Wallet Hub, a personal finance company, found that Fresno, California, has the highest rate of homeless people in the country. Leaders in Fresno say the number doesn’t come as a surprise. City Councilman Miguel Arias of Fresno said, “It just backs up what we’ve seen on the streets for years.”
On the Fresno City Council, Arias has spent a lot of time turning run-down hotels into places where homeless people can stay. These temporary homes kept homeless people off of Fresno’s roads.
Although we have helped thousands of people in the last two years, the homeless population has outgrown our ability to house individuals,” Arias said.
It doesn’t surprise Fresno Mission CEO Matthew Dildine that wallethub.com did a poll on homelessness either. He does care about other things, though.
People are so focused on the adult homelessness but we actually rate higher nationally on childhood homelessness. The amount of children who are in foster care or just homeless,” Dildine said.
He said that there are a lot of homeless families in Fresno whose kids don’t have many chances to get off the streets. A $16 million plan to build a 59-unit shelter was recently turned down by the city council. Dildine wants more people in the community to be angry about how much red tape comes with government projects.
“59 units for $16 million.” “If you give me a fraction of that and don’t add prevailing wage and other red tape on top of it, I could give you so many more units,” I always tell the mayor. “I could take care of so many more people, but the government will make the rules,” Dildine said.
To help solve the problem of homelessness, Arias said, other towns in Fresno County need to step up. The number of homeless people in Fresno County has grown by 2,000 each year. The county of Fresno does not have any shelters or housing for the homeless, and neither do most of the places around us, Arias said.
Arias said that too many towns in the county give homeless people rides where they know they can’t go back to get to shelters and soup kitchens in downtown Fresno.