Judge Upholds L.A. County’s $143 Shelter Allowance

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge refused Friday to order the county to increase its shelter allowance for general relief recipients, despite arguments from anti-poverty lawyers and local clergy that the present level “violates contemporary standards of decency.”

The ruling was “somewhat of a surprise,” said Legal Aid Foundation attorney Gary Blasi, who had argued in court that an indigent homeless person could not get a room in a “Skid Row flophouse” for the $143 a month currently designated for shelter in welfare checks.

“Thousands of people will continue to suffer,” Blasi said. “It is not (going to be) a particularly pleasant Christmas for people who have nothing.”

In a written opinion released late Friday afternoon, Judge Robert B. Lopez denied without comment a motion for preliminary injunction that would order the county to immediately increase its shelter allowance to at least $196 a month.

Blasi said the county’s own data shows that the minimum required for shelter in Los Angeles County is $196 a month.

Mary Wawro, assistant county counsel, said the judge’s ruling was a correct one.

“(He) was persuaded that the Board of Supervisors acted properly,” she said. “Basically what the board did was take $21 million and target it for emergency aid to get homeless (people) off the street. People come in and we give them vouchers for housing.”

Wawro said a countywide task force on the homeless has been working on the problem since 1984, making analyses to determine where the money should go.

Lopez made his ruling three days after hearing arguments for and against court intervention in the issue.

The decision came in a lawsuit filed last October by a coalition of anti-poverty lawyers on behalf of the homeless. The suit contended that, despite inflation, sums fixed for shelter and food in the monthly grants have not been upgraded since 1981.

Blasi said Friday that an appeal of the ruling will be filed “as soon as we can. . . . It will ensure that the question gets resolved at a higher level.”

A contingent of county religious leaders “deeply involved in the rights of the homeless” had joined the lawyers for the poor in calling on the court to order an increase in the shelter provision for relief recipients.

In a brief filed as friends of the court, the 17 clergymen decried “the county’s practice of depriving poor people of an adequate housing allowance” and declared that it “violates contemporary standards of decency.”

“(The county’s) level of housing allowance is so far below all recognized indices of minimum poverty standards that it is arbitrary and capricious and inconsistent with the statutory mandate,” declared the clergymen, who represent Protestant, Jewish and Catholic faiths.

In Lopez’s court last Tuesday, Wawro said that many of the people sleeping on the streets today are mentally ill and that the county is supporting a variety of programs to aid such people.

“Giving a schizophrenic an additional $53 a month is not going to guarantee that that schizophrenic will find shelter,” she told Lopez.

She also told the court that such a monthly increase “would certainly be a windfall” for individuals who share housing, and pointed out that many more recipients of county welfare are managing to cope than are the homeless.

As currently set up, the $228-a-month general relief grant available to qualified single, needy and unemployed county residents designates $143 for housing, $74 for food and $11 for personal care, household upkeep and clothing--sums also deemed too little for decent subsistence by the anti-poverty lawyers.

Employable recipients are required by the county to document monthly job searches and perform at least 72 hours of assigned labor.

The lawsuit, one of a series on behalf of the homeless, was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and anti-poverty law firms, including the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, Western Center on Law and Poverty and Mental Health Advocacy Services.