Streets, Flophouses : Youngsters Share Plight of Homeless

He hadn’t had much to eat--french toast at breakfast, later some 7-Up. Most of the day, 12-year-old Nikia Harris and his family had walked around downtown Los Angeles looking for a place to stay.

Now, as men in worn clothing spread their blankets around him, Nikia huddled on a bench, pulling the hood of his gray sweat shirt tightly around his face. Nearby, his mother cradled his 15-month-old baby brother in her lap. A 7-year-old brother curled on an Army blanket beside her.

Evicted from their Pomona apartment the week before, the family had found refuge--for one night at least--in a temporary shelter for the homeless in downtown Los Angeles.

But Nikia didn’t want to be here, sharing the floor with grizzled men. “Look at all the Skid Row bums,” he said angrily. “It’s dull and dumb and, if it was my world, I would set it on fire.”

Share Parents’ Plight

In the last five years as the nation’s homeless population has soared, children like Nikia have increasingly joined their ranks. Traipsing around the country with parents in search of jobs and places to live, the children share soup kitchens, flophouses and city sidewalks with derelicts and the mentally ill.

Exact counts are elusive, but the National Conference of Mayors reported in December that the fastest growing segment of the homeless population was families, comprising 28% of all the homeless.

The National Coalition for the Homeless, a private lobbying group, estimates that 500,000 of the nation’s 2 million to 3 million homeless are children--with more than 20,000 homeless children in California and as many as 10,000 in Los Angeles.

Because their parents often keep a low profile, fearing that social workers may take their children away, the youngsters are invisible to most people. Few attend school. They may live in motels or Salvation Army shelters or even the family car--”camping” for days or months at local parks.

A National Tragedy

But their plight is fast becoming a national tragedy, a growing number of social workers, doctors and advocates for the homeless said.

“We’re basically throwing away a whole generation of children, a whole generation of citizens when we allow children to grow up homeless,” said Maria Foscarinis, Washington counsel for the National Coalition for the Homeless.

In the last two years, a handful of social scientists has begun studying the effects of homelessness on children. Among the problems they describe:

--Nutritional deficiencies from fast food diets or little food at all.

--Lack of schooling for weeks or months. Even if the children attend some classes in shelters or on the road, “It’s virtually impossible to do well when a child has no home, no place to study, no food to eat and the incredible emotional burden of being homeless,” Foscarinis said.

--Poor hygiene and health problems, including untreated respiratory infections, head lice and chronic diarrhea.

--A parent-child bond that disintegrates in the shelters.

--Lags in behavioral development and severe emotional problems. In a study of 151 children at Boston shelters, Harvard psychiatrist Ellen Bassuk found that 47% showed serious lags in social, motor and language skills; 51% over age 5 were severely depressed and most of the depressed children over 5 had suicidal thoughts.

Despite growing concern about these children, no solutions are in sight. No federal program and only a few state and local government efforts are targeted at them.

California provides aid for runaways but none expressly for homeless children. Nonprofit agencies offer counseling and run emergency shelters. And sometimes child-protective workers intervene, placing homeless children in foster homes if they find parental neglect.

Otherwise, lawyers for the homeless said, the only government aid for homeless children is aimed at families--federal money for temporary shelter and food stamps. And that aid fails to reach many homeless children, whose parents are mentally ill or alcoholics and drug addicts who spend their grant money to support their habits.

Even when homeless parents try to feed their families, the children often go hungry. “Their parents don’t have a place to cook or store food so they buy what they can . . . McDonald’s hamburgers, food at 7-Eleven, lots of potato chips,” said UCLA pediatrician David L. Wood, who treats homeless children at a Venice clinic.

The young family was living in a tent in Orange County’s Featherly Regional Park in Yorba Linda. Parents Linda Napgezek and Richard Hudy, both 21, had run out of money. Hudy, a laid-off factory worker from Madison, Wis., couldn’t find a job. Their car was out of gas. And Joey, their 7-month-old baby, was drinking Kool - Aid because formula cost too much.

Six months on the road had taken their toll on 2 -year-old Jason, too. When the family left Wisconsin to look for work, Jason was a confident toddler, but now, after living in the tent and a suc c ession of motels, he clung to his mother, mimicking the actions of his baby brother.

“Jason was potty-trained when we left,” Napgezek said, “but now he’s back in diapers.”

