Networking to Help the Homeless : Women Hammer Out Details for Emergency Shelter
Construction of the San Julian Emergency Shelter is probably as close as Los Angeles has come, at least in many years, to a barn raising. It has been likened to that since its inception last week, and as it has gone up, all the stereotypes connected with such an undertaking have been present--good old know-how, neighborliness, common sense, even victuals prepared by the womenfolk.
At the start of last weekend, the corner lot at San Julian and 5th streets in the center of Skid Row stood vacant. Owned by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, it was the site of a future park. By this weekend, according to Jim Wood, agency chairman and work-site supervisor, the temporary shelter will be completed and ready to receive the homeless. They are expected to be sleeping there by Monday night.
The fact that the shelter is temporary, and scheduled to be torn down or removed as of June 10, is due in large part to some of the same women who made lunch for the construction crew, Wood said--namely, Martha Brown Hicks, director of the Skid Row Development Corp.; the Rev. Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias del Pueblo; Jill Halverson, director of the Downtown Women’s Center, and Ann Lane, city fire commissioner. They had been among those involved with the homeless who had been called to a meeting at Community Redevelopment Agency headquarters last week to discuss the feasibility of the shelter.
“It’s really a personal commitment on my part,” Wood said at the site earlier this week. “Those four women insisted that it be temporary, that there be a certain date to tear it down, so that a temporary measure wouldn’t become permanent. So we pledged ourselves. . . . We’re confident that through regular channels there will be places available to replace this.” Women leaders help out in the kitchen as shelter goes up in Skid Row. That may involve a lot of confidence. Despite the “can-do” approach behind the San Julian shelter, as the building nears completion it is by no means certain where the money is going to come from to pay for housing the 138 people it takes in. Nor have all the snags been smoothed out regarding how it is going to be run.
“Putting up the building was easy. Martha’s piece is more difficult,” Wood said of Hicks’ agreement to run the shelter.
Indeed, as the week progressed, it seemed at times that the one thing for certain was that for every solution there was a problem. Barn raisings took place in the bucolic wide open spaces, and this shelter has gone up in a morass of politics, bureaucracy and Skid Row.
Last Saturday, as 178 volunteer laborers, carpenters, electricians and plumbers from union locals showed up at the work site, the four women gathered a few blocks away at the Downtown Women’s Center. They were joined by Maxene Johnston, president of the Weingart Rehabilitation Center; Nancy Mintie of the Inner City Law Center, and the Women’s Center’s Brenda Mitchell and Elizabeth Underwood.
Johnston arrived carrying a large tray of bologna and announced a kitchen table was as good a place to negotiate as a board-room table. It proved to be so, except that more networking than negotiating went on. The only thing negotiated was the menu, Callaghan’s plea to include peanut butter and jelly going virtually ignored as the others established assembly lines for 200 tuna and bologna-and-cheese sandwiches.
Other than that, and plenty of ironic humor that the women were providing the food for the men, and that “Jill got us into this” by volunteering their services at the Community Redevelopment Agency meeting, it was nothing but cooperation that went over the table.
Hicks had been asked to operate the shelter because of her agency’s success in running Transition House, which provides temporary housing and services to the homeless. The emergency shelter will be a very different operation, and the other women thought out loud with Hicks, commenting on the problems she had identified and plans she had made.
“It is just a shelter,” she reminded them and herself. “There are plenty of other places for people to go during the day.”
It will be cleared each day, she told them. Meals will not be provided. People will not be encouraged to think of it as a home.
“But we have to give them coffee and doughnuts in the morning,” she said. “They have to have something before they hit the streets.”
Since the structure is temporary, there is no plumbing. Portable toilets outside presented no problem, but showers did. How to provide them was troublesome.
“We’ve got to have showers. We have to delouse. . . .”
Everyone agreed, and Johnston came up with what seemed like a solution at the time. The Weingart Center, around the block from the San Julian shelter, had unused showers off its dining facility. And a fenced-in lot where people could be processed.
By midweek, that solution had been abandoned as too complicated. The distance was too far in such a dangerous area, Hicks said. And there were problems with another possible solution, portable showers in a mobile unit that Lane had located. These involved fire regulations concerning compressed gas and residential facilities, required sewer and water line hookups. . . .
They went over the schedule that Hicks read to them while they worked and concurred with her that security was important enough to contract out for, in spite of the expense. Hicks was worried about the budget, she told them, knowing the public and political reaction that would follow a high figure. They set to work at it, determined to scale it down, aiming for $12.50 per person per night. They did not finish, and by midweek Hicks was relieved to report her office had managed to get it slightly under $9.
Dwight Grey, whom Hicks has put in charge of the new shelter, arrived with the Transition House van, to pick up the food. The women went with him to the work site, sitting on the floor of the van. They served lunch from trays balanced on sawhorses to the cheering, ebullient crew and Mayor Tom Bradley, who arrived with a pot of coffee. They were happy to find that the crew was not all male. Several women were hammering away.
Lunch over, the networking continued. Alice Callaghan left with Hicks to help her interview potential staff. Earlier, Mintie, who is a member of Homeless Organizing Team that sponsored the recently dismantled Tent City, had lined up former Tent City workers for interviews.
And so it continued, Hicks said at midweek, praising all the cooperative effort that has gone on.
And, Jim Wood said at the work site, the union crew had been joined during the week by volunteer workers from the Skid Row community. About seven men were doing unskilled labor, such as installing insulation.
Wood, who is also assistant executive secretary of the Los Angeles Federation of Labor under William Robertson, had high praise for the union workers who had used their contacts to secure donated or “bare- bones cost” materials.
The main problem all around was money. Wood said he had to raise $60,000, commenting that had they waited until they had the money in hand, the building would never have gone up.
Hicks reported she is facing a similar situation. Expenses could run between $300,000 and $400,000, and she said her agency has no money to spare. The city is providing money up front that is “sort of a loan,” she said. She is applying for $69,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, hoping that some funds from the private sector will be forthcoming and that the city and county will come through. Waiting, however, to be reimbursed under the county’s current voucher system for the homeless would present real operating problems for the shelter, she said.
With all the ifs , they are going ahead. People will be sheltered Monday, she said. Somehow, both Hicks and Wood reported themselves convinced the monetary and operational problems will be worked out.
“With all the talent we have, we should be able to solve the problems,” Wood said. “We have improvised at every level to get this done.”
