Homeless Need Help

Your article “Homeless Get Help--But It’s Too Little” (Feb. 11) is only the tip of the iceberg for the involuntary homeless, children, women, men, who live in the rose garden of San Diego, and they must exist among the thorns.

The City of San Diego has provided a home for 600 penguins at a cost of $7 million; it has failed to provide shelter and food for our own American children, women, men. There is a social contract the American courts have upheld, and the federal, state, County and City of San Diego lack the social conscience to meet this moral obligation. Meanwhile, uncounted numbers eke out their existence by collecting soda cans from garbage pails.

Mayor Roger Hedgecock has acknowledged that the county and city have the resources to build a shelter for the homeless, and he pledged he would undertake this humane program. The mayor’s pledge has become counterfeit because he has never proposed legislation for such.

Private shelters in the city at best provide only a few days for a homeless person or a family. And one who applies for welfare must, to obtain assistance, have an address. The welfare bureaucracy has created rules to punish the poor powerless.

Nor have the County and City of San Diego applied to the federal government for empty federal and military buildings, which are theirs for the asking, to shelter the homeless. And with a stroke of a pen, Commander-in-Chief Reagan could open the military installations to feed the hungry and homeless of this area.

The City Council of San Diego has voted $400 million for the following edifices: Convention Center, Kolender’s “Police Palace,” and $2 million for a park in Horton Plaza. To achieve a shelter for the homeless it should be named, “Convention Center Annex.”

Lincoln once wrote, “That God must have loved the poor, that is why he created so many of them.”

ART SALZBERG

San Diego