OUR SERVICES
SHOWER TRAILERS
WHY OUR SERVICES ARE NEEDED
Capital & Main: Living Homeless in California:
Dignity Is a Hot Shower, May 31, 2018
For the roughly [57,760] men and women in Los Angeles County who don’t have permanent housing (and for some who do), a shower and clean clothes are more than a matter of hygiene. They’re a matter of humanity. Cleaning up can dissolve the separateness between a homeless person and the rest of society. It’s a door through which some will come to mental health services, substance abuse counseling, church and other community contacts and, finally, housing….
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees’ standard for displaced-persons camps is one shower for every 50 people; if we think of Los Angeles County as one giant refugee camp, that would mean about 1,140 showers. A 2017 study looking at the lack of toilets on L.A.’s Skid Row (nine public toilets for roughly 2,000 people at night) also found a “scarcity of showers.”
“[The shower] transmits that we care about you and that you have dignity as a human being,” says Paul Asplund, Lava Mae’s director of partnerships and development. He’s a big, voluble guy with a graying beard who was once homeless himself 30 years ago, and has since had several successful careers.
Capital & Main: Living Homeless in California:
Can Washing Up Transform Lives? May 31, 2018
It took 20 deaths from a Hepatitis A outbreak among San Diego’s homeless population for city officials to realize their efforts to address a mushrooming crisis were failing. Besides being an eyesore for housed residents, the squalor on the streets had become an infectious disease crisis with hundreds of hospitalizations, mostly on the public’s dime.
As the crisis unfolded late in 2017, San Diego’s city council took an unprecedented action among West Coast cities to allocate $6.5 million for three large, semi-permanent rigid tent shelters. Though the shelters serve now as nodes for addiction rehabilitation and employment connection services, the most fundamental service the shelters provide for San Diego’s homeless is a chance to wash their bodies, and a safe, clean place to sleep.
