Editor:

Ryan Hurley's snippet on Santa Rosa North ("No Jojo Left Behind," Feb. 5) says he was in Eureka's Old Town and was accosted by six drunk, crazy, homeless people in one day. Ryan needs to get out more.

My office is in Old Town (First and E streets). I've been there for 17 years, five days a week. Most days I walk over to the Co-op to get breakfast. In 17 years, I've been accosted twice, total. Once by a tormented crazy lady who ranted at someone she imagined near me. She wasn't homeless, just crazy, and didn't look crazier than someone arguing into a cell phone. The other time I was accosted was by a young man, neither crazy, drunk, nor homeless. He practiced a performance art rant that one morning.

There used to be plenty of homeless people you'd see waking up in doorways, getting their few things together to head out to wherever they spent the day. But not anymore, as the EPD has done an effective (if cruel) job of driving them away. As for the people you see on Second Street near the Rescue Mission/St. Vinnies, I deliver spare produce there regularly from my Hoopa farm and have never been accosted by any of the poor people there. Ever.

Mr. Hurley's piece borrowed the tone, prose style and moral gravity of the comments section at the Lost Coast Outpost. And I don't think he was being intentionally ironic.

Bill Verick, Westhaven