Winter: The Bane of L.A. Homeless

On a downtown Los Angeles parking lot, where the winds whip down from the snow-capped San Gabriels, Lee Manning and about 15 other homeless men and women have erected their winter shacks.

Their shantytown, hidden from view by walls and closed to most visitors, is the envy of Skid Row. The eight “houses” have walls on all sides and plywood roofs, with bedding and furniture collected over the last five months. The best have raised floors to keep belongings dry in the rain.

Residents cook meals outside on a grill laid across an oil drum. They band together, Manning said, to keep out violent intruders and anyone with drugs.

“We don’t want any trouble,” said Manning, a 35-year-old unemployed Los Angeles native. “If we get booted out of here, most of us got nowhere to go. This is the safest place to be if we’re gonna be on the streets downtown. We’re like family here. At least, we’re surviving.”

For most of the homeless, these cold nights portend another long winter roaming Los Angeles County streets looking for food and some way out of the rain and chill.

Despite the addition of about 460 new shelter beds since last winter and a slight drop in the national poverty rolls, there has been no visible decline here in the ranks of the homeless, a small but visible class at the bottom of the nation’s 33.7 million poor.

Instead, the number of destitute men and women who receive county general relief checks--in exchange for public service work--has grown by 4,400 since last fall.

Not all are homeless, but general relief is the program of last resort for the very poor of Los Angeles who do not qualify for any other aid, except food stamps.

There is evidence that some who receive the $228-per-month relief checks are homeless at least part of the time because they cannot afford a full month’s rent. Rooms in the county’s cheapest accommodations, the run-down Skid Row hotels, begin at about $240 a month, and some hotels have raised their rents since last winter.

More Seeking Assistance

At the same time, the number of homeless people applying for two weeks of emergency, county-subsidized lodging while their welfare paper work is processed has been running far ahead of last year. In September, 4,201 people sought temporary rooms under the program, which has cost the county $8.7 million already this year.

Now that the nights have turned frigid, things are just as bad in the private shelters and missions, which can accommodate almost 3,000 people ineligible for emergency county lodging. Many are filled every night, and when vacancies occur, they are most often in outlying areas. In any case, few of the shelters are open to families or women.

“Although we’ve seen more facilities open, it hasn’t alleviated the need like I thought it might,” said Betty Macias, director of the Turning Point shelter in Santa Monica, which turns away people every night. “There has been a steady increase.”

Despite the gloomy numbers, the living conditions for some Los Angeles County homeless figure to be somewhat improved this winter.

Since last winter, when the homeless erupted into a local political issue, United Way estimates about 460 new shelter beds have opened from Venice to Lancaster. At least 148 more beds are expected to become available before spring, according to various sources, and another 700 beds financed in part with a large state grant to Los Angeles agencies are in the works but will not be ready before the weather warms.

In addition, treatment for the mentally ill on Skid Row has been improved, and more of the homeless are seeing physicians because of a foundation grant last year that finances health clinics.

This winter’s new shelters are largely the result of increased funding for the homeless from the city Community Redevelopment Agency and a new grant from the Federal Emergency Management Administration.

Federal money has been used to open 160 new beds in 10 small shelters, ranging from the Pasadena YWCA to the Antelope Valley Domestic Violence Center in Lancaster. The city money has been targeted by the Community Redevelopment Agency on the downtown Skid Row, where city officials face the perplexing problem of a large homeless population that is hurting redevelopment plans.

‘Big Problem Down Here’

Under pressure by the growing demand for shelter, the Community Redevelopment Agency agreed for the first time to pay $1.4 million toward the cost of operating shelters, instead of solely helping with construction costs. “We got into the operating side of this only reluctantly,” said James Wood, Community Redevelopment Agency chairman. “We have a big problem down here.”

Money from the redevelopment agency’s new shelter trust fund will allow the city to keep open a temporary plywood shelter that houses 138 homeless men and women on Skid Row. It was built by volunteers from organized labor last Christmas season.

Occupants have been temporarily relocated in leased beds at the Weingart Center on San Pedro Street while the shelter is moved to a new site where it is scheduled to reopen in December.

City money is also helping finance additional shelter in the Weingart Center, a 12-story former hotel on Skid Row that houses county health clinics, alcohol recovery programs and a large shelter program. The new redevelopment agency money is being used to provide 132 beds for impoverished men and women who are homeless but have been suspended from receiving any welfare benefits.

Welfare Rules Criticized

Los Angeles County policy is to stop paying monthly relief checks for 60 days to anyone who fails to show up for work assignments or who does not comply fully with job search requirements. County officials say the policy is necessary to control welfare costs, but advocates for the homeless say the rules are erratically enforced and simply create more homeless.

“It’s a crazy system,” said Gary Blasi, a Legal Aid attorney who is challenging the 60-day penalty policy. “People on general relief, by definition, have no other money. How are they supposed to live if they get cut off?”

This winter, however, the city is supporting further programs of its own to help improve Skid Row life. A 100-bed shelter for families, run by Las Familias del Pueblo, is scheduled to open early next year, and a 48-room hotel for homeless women run by the Downtown Women’s Center is also to open soon. Last summer the Community Redevelopment Agency helped provide start-up costs for a nonprofit center for the hundreds of mentally ill men on Skid Row.

Advocates for the homeless say all the activity is due to the political attention focused on the homeless last December by a tent city erected across from City Hall.

The encampment attracted considerable public support in the form of donated food and clothing and was declared a success by organizers who sought to embarrass Mayor Tom Bradley and the county Board of Supervisors into action.

No Plans for Tent City

This year there are no plans to revive the tent city, but the organizers are planning a Christmas season vigil and demonstration to prod the Board of Supervisors into raising the $228 relief grant and relaxing the 60-day penalty for minor welfare rule violations.

Earlier this year Eddy Tanaka, director of the county Department of Public Social Services, said the relief amount was too low and urged the supervisors to raise it. But the supervisors decided against any change.

Homeless advocates consider the relief grant inadequate because it assumes that housing can be obtained for $143 a month, when even the worst of the unheated Skid Row hotels cost at least $240.