Schooling for homeless children can be an uncertain proposition.

Several East Coast school districts have refused to admit homeless children because they had no local address, Foscarinis said. And homeless children who do attend school usually miss classes because they move so often.

Los Angeles sociologist Kay Young McChesney said most of the 148 children she studied at five county shelters last year attended school rarely--if at all.

A few shelters provide tutoring--or even schools. In San Diego, the St. Vincent de Paul Society’s shelter has worked with the city school district for the last three years to run a one-room schoolhouse for kindergarten through ninth-grader children. Typically, half the 30 or so students start out below grade level but catch up, said Robert Calhoun, program manager for special education at the San Diego Unified School District.

Others are not as fortunate.

“We definitely are beginning to see children with a developmental lag of 2 1/2 or 3 years,” said Michael Jeffers, principal of the Ninth Street Elementary School, which has many homeless children from downtown Los Angeles among its students. “The bottom line is that we (taxpayers) will have to pay for those kind of things the rest of our lives.”

Homeless children also have serious health problems that taxpayers are just beginning to pay for.

On weekday afternoons, shabbily dressed parents and squirming children from nearby shelters line up at the Venice Family Clinic for its special session for homeless families.

Children arrive “with all the typical childhood diseases . . . and a lot of untreated conditions that can become more serious--vomiting, diarrhea, colds, skin conditions and ear infections that can lead to loss of hearing,” said Mandy Johnson, director of the clinic’s homeless health-care project, one of 19 in the nation financed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Many of the children have not been properly immunized, she said. And sometimes homeless parents cannot afford to care for their sick children or do not know how. Recently one mother whose baby had pneumonia accepted a prescription she could not afford to fill, Johnson said. A week later the baby was reexamined. He had received no medication and was still very ill; clinic staff members reported the mother for suspected child neglect.

In her study of homeless families, McChesney found developmental lags in many of the children she interviewed. She met older children who, under the stress of being homeless, had begun wetting their beds. She also met children who had learned “adaptive strategies” from being homeless that could create problems for them.

When a child used to eating from trash cans does so in school, “he’s shunned by other kids and labeled a troublemaker,” McChesney said. “Already, habit patterns established from only a few months . . . are getting children in trouble for years.”

Wood, the UCLA pediatrician, remembers examining a boy, the 4-year-old son of a cocaine addict, who was unable to speak more than a few words and tried to hit, bite or kick when approached.

Homeless children desperately need love, Wood said. “I think much of their acting out is screaming at the world to ‘please give me something.’ ”

At dusk in Hansen Dam Park in Pacoima, 9-year-old Lara turned cartwheels beside a neighbor’s garbage can fire. She had lived in a camper in the park with her parents and three young brothers since September and kept a B average in school.

Staying in the camper was “not bad,” Lara said. “It’s like a house to me except it’s smaller.” The camper had no shower but “my mom has a shower at work and sometimes we take showers there,” Lara said. And every week, a Salvation Army truck stops by, offering food and extra blankets when the weather turns cold.

Still, Lara was embarrassed to tell her fourth-grade classmates where she lived and had not invited them to visit. “They think we live in a house,” she said.

Ironically, one problem for homeless children comes from an institution created to help them--the shelters.

Their rules often drive children and parents apart, Foscarinis said. In many cities, a “family” shelter is restricted to women and children; homeless fathers must stay in a shelter for men, forcing families to split up.

And the lack of privacy in a shelter may cause mothers and children to become withdrawn and depressed, Atlanta psychologist Nancy Boxill reported in a 1986 study of 50 mothers and 120 children at a shelter there.

Shelter families are subjected to “public mothering,” Boxill explained. “All their activity--24 hours a day, seven days a week--is in full view. That puts incredible stress on the relationship of mother and child.”

Melissa Coleman, 21, a single mother with four children, was complaining about the lack of privacy in a shelter run by a Venice evangelical church.

Coleman and her children--15-month-old twins, a 4 - year - old and a 7-year-old--had left Houma, La., for a better life in California. They found lodging and free meals a t the Bible Tabernacle Church , which each night lets more than 100 homeless parents and children sleep on its wooden pews or on the floor.

