Day 4 - College Park to Laurel

Focus on the Marchers: Sarah Frohock

Sarah Frohock is a student and welfare recipient from San Jose, California.

I'm from San Jose.  And it's the center of the Silicon Valley.  Which means, that's where all of the computer industry is located.  It used to be an agricultural area; we used to have cherry orchards, and plum orchards, and all kinds if different fruits.  And slowly after the silicon chip was invented, in the area, slowly the computer companies started coming in, and buying up the land where the orchards were, and building these huge buildings.  And bringing in tons of people.  I mean, people come from all over the world, really, to live there.  The population has probably quadrupled in the last, I would say, five years.

San Jose's population is larger than San Francisco's now.  We have over a million people, and it's not a very big city, really.  There's a huge housing shortage.  Because of the housing shortage, the rents are extremely high.  The lowest rent that I know of is a two bedroom apartment that's $1200.

People are commuting two or three hours into the city every day, because they can't afford to live there anymore.  I mean, I have a friend who's a garbage man.  He gets up a 3:00 in the morning to get to work by 6.  Every day.  And then he sleeps in his car when he's done with work because the traffic's so bad to get back out of the Valley.  He would like sit there for like five hours - it would take him five hours to get home.  So he just sleeps in his car when he's off work and then drives home, and gets home around 9 or 10.  And then he gets up in the morning and does it again.  Just so he can afford to have a house for his family.

Most of the homeless families that I see have at least two people working, full-time.  It's not about like, there's no jobs.  They are working.  But there's no way you can live there and pay the rent, and have any kind of life.  There's people who have a house across the street from me that have at least 10 people living in it.  It's probably a two bedroom house.  We see a lot of that.  People actually live in places in "shifts."  What they'll do is find a house, and they will all live there, and we see them about 6 o'clock in the morning, and they'll go out and they'll stand up on the busy intersection like toward the really wealthy part of town.  They'll just kind of stand in groups and like everybody around knows that if they need some kind of labor done that they can just go, and there's people just waiting.  The rich people will come down out of the hills and pick them up and take them up to their house to do their yard work or whatever.  And they don't pay them very much.

And they'll do this all day and then come home and go to sleep.  And then another group will come out.  And they go out with, like, janitorial supplies.  And they just go out and clean businesses after they close.  I mean, they do that so they can all have a roof over their heads.  I mean it's going on all over the place.  People who take a night job, and other people in the house take a day job, and they just kind of go back and forth.

The area that I live in is really neglected.  It's the lowest income area in the city.  You know, in my daughter's school half the toilets don't flush.  And then you go four blocks away and there's people living in these huge houses that are making, literally, half a million dollars a year working in these computer companies.  And you go down my street and you got people living in shifts in these houses.

So that's pretty much what's happening.  I mean, the people are leaving, and the people who can't afford to leave are staying are doing whatever they can.

We have a lot of wintertime shelters, armories and stuff, that operate in the wintertime.  But in the summertime, not so many.  And most of those that are left are for women and children.  There only one for men.  And I mean, this is in the whole county.  There's one that's been serving people for a long time.  It's in a church.  They've been letting people sleep there.  And they've been fighting the city since last summer, basically, to be able to keep letting people sleep there.  It's an ongoing thing.  The city doesn't want homeless people around.

It's really crazy.  It's insane.  I mean, I grew up there, and I can't believe how much it has changed.  It used to be, you know, you'd go through downtown and it was an old city.  It was tore up.  And you know, now it's like totally gentrified and I don't know where everyone went.  I don't know.  They're all moving, leaving when they can.  And when they can't, they're usually in shelters.  If they can even get in there.

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