Shelter for Homeless Is Still Seeking a Home : Agency Runs Into Opposition With Every Site It Proposes for Temporary Facility for Families

A shelter for the homeless that is itself homeless is perhaps the ultimate irony in this time of so much expression of concern for the homeless.

Yet that is what has happened to a project to provide a 100-bed temporary shelter for homeless families in Los Angeles. Las Familias del Pueblo’s Downtown Emergency Shelter Project has the financing, has a director, has an approach that public officials and corporate executives find innovative.

It does not, however, have land to put the shelter on. This despite almost two years of searching and negotiating, lot by lot, in and around the downtown area.

“Everybody says it’s a shame children are homeless, that we need to have shelters for homeless families, but it appears that nobody wants one near them,” said the Rev. Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias.

“Well, a shelter has to go some where . If you can’t put it in a residential area, if you can’t put it in an industrial area, where can you put it?”

Anaheim Rejected Shelter

The same question was raised in Orange County this week when Anaheim residents, fearing the prospect of transients in their neighborhood, blocked the opening of a shelter proposed by Christian Temporary Housing Facilities Inc. In rejecting the plan because of residents’ opposition, Anaheim planning officials promised to seek another site for the shelter.

In Los Angeles, Callaghan said her agency may have to call it quits on the shelter and relinquish funding and commitments of nearly $1 million if land does not become available fairly soon.

“That would be awful,” said Maureen Kindel, president of the Los Angeles city Board of Public Works. “I personally would consider it a great failure on my part if we were unable to find them anything. I can’t remember how long we’ve been at this--it must be a couple of years. We’ve turned the files upside down. . . .”

Like the Oil Business

“This is a little like my business,” said Robert Wycoff, president of Atlantic Richfield Co. and a Las Familias board member active in the shelter project negotiations.

“Everybody recognizes the importance of having a source of oil, but nobody wants oil wells near them. I never expected it would be so difficult. . . . We’d find a piece of land; it would be unsuitable. Frankly, we would not be looked on as good neighbors. People have an almost unknown fear. And these were not just any homeless. These were women and children.”

“It was almost an apple pie project that Alice had,” said John Maguire, deputy administrator for housing and community affairs for the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.

The land issue will have to be resolved in the next four to six months, he said, or state money probably will be lost and CRA money reallocated. Citing difficulties the CRA was having with a number of shelter projects, he said, “We’ll be in the embarrassing position of not being able to produce on projects.”

The Las Familias project calls for 11 mobile modular units where families would be provided shelter, meals, counseling and support services--at a daily cost of $8 per person. Each unit would essentially be like three motel rooms, with front and back entrance, interconnected to adjust for the size of a family.

“One of the most interesting components of the shelter is its flexibility,” Callaghan said. “Rather than institutionalize the problem somewhere by constructing a shelter, we’ve elected to use mobile units. . . . It may not make sense four years from now to have a 100-bed shelter downtown. We can divide it in half if need be. . . . And we can use a piece of land that’s available only temporarily. When it’s needed for another use, we can go elsewhere.”

Aim Is Independence

Families would stay for a maximum of 60 days. The program is designed to help them re-establish independence and to help them find permanent housing in residential neighborhoods. To provide a roof but no support services, Callaghan said, would mean that “at the end of 60 days they’d just be sitting there.”

Las Familias, a community center that serves families living on Skid Row and relocates them to more suitable neighborhoods, designed the project in a feasibility study funded by the Arco Foundation. Matching grants of $250,000 each from the state Department of Housing and Community Development and the CRA provide the capital to buy the modular units. The Arco Foundation came through again with $25,000 for furnishings, and instructions to the California Community Foundation to provide Las Familias with $150,000 of its Arco money for operating costs.

Other corporations in the downtown area either earmarked funds or indicated they would be available once the land was secured. In all, two-thirds of its $363,000 operational budget was raised for the first year, with indications that the remaining funds would be no problem.

Was to Open Last Year

The shelter was targeted to open last October.

Nancy Berlin was hired as director last July. She set to work visiting existing shelters, coordinating intake and screening procedures with the Department of Social Services, establishing contact with the Health Department and schools, writing job descriptions for staff, looking at equipment, developing her program.