But after six weeks at the church, Coleman was hoping her family would send her bus fare home. “It’s not like I thought it was going to be,” she said. All her children seemed depressed, Coleman said, as she held one baby and at the same time, tried to coax some baby food into the other twin’s mouth. “My babies--they have a tendency to cry lots,” she said.

In California, homeless families have faced another threat. Until a year ago, when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge barred the practice, some county welfare agencies were requiring homeless parents who sought food stamps or other aid to allow their children to be placed in foster homes.

“People had gone in, saying, ‘We’re sleeping on the street and our baby’s hungry,’ and in some cases welfare officials would say, ‘No, we’re not going to do anything for you, but we’ll take the child away,’ ” said Melinda Bird, an attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty in Los Angeles.

Department of Social Services spokeswoman Kathleen Norris maintained that parents have lost their children only when there was abuse or neglect. “It was never the policy of the state to separate children from homeless families,” she said.

But in their class-action suit, legal aid lawyers argued successfully that the state should stop removing children from homeless parents and offer them emergency housing instead. The department has appealed but, for now, the counties and the state cannot deny emergency housing to homeless children with their parents.

‘Resources Are There’

Meanwhile, California will pay private agencies $4 million this year to run emergency shelters, said Maggie DeBow, assistant secretary for policy and fiscal affairs for the California Health and Welfare Agency. “The resources (to help homeless families) are there. It’s just really trying to get people hooked up to them,” she said.

But many city and shelter administrators disagree.

Los Angeles has 250 beds for homeless parents and children, but could use 3,000, said Gene Boutilier, emergency services manager for United Way Inc. And, every night, a third of the 20 families who telephone the Info-Line hot line seeking shelter must be turned away, said the service’s director, Linda Lewis.

In Orange County, there are about 230 beds for homeless families, when at least 1,000 are needed, said Marianne Guido, housing specialist for the county Human Relations Commission.

‘Band-Aid Effort’

And shelters are only a temporary solution, those officials said. “Our efforts right now are a Band-Aid kind of effort,” said Emery Bontrager, assistant to the director of Los Angeles County’s Department of Children’s Services.

Homeless families need a host of services--tutoring, counseling and medical care for the children, child care and courses in parenting and money management for parents, Bontrager and other experts said.

But the first priority for homeless children is stability, they said--and that means a permanent home.

At a Salvation Army shelter in downtown Los Angeles, three teen - agers were discussing the frustrations of being homeless.

“Sometimes I tell my friends about the shelter, and they ask, ‘Why do I keep moving all the time?’ I say I have to move. My mother is moving, but they say, ‘Why don’t you stay in one place?’ ” 13-year-old Rodney complained.

Raquel, 14, said she was embarrassed to tell classmates about the shelter. “If you say you are from the Salvation Army, they make fun of you ,” she said.

“I just want to get out of here,” interrupted 16-year-old Maria. “I don’t want to be in a shelter.”

Counselor Terry Porgrejak asked if there was anything they could do to help their parents find a home. They were silent a moment. Then Rodney spoke. “I can’t do nothing,” he said.

“No, you can’t,” Porgrejak said. “That’s true. You guys are the kids.”

The task of finding homeless families a permanent place to live has been difficult for several years. Since 1981, the Reagan Administration has sharply cut the money available to cities for federally subsidized, low-income housing, and cities have had a choice--pay for low-income projects themselves, or build little such housing at all.

In Los Angeles, housing officials projected that the city needed about 230,000 new units of low-income housing from 1985 to 1988. So far, only 30,000 units have been built. The result? “Low income families in the city do have a lot of trouble finding units,” said Steve Renahan, an analyst for the Los Angeles City Housing Authority. “That’s one of the reasons for homelessness.”

Some government officials believe that the federal government should get back into the business of subsidizing most low-income housing. “We’ve got to start building housing,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), chairman of the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families. “The choice is whether we want to look like New Delhi--or the progressive high-income country that we are.”

In the Los Angeles shelter, Nikia hunched forward on the bench, staring into space. Nearby, a woman with matted hair danced down the aisle and several older men, the ones he had called “Skid Row bums , “ began to snore.

Nikia glanced at them, then looked away. He didn’t want to stay here, the boy said softly. He pulled the hooded sweat shirt more tightly about his face, telegraphing his misery with each move.

“I feel like a dead cat . “

Times researcher Patricia L. Brown contributed to this story.