Assaults, drugs and floods. Homeless live on the edge in Madera river bottom
Clouds of smoke puffed out of the Fresno River as the homeless Maderans who live there woke up to a wet mid-December morning under gray skies.
“Of course we get cold,” Nicanor Rodriguez said. “How could we not?”
Rodriguez, who is in his 60s, told The Fresno Bee he’s lucky to not get sick easily.
He and two others escaped the rain as they huddled around a small fire under a bridge over the river on the east side of the city — where Cleveland Avenue becomes Tozer Street. Another man burned a flame to himself about a quarter-mile downstream to the southwest.
“I ended up here the same way anyone else would,” Rodriguez said in Spanish. “Some of us end up here because we have nothing. Others end up here because of drugs — I only smoke marijuana.”
Madera, like many other California cities, is looking to crack down on illegal encampments as it attempts to address the impact of homelessness on the town’s quality of life. Police Chief Giachino Chiaramonte previously said he wants a stricter ordinance to address groups of homeless people who gather in public parks and make those spaces unsafe and unwelcoming during daytime hours. He told The Bee in an email last week that he hopes to return to the City Council in January or February with a proposal.
The police in Madera already can clear encampments and usually provide homeless people a 72-hour notice to move. Chiaramonte previously said most of Madera’s encampments were set up along the Fresno River, which runs through the northern half of the city.
He has described the riverbed as a hotbed for crime, including assaults, drug and gun sales and fatal dog attacks. The river is arid through Madera most of the year, and fires started there by homeless people have been a major hazard to residents and properties.
This December, the river area around Cleveland Avenue/Tozer Street is damp, green and scattered with tents. The dogs belonging to the people who live there run around playing as a pack and splashing in puddles. A few tents are more isolated, but those who live in the river tend to group up for their own safety — they, too, face danger from other people and the elements.
When the river bottom gets wet, Rodriguez said he moves as far up the banks as he can while remaining under the bridge. He is a former farmworker and said he still works in the fields when he is able. Some others in his group are also former farmworkers, though they are less trusting of visitors they don’t recognize.
They move up and down the riverbed as police evict them from one place to another, telling them to “’get out of here,’” Rodriguez said. But he said it’s often outsiders who don’t live in the riverbed who show up there to sell drugs and commit other crimes.
The small businesses on Yosemite Avenue, which runs along the Fresno River in east Madera, deal with homelessness daily. One worker at an auto mechanic shop, who declined to provide his name, told The Bee last week that homeless people “bother us every day.”
He said they don’t often steal from the nearby businesses, but they attempt to sell items to the businesses. His boss calls the city often to complain about trash and also tells the homeless people themselves to clean up their area, the worker said.
“Some of them have been there for eight years,” he said. “They only leave when the river fills up, but then they come back.”
The manager at Xtreme Auto Collision, also on Yosemite Avenue, spoke with a different tone.
“We had a break-in recently, but we’re not sure who it was,” the manager said.
He said it’s easy to blame homeless people for crimes, but sometimes they are not the ones actually committing them.
Women in the Fresno River
Life on the streets and in the river bottom can be especially dangerous for homeless women.
“I’ve been knocked out out here and left,” said Kaya, a 35-year-old woman whom The Bee interviewed in August under the Highway 99 overpass above the Fresno River.
“By the grace of God,” she’s never been sexually assaulted, but she said she has heard of it happening.
“We have family members that have found their spouses out here, you know, passed away,” she said.
Andrea, 45, a woman who was living in a tent near Kaya, told The Bee in August that some men who are not homeless are also a danger for homeless women.
“It’s hard, very hard,” she said. “People think that, just because we’re homeless, nobody cares about us, or that we’re going to just downgrade ourselves just because we’re trying to survive. And that’s farthest from facts.
“So a lot of men, they’ll follow us. They’ll stalk us, even up to the point where they’re just standing there looking. It’s weird.”
Addiction, mental health issues
Another homeless woman who lives under the Cleveland Avenue/Tozer Street bridge told The Bee last week that drug addiction is not the underlying reason why people end up in the river bottom.
“Most of them have emotional or mental disabilities and are not given the opportunity to be evaluated the correct way or even heard,” said the woman, who declined to provide her name. “I’m pretty sure if we were to get the correct help, there wouldn’t be so many people out here.”
Josh Blair, pastor at the Central Valley Church located just steps away from the Fresno River encampments, said he has noticed it is a drug addiction and a mental health problem. The church has organized outreach efforts in the river bottom, and Blair said some of the people who lived there have turned their lives to God and made it out.
Another church-goer is “walking in sobriety,” but he is still living in the river bottom, Blair said.
“He told me it’s hard to be down there and sober because all the frustrations of life,” Blair said. “The elements and the cold, you feel all of that when you’re not high. But if you’re high, you don’t feel it as much. ... It’s almost like it’s a dead cycle of treating an issue and then also dealing with reality of what you’re facing.”
Others “just want freedom” and don’t want help from the church or the nearby Madera Rescue Mission shelter, Blair said.
Back under the Cleveland Avenue/Tozer Street bridge, one of the homeless men huddled around a fire said sometimes he goes to the Rescue Mission, and sometimes he simply chooses not to.
“Sometimes people do and sometimes people don’t,” said the man, who did not want to give his name. “Everybody living here is a different individual. Everybody thinks different.”
