Slim-k-d - Untitled

Close up of Pluto from the New Horizons space probe.

Will be adding several more photos to this same post

how’s that house that raised you?

goodgoodgood.co

California builds 'one-of-a-kind' homeless campus: 'Heck of a lot cheaper than letting someone stay unsheltered'

The new Safe Stay campus will include 225 cabins, 75 emergency respite beds, health services, job training, and more.

"In Sacramento, California, an estimated 6,615 people are experiencing homelessness, a number that — while still heartbreakingly high — has declined 29% since 2023, according to the latest Point In Time counts. 

But a new project, which has been in the works since 2022, might bring that number down even lower.

A new 13-acre property purchased by Sacramento County will soon be home to the Watt Service Center and Safe Stay. 

The county broke ground on the mixed-use service center this week, which will provide shelter, emergency respite, safe parking, health services, and more to community members who are unsheltered — meaning they don’t have a place to safely sleep at night.

“We wanted to do something that is not only larger, but a large-scale campus to provide more than just the shelter,” Janna Haynes, of the county’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing, told KCRA3 News.

The Watt Service Center will have amenities to help meet the needs of anyone staying there, including bathrooms, showers, laundry, and food, as well as mental health, treatment, and employment services.

“You can also meet with your case manager, get behavior health services, look for a job, get rehousing services, a place for your dog,” Jaynes added. “It’s really everything you need, not only for your day-to-day life, but to hopefully end your homelessness.”

While the center is a costly offering, the city explained that it is ultimately less expensive than allowing the homelessness crisis to go unmitigated.

The land was purchased for $22 million and will cost an estimated $42 million to construct the center. According to ABC10 News it will be mostly funded by the American Rescue Plan Act.

While the center will have the capacity to host 225 beds in Safe Stay cabins, 50-person capacity in Safe Parking, and 75-person capacity for emergency/weather respite beds, it will serve countless others outside of the 350 total people it can house at any given time.

According to a press release from the county, “conservative estimates” have found that over the course of 15 years, the center will serve 18,000 people.

In 2017, the city found that the average cost for an “unsheltered individual” was about $45,000 a year, considering public systems like county jail, shelters, behavioral health, and more.

With the projected impact of the shelter, that cost lowers to less than $3,600 per person.

“If you break down the funding, it’s actually not that expensive,” Rich Desmond, county supervisor for District 3, told ABC10.

“It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than letting someone stay out in the community, unsheltered where they are extremely expensive in terms of the emergency response from fire, our emergency rooms, our law enforcement response.”

Providing what the county calls “wraparound services” not only brings down costs but truly helps people meet their basic needs.

“The really great thing about this site in particular, that we don't have at any other shelters, is the sheer size and the ability to really wrap everything people need,” Emily Halcon, director of the Department of Homeless Services and Housing with Sacramento County, told ABC10. 

One notable feature is the center’s Safe Parking spaces, which are the first of their kind in the city. People living in their cars will now have a safe place to park, monitored by security.

“We know a lot of people who are unsheltered actually are living out of their cars,” Desmond said, “maybe a family that’s barely hanging on but they still need that vital transportation to get their kids to school or get to work.”

This support is especially helpful for those who are newly homeless, Halcon added, building on the amenities provided in the county’s two other “safe stay” facilities. 

While Sacramento County just broke ground on the Watt Service Center, officials say they hope to begin moving people into the facility in January 2026.

“Our staff is putting in extra time and attention to this campus, ensuring that it houses everything we need to end homelessness for people,” Desmond said in a statement.

Once it’s up and running, Jaynes told KCRA3, they plan to onboard formerly unhoused community members as part of the staff at the facility.

“When you have a conversation with someone who understands where you’ve been, and you see the success they’re having now,” Jaynes said, “it really does give you hope something could be different.”

-via GoodGoodGood, January 24, 2025

Goodbye to all that

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later — because I did not belong there, did not come from there — but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. […] All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it. […] All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, Joan Didion.

Among the latest discoveries in Pompeii:

A house with a private bathhouse , complete with hot, warm and cold rooms, and a plunge pool.

In a room were found the skeletons of a woman of about 40 years and a man of about 20 as well a pair of gold and natural pearl earrings.

The wonderful Pompeian red on the walls

Frescoes, various valuable objects, and gold coins.

Pompeii Parco Archeologico

@ancientcharm

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Dorothea Lasky, from Rome

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Pablo Neruda / Tonight I Can Write

The Santa Anas

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather”. My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake. “On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.” That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.” In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn. A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, Joan Didion.