Eviction of Residents From ‘Illegal’ Shelter for Homeless Ordered

Ditched beneath a backyard shrub at the Shelter for the Homeless were a bag lady’s two shopping carts, empty on Saturday but probably not for long.

Like the five other homeless people who were staying at the shelter, the woman must pack her belongings and move. On Friday, Santa Ana city officials deemed the house hazardous and lacking permits, and they ordered residents to leave by Monday.

The way resident manager Ed Harrington sees it, the city is using a technicality to shut down the shelter he runs, under a contract with the county, for homeless people, some of them mentally ill.

City Manager Robert C. Bobb, who ordered an eviction notice posted on the shelter’s front door, said the city is only enforcing zoning ordinances designed to protect the “residential character” of a charming historic neighborhood.

Never Applied for Permit

Defending his decision, Bobb said the shelter operator never applied for a permit. Even if he had, Bobb said, it is doubtful the “boarding house” would be allowed to remain in its location without the support of neighbors.

The six remaining occupants of the house on South Birch Street were preoccupied with making arrangements to move, knowing they had to find other digs by Monday in a county where emergency shelters already are overcrowded.

City officials had given Harrington the name of an emergency shelter, but repeated calls there Saturday were unanswered.

The city said only four people may live in the house, but it no longer may exist as a shelter. Harrington said he was told those four may include himself, his 43-year-old sister Barbara, his wife--if he had one--and one friend.

And four people, he said, cannot pay the rent.

“They got us on a technicality,” Harrington said Saturday, sitting in a study filled with donated office equipment. “What they got us on is overcrowding. They’re claiming we need a hotel license because of the number of people.”

What Harrington calls technicalities Bobb calls zoning ordinances, and he said the shelter does not conform to the R-3 zoning of the rest of the Heninger Park neighborhood.

Bobb said he learned of the shelter, and its lack of city permits to operate as such, on Tuesday from a newspaper article quoting homeowner complaints about the place. He sent Community Development Agency inspectors to the home on Wednesday.

Those inspectors found the shelter operating as a “hotel” without a certificate of occupancy and reported 18 people living in three bedrooms where a maximum of 10 is allowed.

The city inspectors also reported finding deteriorated walls in the basement and beneath the kitchen sink and a host of other code violations, including faulty wiring, and electrical and plumbing problems.

On Friday, city officials returned to the home, this time to post red “Danger” signs and to remove eight mentally ill, homeless people whose $12 daily room and board were paid by the county.

The remaining occupants, who had found their way to the shelter through referrals and word of mouth, were given three days to leave.

Look for Another House

Jim Miller, executive director of the shelter and the man who leases the home for $1,800 a month, said, “We will probably go out and look for another house, and I will be frank: I will apply to the city beforehand.”

Some neighbors said Saturday they were less concerned with the proximity of drifters and mentally ill people than with safety and fire hazards. They said Harrington had told them that he kept men and women separated on the two floors of the house by a locked door.

They also said they wanted the shelter operators to go through the application and hearings process for a permit so that they could express their interests and concerns beforehand.

But the issue is really one of compatibility and upholding the “residential character of a neighborhood,” Bobb said.

‘Incompatible Use’

“We would unequivocally state that this is an incompatible use for that or any other neighborhood in Santa Ana. Until such time (that) there’s an appropriate review and the neighborhood is willing to accept this type of use, it is not,” Bobb said.

He added that he believes Miller was granted funding from the county Department of Mental Health for patients because Miller indicated he had acquired necessary city permits.

Miller concedes he never applied for city permits before opening the shelter on April 1, but said he talked with “four Planning Department people and they told me they would send me an application, which I never received.”

“Fixing the house is not the problem. It’s the homeowners and the city,” Miller said. “We could make the place a palace, but there is still the homeowners. And with the politics, I don’t see how we can win.”

Although the residents didn’t know where they would be living after Monday, Miller and Harrington vowed they would work things out, and soon.

“I’m not going to be on the streets,” Harrington said with a smile. Homeless himself until last month, the 44-year-old Harrington said he and his sister, who is deaf, know how it feels to have nowhere to go.

“I’m gonna get me another shelter going,” he said.