Pulling In the Welcome Mat

Anaheim--the home of Disneyland, the baseball Angels and the football Rams--welcomes people, especially tourists with cash credit cards and newcomers with down payments on mortgages. The welcome mat does not mention the homeless--the people whose plight was acknowledged when Anaheim residents, including Mickey Mouse, joined hands in the Hands Across America project and was forgotten a few days later.

The act of forgetting occurred recently when about 100 residents, many of whom claimed to be actively helping the homeless, packed a city Planning Commission meeting to protest a proposed shelter in their neighborhood. To the city’s shame, the protest succeeded.

The commission, responding to fears of residents about transients loitering near their homes, for the safety of their children and of an increase in crime, unanimously rejected a proposal from Christian Temporary Housing Facilities, Inc. for a shelter for homeless families in the Seventh-day Adventist Church on South Sunkist Street.

The action was just the opposite of what many people dealing with the homeless on a daily basis hoped the Hands Across America demonstration would produce. What was needed from that outpouring of concern was for people to go back into their communities and work to help the homeless. Paying lip service to the problem isn’t enough. Neither is just sending a check. It will take more, lots more. It will take commitment, the kind that Anaheim had the chance to show last week and didn’t.

People have to start supporting the opening of shelters for the homeless in their own neighborhoods, not just somewhere else.

At the Anaheim hearing, the commission chairwoman, although rejecting the proposed site because it was in a residential neighborhood, did say that it was time to take an active role in finding a place “for them.” Audience members, relieved that she didn’t mean their neighborhood, applauded. And the rejected housing group’s executive director, reacting more to history than to good intentions, later expressed his fear that if the group finds another suitable location that it can afford, it will encounter that neighborhood’s opposition, too.

Until those neighborhood and official attitudes change, nothing else will.

A church in neighboring Orange, in a lesson of acceptance, has agreed to provide the shelter that Anaheim rejected. Church officials have declined to disclose the name or location until the agreement is finalized. But the offer from Orange will not provide shelter for the homeless of Anaheim.

Anaheim has more homeless on its streets than any other city in Orange County except Santa Ana. The community ought to be doing something about that--something a lot more than hypocritically holding hands with the the rest of the nation in a symbolic gesture, then locking arms to keep the homeless out of their neighborhoods.