appalling lack of compassion for the people they supposedly serve.
If Grants Pass wins, we can only hope our local communities will take a higher moral path than punishing people for something that is not their fault and they can do nothing about.
Tom Durkin is creative director of the Sierra Roots/No Place to Go Project in Nevada County. The Project is funded by a grant from the Upstate California Creative Corps, a program of the California Arts Council. He may be contacted at tomdurkin@sierra-roots.org or www.project.sierra-roots.org. © Sierra Roots 2024