Irvine Does Have Homeless and the City Is Trying to Help
Carly Vinn is a woman who wants it all and usually gets it.
When she was a model, her face made the cover of a national magazine. When she married, it was into a prominent family from the Eastern Establishment. But when the couple and their children moved to Orange County, her alcoholic husband drank away their life style, squandered $50,000 in four years on moneymaking schemes and eventually left her and their three children last summer in an Irvine town home.
Suddenly, Vinn (not her real name) realized that she would owe $1,500 in rent the next week and was $12,000 in debt. At 38, she was about to be homeless in the county’s preeminent planned city whose motto is “Just another day in Paradise.”
The upwardly mobile young city has recently found out that the homeless are not always ragged derelicts who sleep in parks and wait in soup lines. In fact, they can be people like Vinn and people like themselves--executives, office workers, nurses. As a result, the city is taking unusual measures to help its homeless keep their dignity while digging themselves out.
Last year, the city allocated $182,000 in community block grant funds to Irvine Temporary Housing, a private agency that has been housing five homeless families at a time in furnished city apartments for the last three years. The locations are kept secret to protect the families’ privacy and guard against losing other tenants who might not like the idea of the program, said ITH executive director Jim Palmer.
As many as 30 Irvine families may be homeless--somewhere--every night, Palmer says. A recent survey of churches and shelters, undertaken by the unofficial, ad-hoc Irvine Task Force on the Homeless, showed that nearly 400 men, women and children from Irvine have turned up at shelters in the county so far this year. “We were amazed,” said Sylvia Easton of Irvine, the task force’s founder. “We export our poverty.”
Earlier this month, Irvine City Council members expanded their program by authorizing ITH, a nonprofit organization, to find more temporary beds for the homeless in the city’s posh but unfilled hotels and to investigate turning an unused animal control facility into a group shelter.
“Some people commented, ‘Isn’t there something bizarre about a homeless person staying in a room at the Marriott or the Hilton or the Embassy Suites?’ ” Mayor Larry Agran asked. “It’s no more bizarre than to have all of these vacant rooms and people out on the streets at night. The kinds of people out on the streets here are those associated with family crisis, a wrenching breakup, a kind of economic catastrophe that makes it impossible for them to pay the rent or cover the mortgage payments anymore. It’s different from those sliding down the economic ladder. We have very few public welfare recipients in the city.”
In fact, Irvine’s homeless do not tend to wander the city’s cul-de-sacs, greenbelts, sleep in the high-tech industrial parks or live in motels. There are no motels in Irvine.
Some are UCI students between loans, runaway children or single battered women. But most are overextended middle-class workers hit by an unexpected catastrophe: a disabling accident, medical bills, losing a job or divorce, social workers say. Ashamed and in need of help, many move out to lower-rent cities, they said.
The number of Irvine’s homeless may be less than other cities, even that of Newport Beach. But Irvine council members believed that the city should under take its “fair share responsibility” for the homeless on a pro-rated basis, Agran said. With 5% of the county’s population, Irvine should provide about 200 temporary beds, Agran figures.
In its office located down a hushed corridor in the mirrored Fluor Co. complex, Irvine Temporary Housing keeps a wall of canned goods next to a computer room. The ITH data bank holds the names of 1,300 other Orange County agencies that will help the homeless if ITH can’t.
The agency can help only one-third of those who call for help. They need not live in Irvine, but they must have minor children, be U.S. citizens and be able to hold down a job. They are asked to contribute $260 towards monthly rent in the private apartment. They may stay up to 90 days.
Half Came From Irvine
In the last three years ITH has provided shelter for 48 families--including Vinn. Half came from Irvine, the rest from south county communities with similar life styles, Palmer said.
The clients included:
- A former professional basketball player, used to high living, but unable to find any other type of work. He called the agency when he, his wife and four children were evicted from their apartment. They eventually separated.
- A middle-age executive with a wife and two teen-age children. The man lost his job at Hughes Aircraft and had not been able to find another. After two months, they left for an unknown destination.
- A former policeman, disabled by an accidental shooting when he was between jobs and without insurance. His in-laws took in the man, his wife and two small children, then after an argument asked them to leave. He now lives in Riverside, but dreams of returning to Orange County.
Four of the five families sheltered in the city apartments now are headed by single mothers, and two have been headed by single fathers, says Evelyn Huebner, a marriage, child and family counselor who directs the program to help them become self-sufficient again.