Formerly with the Interfaith Hunger Coalition, Berlin had become familiar with the issues of homelessness by working with welfare mothers there.

“I saw this (the Las Familias project) as an opportunity to do something concrete,” she said.

“Our only mistake is that maybe we were a little too nice,” Berlin said of past tries for land.

Callaghan agreed, using the same words: “Maybe we’ve been too nice.”

She does not have a reputation for docility or defeat. She has a “can do” air about her, and it seems no accident that her shirt sleeves are always rolled up.

“We kept backing off each time we got significant opposition. We kept being hopeful there’d be another piece available. . . . We’ve reached the point where we won’t back off so quickly now. If we find land, we’ll push the question, whether it’s city or private land. We’ll no longer back off.”

It started several years ago, Callaghan said, with a desire on the part of Las Familias to get the community, especially the public sector, moving toward a well-planned long-term response to the issue of homelessness.

The focus on families was a strategic decision, Callaghan said, explaining “the point being that with homeless families, people might have more empathy. It was a way to get a handle on the issue.”

The staff at Las Familias had not been working with many homeless families, but with poor families, most of them Latino and many of them recent immigrants, who were living on Skid Row. Las Familias had become expert at relocation, since one of the goals of the agency is to clear Skid Row of families, finding them more suitable dwellings and encouraging landlords to revert the hotels to the single-room occupancy units they were built to be.

No sooner had Las Familias staffers decided on their project than they met the Garcia family, reinforcing their commitment. The Garcias--mother, father, two daughters and an infant son--had been living in their car for two weeks when they were brought to the attention of the agency by Janice Wood, president of Communications Workers of America Local 9502.

Union members had become aware of the family, who were parked in a lot near their office near Beverly Boulevard and Virgil Avenue. One Spanish-speaking member, Albert Gribbell, talked with them, and learned enough of their story to assure them the union would try to raise a little cash for them and get them some help.

“Every day the mother would dress the little girls and send them off to school,” Callaghan recalled the story they pieced together. “The man would walk to work at a minimum wage job he had taken at a kennel nearby. And the woman would spend all day in the car with the infant, guarding their belongings. The little girls would come home from school, the family would eat and bed down for the night.”

Berlin and Annamaria Rivera, also of Las Familias, went to the car and learned the Garcias had been sharing an apartment with another family. When that family moved out, they could not afford to carry the rent themselves. When the day finally came, they just drove away.

After much searching, they put the family up for the night in a motel. By the next night the family was in an apartment in Boyle Heights that Mrs. Garcia had learned was available for $180 per month--a rent the family could manage.

Las Familias paid the first and last months’ rent for them, gave them some furniture and helped them move in. Recently, the Garcias moved, with their own funds, to a larger apartment in the same building.

Typical of Homeless Families

Based on what they have been learning, Callaghan, Berlin and Rivera all describe the Garcias as fairly typical of homeless families, except that more homeless families consist of women and children.

“I suspect homeless families become homeless in incremental stages,” Callaghan said. “At the point where they run out of money, either through unemployment or some heavy expenses or losses, or poor management, they’ll use up the last month’s rent. Then they’ll move in with a friend or relative until the welcome wears out. Then they’ll start living in their car.

“One reason no one knows how many homeless families there are is that they tend to be invisible. They risk having their children taken away as neglect cases if they are in the street with a child. They’re more likely to be in a car.”

(Estimates of the general homeless population in Los Angeles County range from 25,000 to 50,000. Berlin has been surveying the number of beds available for families and has come up with a conservative estimate of 140 to 150, although she is the first to say an accurate count is almost impossible. Definitions of “family” and various restrictions account for the difficulty, she said. Some shelters have marriage certificate requirements or age limits for teen-age children; some allow no infants, some only single mothers.)

Area Scoured

Last summer, staffers started scouring the area bordered roughly by Sunset Boulevard to the north, Adams Boulevard to the south, the Harbor Freeway to the west and Alameda Street and the riverbed to the east. Families in that area would be drawn to the downtown area and could be put near service agencies, a bus line, and light industrial and service industry employment.

