“My name is Melody. I'm originally from San Francisco, California, but I moved here with my parents when I was 11.
I am like a hundred percent permanently disabled.
It's been about four years that I’ve been homeless off and on.
They pretty much don't like tents up, which I don't understand that. I mean I do but I don't because they do need to keep the streets clean and all that stuff. But everybody pretty much picks up their own stuff and they take their tents down every morning. But if you put up a tent, that like attracts attention, but it keeps us warmer…
We're only allowed to put them up when it's raining or when it's about to rain and only at night.
We don't agree with the camping laws that they're giving people tickets for camping.
We do try really hard. We get like usually a room, like a hotel room or a motel room somewhere. And we stay as long as we can until our money runs out. And then we have outside. So we're not like outside like day in and day out. At least like once a month we're in for probably maybe about a week is what our money covers, you know, to be inside.
And then the ambassadors, they really do help out a lot. But some of them get a little bit pushy. They go around and wake everybody up, but then sometimes they make you leave. Sometimes they just start taking your stuff … for no reason. And so we've lost a lot of stuff…
The park rangers, the parks and recreation people, I mean, some of them will just take your stuff right in front of you and put it in the back of their truck …
And so that makes it difficult when they come and take your stuff.
Sometimes, you just have to run to the bathroom, you know, and you don’t maybe take five, 10 minutes to run to a bathroom and come back and your stuff will be gone and you'll never see it again. Because they do that.
People might have stuff that's worth a lot of money here or stuff that isn't theirs that they're watching for somebody else, but they just couldn't stay and watch it 'cause they had to run to the bathroom. They'll be back, you know, sometimes you'll come right back or you'll only turn your back on your stuff and it disappears.
Rather than just leaving the people's stuff alone, you know, unless it's been sitting there for a substantial amount of time, like if it's been there for like over two days just sitting there.
If I was one of the city workers, I would definitely take the stuff but leave a notice or something right there wherever the stuff was and let 'em know where they could pick their stuff up at because it had been there for a certain amount of time.
We have lost so much from them, the parks and recreation people, doing that to us because well, we ought to clean this place up, you know, with our dogs, it looks bad.
I mean it's not like we're throwing our garbage all over the place because we do pick up all our garbage and put it in the trash and we even have our own trash bags.
When they take your stuff before night, you lose what you need and you end up getting sick and freezing.”