Mountain View - Eric Ares and Residents Meeting - IMG_8099 2

4:42PM Oct 12, 2025

Speakers:

*David

Keywords:

You kind of know in your gut when a situation is not going the right way. Everybody has choices to make. The you can either make your choice to continue to have a situation go bad, or you can choose to change it. I can't control everybody's choices, but I feel like if you were in my situation, you would want some help. You would want some progress. You wouldn't want to be throwing bits and pieces of information, but still in the same situation, especially when they have funding, you know, I can understand if there was no budget, no funding, and there wasn't anything they could do. We kind of have to deal with it. People voted for there to be a budget, so they kind of already are on the same type of page that we are. Just there's no immediate help.

When you say people can make a choice. Are we talking about anybody in particular here,

from the police officers that conducted the raid to the councilman and deciding to call a sweep without giving us Housing First. You know, we all have choices in our life, and those choices affect people, and maybe one person. It could be a million people that it affects, but somebody is affected by the choices that we made.

That was interesting, that somebody pointed out, why didn't you provide the housing before this happened? And I know that's probably usually a very logical thing, I don't want to hold up anything. I just wonder, like, how you feel about the fact that it's logical, but it's never really treated as a serious matter.

Well, probably because everybody has problems that they go through. We all have problems, but my problems are important to me, just like your problems are important to you. So until you are actually in that situation and they have to face and deal with that problem, it's not going to be at the forefront of your thought. Everybody has their daily routines and life that goes on. So I feel like if you were in the situation, it would be just as important to you as it was to me, like if he was homeless, I'm sure he wouldn't appreciate the councilman calling the raid instead of offering some type of housing or temporary shelter, versus just rating us and then leaving us to go and find somewhere else to still camp. It's not like we can go and move into a house, you know, or move into apartment or have physical housing. We still have to find somewhere to shelter it at night, and we're coming into winter, it's about to get cold.