Mar 13

Burbank – North Hollywood Food Info Changes

Note These Changes To Your Food Sheets

Many Thanks to Ric for Sending These To Gypsy Cool

1) Time change: Beginning in August (2014) the meal provided on the 3rd Saturday at the Village Church (3216 W. Victory, Burbank) will move from 2 pm to 11 am. For the time being this is a permanent change.

2) Name change: Henceforth the church group that provides the meal on the last Sunday at the Amelia Earhart NOHO Park will be known as The Tapestry LA Church (i.e. no longer the New Life Community Church)

3) Besides some blankets, used clothing, a little bit of fruit, and bottled water brought to the NOHO park on Magnolia Street, on the final Sunday of each month, Angel Hanz always has a table with some pet supplies including food, collars, leashes and pet toys. Karen Hamza, who runs this organization, is only interested in providing these provision to the homeless for their pets. Karen often man’s this table herself, and generally doesn’t want to give out the pet
supplies unless she sees the pets with their owners at the park.

Jan 22

COLD WEATHER SHELTER OPEN

Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission Presents:

San Fernando Valley and Glendale Cold Weather Shelter

When:     Thursday December 11 2014 through March 15, 2015

Where:    Greater Community 2nd Missionary Baptist Church, 11066 Norris Ave. Pacoima.

Time:       Shelter Opens at 6p.m. and closes at 7a.m.

Pick Up:  5101 San Fernando Rd., Glendale, across fro the Home Depot.  This pick up is for Glendale Homeless ONLY.  Pick up time is 5pm.  Drop off time is 7:30 a.m.

Walk Ups:  Walk ins permitted, first come, first serve basis.  Line up at the Pacoima Shelter at 5:30 p.m., not earlier.

Amenities:  Hot Showers, Hot Dinner Hot Breakfast, Case Management, Security Safe, Warm Place to Sleep.

NOTE:  No Shopping arts allowed onsite.  Only one small bag per person allowed.

 

 

May 16

Free RV Parking Websites

Here Are Some Links to Websites that Offer Information on Free or Low-Cost Overnight Parking and Camping

Boondockers Welcome is a group that spans the Country and sets up a trade of Free Parking.  So if you have a space in your driveway, you can join up and then use someone else’s space while you are on vacation.  For those of you living in your vehicles, you can still use this, you might have to pay a small fee, but possibilities are there for some imaginative trade-offs.  CLICK HERE

Wheelingit This website is for RVs, but lists some great places for overnight parking.  Aside from Walmart, there’s the Casinos, some big box stores like Camping World, Flying J Truck Stops, and much more.  CLICK HERE to access their article on Free Parking at various places.

OvernightParking  Overnight RV  Parking is a website that sells an app that tells you spots around the Country to park for free.  If you are on the road, this would be helpful in locating spots for safe parking.  CLICK HERE

San Diego Safe Parking Program for Homeless  If you are living in a vehicle, this group offers free, safe overnight parking in the San Diego area.  You have to register, and they do not tolerate bad behavior or drugs.  They will also help you with some social service benefits and housing.  Parking starts at 6pm.  CLICK HERE to go to the website and apply.  This is a program that should be in every major city, and volunteers at gypsycool have talked about, but it is very difficult to find a church or business to participate, much less the Los Angeles area cities.

May 16

Overnight Parking at Walmart

Website Provides Latest Information

For those of you who are “on the road” and want to park at a Walmart, here’s a link to a website that provides a list of Walmart stores and whether or not overnight parking is allowed.  CLICK HERE

The website, Allstays.com, also has an inexpensive app that you can download for your iphone or ipad with the latest Walmart information.

May 12

Camping at the North Fresno Walmart

 

Camping at the North Fresno Walmart Parking Lot

by Skip Rorshach Freedman

 

Camping at Walmart

Camping at Walmart

You can smell the desperation in this place, like the heat that wafts off one of those old-time steam radiators. Tweekers, rednecks and illegal aliens make for an interesting melting pot in this central valley hellhole called Fresno. Even in mid-April, the afternoon sizzles at around 90 degrees – even with partly cloudy skies. There are at least a dozen people that call this parking lot and its environs home on a regular basis. There are probably at least another dozen that I never even saw. Maybe more.