In a new community there often is little family support available, social workers say. Those who call ITH have used up their friends and receive little help from churches. “Part of it is the time in which we live,” Huebner said. “Even during the Depression, there was not the alienation and separation we see now especially in Orange County.”
Vinn considers herself a proud individual--too proud to lean on acquaintances and family. Besides, her husband’s Jekyll and Hyde personality, plus his borrowing and spending habits, had alienated most everyone they knew, she says.
A born-again Christian, she contacted her church, a large Costa Mesa congregation. “They couldn’t verify that I was with the church, so that was no help.” Then, her landlord’s realtor suggested Irvine Temporary Housing.
They placed her and her children in a three-bedroom, $1,000-a-month apartment. She was able to pay $250 rent with a job she found immediately with a full-time temporary agency. Huebner brought her canned goods, bakery items and powdered milk. At Christmas, a man dressed as Santa Claus arrived. It was the former policeman Irvine Temporary Housing had helped relocate.
She had chosen Irvine for its greenery, its family-oriented lakes, bikeways and parks, its feeling of security. She didn’t want to move. “I’m affected by my surroundings,” she said. “It’s important for me to look out and feel comfortable--to see something pretty. I’m not used to a cardboard box and the railroad tracks.”
Huebner says that, in some ways, the middle-class homeless are no different from those she also counsels at the Rescue Mission in Santa Ana. In addition to needing acceptance and friendship, they must learn lessons of “delayed gratification” that they somehow missed during childhood, she says.
“People today, 20 to 35, grew up in a time of instant gratification. You eat at Carl’s Jr. You don’t have to wait for the oatmeal to cook. Often parents have indulged children to their own detriment.”
Some have had to declare bankruptcy, she says. Some need to learn budgeting at the most basic level in order to save to pay outstanding bills or rental deposits.
Many resist her message of discipline and hard work, her suggestions that they take a sack lunch to work. “Even if you spent $2.50 (a day for five days) in the cafeteria, in a week you have $12.50 to spend at the grocery store. If you shop wisely, you can get brown rice, tomatoes, potatoes, a bit of meat. You can begin to nourish your family. Coca Cola is a luxury if your kids need milk.”
Better-Paying Job
Within three months, Vinn found a better-paying job as a manufacturer’s representative and a partly subsidized child-care program. The most difficult part was finding housing and answering questions about the last three months, she said. Luckily, she ran into a realtor who knew her former realtor. He persuaded an Irvine landlord to spread out the cleaning costs over her first three months’ rent.
Now Vinn earns $1,400 a month, plus commissions. It’s enough to afford an $880 two-bedroom town house with a view of South Coast Plaza.
She is paying off her husband’s debts on their joint accounts in $30 and $10 installments. She cuts her own hair, does her own nails, and instead of Bullock’s, she shops at the sale rack at Penney’s. She doesn’t eat out, and her social life consists of taking her children to church.
“Things are going quite well now with the love and support of Jesus Christ,” she said. “The Lord always knew I loved a room with a view.”
Some critics say Irvine is wasting its money on the middle class, the “creme de la creme” of the homeless, according to ITH’s Palmer. “But the bottom line is, if you don’t assist them, they will be out of a class. They will have no money at all,” he said. “When you become homeless, every stage is harder to get out of. It take so much longer to deal with a family who’s been living in a park.”
Approximately 30% of the county’s hard-core homeless started out in the middle class, says Jean Forbath, director of Share Our Selves, a Costa Mesa volunteer assistance agency for the homeless which served 4,700 men, women and children during February.
Must Increase Subsidies
According to Palmer, Irvine’s homeless are victims of society--with a new twist. “Here, society encourages you to drive a car as nice as your neighbors’. They redecorate. You redecorate. We live in a society that demands images.” At the same time, few have learned any sort of financial planning.
Among the 85% of ITH clients who eventually find housing, three-quarters find it outside Irvine. Those who stay may find some federally subsidized or city-bonded apartments, or share housing, Huebner says.
Once the city solves emergency and transitional housing problems, Mayor Agran believes that Irvine must increase its housing subsidies to cover residents on welfare. “That is a much more permanent solution.”
Some fear that Irvine’s programs will provide a magnet for the transient derelicts. Agran disagrees. “All those (homeless) essentially referred out of the city can and should be referred in the city. If other cities did the same thing, we would be well on our way” to solving the regional problem, he said.