The first and most common obstacle they encountered, one that continues to be the major stumbling block, Callaghan said, was that almost every site they found was owned by Caltrans, the Rapid Transit District or the city, often recently acquired, and lying fallow for the proposed Metrorail. There was no negotiating.

Large Site Found

Late last summer they found the answer, they thought--a large site, consisting of several separately owned parcels, in the Temple/Beaudry area. With the exception of a computer center owned by the Bank of America nearby, the area is largely one of old, slightly dilapidated houses and vacant lots. The CRA proposed to buy the whole site for $8 million and to let Las Familias locate the shelter on half of it rent-free for five years.

Developers objected, however, and Las Familias and the CRA backed off.

Specifically, Center City West Associates objected. In a letter to Councilman John Ferraro last September, the group’s director, Graham Kaye-Eddie said the full board, with one abstention, endorsed the concept, applauded the effort, but found the land use inappropriate for temporary or future moderate-to-low income housing. It doubted the downtown area or outlying areas to the east had been adequately explored. Kaye-Eddie said the Associates were committed to assist in finding an alternate site.

By October, another site had been located in Chavez Ravine on Stadium Way. A paved lot at the base of a cliff, its nearest neighbors were a Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center across the street, and in the distance, a portion of Chinatown isolated from the main community.

Dodgers Owned Half of Site

“We thought the city owned it. So did the city,” Callaghan said. “It turned out the Dodgers owned a little over half.”

The Dodgers, however, declined to allow the land to be used as the site. In a meeting arranged by Maureen Kindel at Public Works, Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley met with Kindel, Callaghan and Robert Wycoff.

“That was one of our biggest disappointments,” Kindel said. “O’Malley said he would help in any way, but that it’s not appropriate to have a homeless shelter across from his stadium. I think that’s a big part of the problem. Nobody wants to have it near them.”

“It is not suitable for residential use. Just look at it. It’s at the bottom of a 200-foot cliff,” O’Malley said recently at his office at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers use it occasionally for parking, he said, when there is a large event at the stadium. “I have to believe there is a better site for a residential community.”

He stressed it was not suitable for any residential use, citing the topography of the land, the fact that it was directly across the street from a ticket office, saying his main reservations had to do with traffic and safety.

‘We’d Love to Help’

From a public relations point of view, he said, “sure we’d love to help the city and help the group.” Looking out over the playing field below and pointing out the windows in several directions, he mentioned a church, Elysian Park, the police department. “I think we’ve cooperated with just about every community project I know of. We like to believe we are good community citizens. We want to cooperate. We told them, if you see another piece of property, let us know.”

Since a portion of that land is technically part of Chinatown, the CRA’s Chinatown community advisory committee was consulted. They voted against it. In a letter to Councilmen Gilbert Lindsey and Ferraro last December, the committee chairman, Albert Lum, said that “such a facility would be of little benefit to the community.”

No one involved has really given up--least of all, Callaghan.

Las Familias is thinking of buying land, and the CRA intends to help with a loan for that purchase. Buying land will not remove all obstacles, everyone knows, but, as Kindel remarked, “Money helps everything, doesn’t it?”

One recent afternoon, Callaghan was out in her car, pointing out the old sites they had lost out on and areas recently under consideration, providing a nonstop, exasperated commentary as she conducted her tour.

After touring downtown sites, she drove out along the railroad tracks and riverbed areas, pointing out odd bits of land that were often difficult to distinguish in the rubble of their surroundings.

They were eyesores, but they would do. Landscaping would help, she said. And, because of the danger of the railroad tracks, they would put up buffer walls.

Current Negotiations

Most of the current negotiations, she said, were with Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads--stalled to some extent because of the railroads’ pending merger. She had her eye, however, on a few city-owned slivers.

“None of them are ideal now, but at least maybe nobody will care if we’re there,” she said grimly. “What it takes is being near nobody, because nobody wants it.” She had passed about five such places--each of them already checked out by Las Familias for feasibility. Any one of them would do.

“Sometimes, when we’re joking in despair,” she said, smiling but not laughing, “we talk of hooking the units up to trucks and just driving people all night on the freeways.”