Sunrise finds the lot moderately crowded with empty employee cars, except for five vans and one RV. People that were sleeping in the bushes are stirring and slowly milling around into groups on the grassy perimeter. The tweekers huddle together nervously in their own clic. Their eyes darting around like lizards, they contemplate what they’re going to do to survive another day in this dusty blast furnace. Some will start scrounging the local dumpsters, others will try to hustle people down on Shaw Avenue. This heavily-traveled artery cuts through extreme north Fresno from the 99 freeway all the way east to Clovis, where the locally-famous rodeo will get underway in a week and a half. An old-timer comes out from behind the building pushing his overfilled shopping cart/storage unit. He’s nicely grizzled and has obviously been doing this for awhile. He looks around 50, but is probably younger. This seems to be over twice the average age around here, most residents seem to be early- to mid-20’s. Several illegals have already headed over to the Home Depot down the street to find some manual labor for the day. The van people sleep in until around 8 or so, then slowly head over to one of the three nearby fast-food joints for a cup of coffee. The RV folks leave before 9. You see vacant stares as the tweekers walk by you; these are young lives completely devoid of hope before they even hit 30. You wonder if these people will even be alive in five years. The white security van starts making rounds up and down the parking lot aisles. They’re actually pretty cool here, for cops (which doesn’t happen very often). As long as you move your vehicle every couple of days or so they won’t hassle you. No idea what the record duration for staying here is. It might be surprising.

Once the sun is fully up and blazing, the groups begin to dissolve into the surrounding area for the day’s hunter-gathering. People move their vans into the shade to try to minimize baking, and a few kids mill around under trees to keep cool. The only folks coming here in the afternoon are customers: overweight suburban housewives, retirees, Armenians in scarves, and people just passing through the area.

It starts getting dark around 8, and a few guys straggle back to the lot with things like hoses, pieces of wood, and other objects they’ve scrounged from dumpsters or behind buildings. Groups reassemble and discuss the day’s catch or swap amusing anecdotes about people they met. The spring night winds kick up about an hour later, and the van people roll down their windows and crack their side doors to bleed out the day’s heat accumulation. Inside it’s usually around 100 degrees, even when they’ve been in the shade all day, so it takes a little while to make them habitable for the night. The customers all left by 10, but there seem to be employees there all night – probably restocking shelves and sweeping up the place. Just after 11 a lonely train whistle wails about a mile to the west, alongside Golden State Boulevard, signaling the end of another day of survival. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

 

Mar 14

The Homeless Go Underground

Homeless Across America Living in Tunnels, Storm Drains, and Caves.

Las Vegas StormdrainsAs the class war in America intensifies, many homeless folks have been driven underground.  Really underground.  For instance, in Las Vegas a colony of lost souls are living under the glitzy city in storm drains.  Unable to find work, and driven off the streets by cops, they sneak into the city’s storm drain system to make their temporary living quarters.  As more and more folks get foreclosed, they have to move to apartments.  If they lose their jobs then the next stop is a shelter, if a spot is available. The shelters are only temporary, so eventually people take to living in their vehicles.  Many buy old RVs to live in.  This is actually a good solution, one could live forever in a good condition RV, but many cities across the country have launched cruel wars against them.

The middle class and rich class elitists look upon homeless folks with fear.  They don’t want RVs parked in their neighborhoods, the occupants could be serial killers.  They could also more likely be really nice folks just down on their luck, or seniors making a new life by taking the gypsy trail around the country.  No matter, in city after city, the upper classes have passed very mean-spirited laws against anyone living in a vehicle.  RVs are particularly vulnerable because they stand out like a sore thumb.  In Southern California, for instance, cities like Burbank want anyone with an RV in the city limits to go to the police station, register with the cops,  and pay a $5 fee per night.  In Pasadena there is no parking on any street without a permit that can only be purchased by a resident.  The going permit is around $65 per month.  Outsiders, post-foreclosed refugees and homeless need not apply.  Gypsy Cool gets reports from all over the southland of folks who are getting harassed by the cops, getting tickets, getting their rigs towed away and actually getting arrested.  One man told us the cops knocked on his RV door the day before Christmas and ordered him outside, then towed his vehicle away.  There was no “warning” notice posted.  The cops told him they were going to “get rid of you people.” It cost the man around $700 to get his rig back.  He is a retired aerospace worker trying to live on his social security pension.  Like the veterans who served their country, now this guy is no longer “needed”, he’s superfluous to the ruling class.  Any wonder why so many veterans are committing suicide every day?

