March Base Barracks Could Shelter Women, Children

Just over a week ago, Auiwon Hicks was living under Interstate 215 in San Bernardino after her Ford Taurus was impounded. But the 20-year-old single mother ended up in an unlikely place: March Air Reserve Base near Riverside.

The base is home to Amelia’s Light, a transitional shelter for women and children run by Lutheran Social Services. Now, another one of the downsized base’s vacant barracks is poised to open for some of Riverside County’s most vulnerable residents.

The March Joint Powers Commission is expected today to approve plans for a 66-room homeless shelter for women and children on an unused portion of the former Air Force base.

Riverside County has nearly 5,000 homeless people on any given day, according to a recent study by the Institute for Urban Research and Development in Los Angeles. About half are women and children.

Increased rental rates have pushed many people with low incomes to the fringes of homelessness, said Anne Unmacht, 41, a Realtor and local housing advocate.

The region’s growth is “great economically,” Unmacht said, “but there’s a downside. This huge tidal wave of homeless or near-homeless people just barely hanging on is getting astronomical.”

The profile of those living on the county’s streets is changing too.

“It’s more families, single moms struggling to make ends meet,” said Raul Diaz, whose Path of Life Ministries runs three shelters with roughly 220 beds in Riverside.

The county has just 377 emergency or seasonal beds available for homeless people and 495 more permanent-housing options, said Ronald Stewart, interim administrative manager of homeless programs for Riverside County’s Department of Public Social Services.

The new shelter at March would initially provide 10 to 12 rooms for single mothers, said Lori Stone, director of operations with March Joint Powers Authority. A larger transitional shelter, scheduled to open next winter, would accommodate about 200 people and provide women with vocational counseling, financial education, mental health services and other assistance.

In a county as vast as Riverside, homeless people congregate in the population centers: Riverside in the west, and the Coachella Valley in the east, Stewart said. The new shelter will be situated to help those across western Riverside County, said Diaz, who is working with Riverside city officials to establish transportation to the facility.

“The shelters in Riverside are pretty much filled up to capacity,” he said.

A third of the 6,600-acre base is still used by the Air Force Reserves. After the 1993 decision that the base would be realigned, federal requirements mandated that it offer homeless services, said Phil Rizzo, executive director of the joint powers authority.

Similar social services are offered -- at times amid local opposition -- at defunct military installations in Merced, Monterey County and Sacramento, according to a recent report by Washington’s National Law Center for Homelessness and Poverty.

Plans for the shelter at March show that Riverside County officials are willing “to deal with an issue, as opposed to hoping or maybe kind of wishing it wasn’t there,” Diaz said.

At least 15 local churches and organizations have pledged more than $200,000 in the next year to help get the shelter running, and officials anticipate more to come from federal grants.

The facility will join a shelter for more than 100 homeless veterans and Amelia’s Light, which caters to single mothers living on the streets.

Hicks, who became homeless last fall, now lives in a spotless one-bedroom unit crammed with donated furniture. She knows firsthand what such base-conversion projects can accomplish: She’ll finally get her 23-month-old son, Mykhyl, back from Child Protective Services this week.

Moving into the modest building that once housed military families was “the best thing that happened to me this year,” Hicks said.