We Care More
A community path off the warehouse wheel
By David Michael Dobbins, Bakersfield
When a community is failing it complains loudly. I do not. I put the same idea on the table until it is
adopted or something better replaces it.
Los Angeles and cities like it still spend on the order of billions a year to warehouse people who have no
address and no clock. Beds sit empty. Hotel programs cost tens of thousands per person. The curb does
not move. Doing that again and calling the next appropriation a solution is how an institution classifies
itself a fool.
The alternative is not another agency and not a campaign wrap. Call the door We Care More. Willing
entry only. No cargo. No one-way ticket to another state. No camp. A person walks in and receives an
address, a bunk, food, a shower, and a seasoned hand on the floor. Private vice that is not violence or a
blocked sidewalk is not the city’s novel. Dangerous conduct is a different column — clinic or the law —
with the same written ritual every time.
Then three questions, in order: What can this person do now? How many days to teach the next thing?
Where is the open job? First-step work has to be real demand or it does not fly: kitchens and Meals on
Wheels on three shifts, because an elder’s knock is a sign of life and not everyone lives on bankers’
hours; laundry and cleaning; colony and TNR stewardship — cats are not owned; steel frames with
hemp-lime walls that labor can pack while an engineer stamps the skeleton. After a year on the roster the
path is a unit they helped stand. Selling existing houses to people with no file excludes. Building the
next ring includes. Wealth that never reaches the base of the labor force is a parade.
The only number that is not a ribbon-cutting is day 90. Of the people who started a paid job with an
address, how many still have the job and the address? Publish it every quarter. Fifty to seventy-five
percent is a working band. Below fifty, the lead is missing. Sixty percent is already how serious training
contracts hold the last check. Hold public dollars the same way. Then publish 180 days and one year.
Change the trades when the year-number dies. Do not change the consent rule.
Print a report card — city, county, state — one grid: warehouse dollars down, program dollars that only
release at day 90, walk-ins and free exits, who got paid, and re-green from the city core toward the
mountain ring. Living trees. Cleared ditches. First-step shops. Colony routes. Beautification that stops at
the civic center is a photo. Bakersfield already talks canopy and cleanup. Apply that work outward
across the basin.
A printed weekly Q&A — sources under the answers, questions from the basin — is that report card in
public, not a poll for sale. Campaigns may buy the space beside it. They do not buy the names. I will not
take a fee for this. Entanglements are how the last machine learned to smile.
Rehab does not start with the affluent. They get a street that works. The investment is the productive
anonymous: unhoused, destitute, coming home from jail, willing to walk in. Second and third chances
with a lead still standing. July 2028 will inspect the curb between the airport and the Coliseum whether
anyone plans for it or not.
Community that stops caring becomes the next contractor. I will keep putting this down until the street
changes or a better broom shows up. That is the work.
David Michael Dobbins lives in Bakersfield.