Vietnam War Comes Home

Kansas City tunnels

Kansas City tunnels

Meanwhile, in Kansas City, the cops raided 3 homeless camps and found that many of the folks there were living underground in tunnels. The excuse for the raid was that some copper was being stolen from a near-by grain storage facility.  Possibly a few of the people in the camp were bad apples, the cops should have found the culprits and arrested them, but they instead bull-dozed all the camps and filled in the tunnels, punishing all the homeless living there.  Looking at this, it is like the Vietnam war has now come full circle.  Remember that the Viet-cong guerrillas in Vietnam lived in tunnels, in fact much of the rural population lived in tunnels for protection against air strikes.  American troops punished all when they could, destroying the tunnels and moving the population into special “security” villages. It seems that things are going in a similar way in Kansas City.  The homeless can’t even find peace hiding in caves and tunnels.  Viewing the photos of the caves it looks like they were very professionally made, in fact, they were so perfect it will probably turn out that the tunnels were made by others in past years, maybe dating back to the civil war.  It seems unlikely that a few homeless folks could have made them, no tools or shovels were laying around, and no dirt displacement was seen in the video.

Columbia South Carolina Most Depraved City in America – Mass Deportations of Homeless to “Camp of No Return”

Councilman Runyan sends poor to camps

Councilman Runyan sends poor to camps

In Columbia, South Carolina, the war on the poor has now gone into the mode of an outright Nazi operation.  The City passed an ordinance to criminalize the homeless.  The cops are giving people who “look like” they are homeless a choice: go to a special “camp” that is 15 miles outside of town or go to jail.  That’s the choice.  Once in the “camp” there is no return, cops are stationed on the road between the camp location and the City of Columbia to make sure the poor don’t try to wander back into town. This is nothing more than a concentration camp for the poor.  The cost for all this is huge, over a million bucks to start.  This mass deportation of the poor is nothing short of a mass kidnapping.  Is the U.S. Justice Department going to let this pass?  Imagine during the Civil Rights movement if Southern cities had started deporting African-Americans out of cities and into special internment camps.  During World War 2 America “interned” all people of Japanese ancestry and sent them to concentration camps.  Much of their personal and real property was confiscated and they never got it back.  These were also American citizens, victims of the same cabal that still runs this country.  It is now happening again right before our eyes.

Following in the Footsteps of Nazi Germany

This operation, pushed by Columbia Councilman Cameron Runyon, harkens back to the days of Nazi Germany.  Once Hitler took power, the poor were rounded up and sent to forced labor camps.  Next it was the “radicals”, the communists, anarchists, and non-Nazi socialists.  Then it was the Jews, gypsies, and others.  Marching down this same path is new would-be “gauleiter” Runyan and his crew of mean-spirited “business men” in Columbia. Runyan claims to be a Christian, but he must have been dozing in church when the minister talked about Jesus.  His plan of mass kidnapping and relocation is spun with words like “shelter”, instead of what it really is, a concentration camp for the poor.  First it’s the poor, then who’s next on the list? Ignore this raging class war at your own risk.

Criminalization of Poverty

Former President Lyndon Johnson must have a smirk on his face, even though he is certainly burning in the fires of hell for his many evil deeds.  His War on Poverty was a complete success.  It took some time, with a lot of help from the banksters, but about 40% of the population is now in poverty of one sort or another.  The final step of this “war” is to make poverty itself illegal, a move that various state and local governments have been pushing for over ten years.  The National Coalition for the Homeless published a monumental report in 2004 that chronicled the evil deeds being put into “law” around the country.  They even listed the 20 meanest cities in America.  Now, ten years later, Columbia, South Carolina can be put right up on the top of the list.  As the class war scales up to new heights of depravity against the poor in cities across the land, we can see the beginnings of a new nazi-style state, complete with cameras and spies on every corner and concentration camps for the poor.  When will Americans wake up and realize that the beginning of the solution to the problems of poverty is to help the homeless and put the banksters in jail.  Blaming homeless folks for the evil deeds of the financial terrorists is the biggest irony of our time.

Story by Uncle Paulie

News Report on Kansas City tunnels Click Here.

Columbia South Carolina story Click Here

Criminalization of Homeless Report Click Here

Mar 14

New Saturday Breakfast in Burbank

Burbank Church of Christ Offers Free Breakfast on Saturdays for Homeless/Food Challanged

Burbank Church of ChristThe Burbank Church of Christ now offers a free breakfast on Saturday morning between 8:30 and 10 am.  The location is 2030 W. Burbank Blvd. at Fairview (between Buena Vista and Hollywood Way).  These nice folks were doing this in the past but had to stop for some unknown reason.  Get up early and ‘git’ your bacon and eggs!