Bob Collins
A tent city of homeless people is starting to fill up in Sacramento. It got some publicity last week on Oprah, and now several social service agencies are telling people not to “cater” to the homeless, according to MSNBC.
“It’s really not a very good thing to do,” says Sister Libby Fernandez, the executive director of Loaves & Fishes. “For one thing, you have to have trash pickup. You bring things out there like clothing, suitcases food, water … it just builds up an accumulation of trash.”
As many as 50 people a week are turning up and the authorities estimate that the tent city is now home to more than 1,200 people, the Daily Mail reported.
What are people and cities supposed to do? The city is thinking about providing some services on the site — portable toilets, for instance — but a TV station looked into another tent city in Ontario, California and found as soon as the city did that, people from out of the area moved in.
(Photo via Getty Images)
