‘We Don’t Have Problem,’ Official Says : Inglewood Shuns Funds to Help Homeless

Four Los Angeles basin cities are among only five local governments in the nation that were eligible for emergency federal housing grants for the homeless but did not apply.

While 322 other cities and urban counties will begin receiving a total of $50 million in grants this week, Inglewood, El Monte, Glendale and Santa Ana have chosen not to participate.

Variety of Reasons

City officials said they did not apply because homelessness is not a big problem in their cities, because the one-month application period was too brief or because city administrative costs to set up a shelter made it unwise to accept the small grants.

Palaupalau, a Pacific island territory near Guam, is the only other qualified jurisdiction that did not submit an application for the special homeless funding approved by Congress in a highly publicized vote three months ago, said John J. Flynn, spokesman for the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Inglewood, Glendale and El Monte each would have received between $28,000 and $32,000, while Santa Ana’s grant would have been $66,000, Flynn said.

All applicants were guaranteed funding if they applied, he said, adding that most applications were three to four pages long.

The City of Los Angeles will receive $947,000 from the program, about a third of the $2.6 million to be distributed to 17 cities and counties in Southern California.

To qualify, cities must have populations of at least 50,000 or be the central city of a metropolitan area and counties must have at least 200,000 residents.

Although Inglewood, Glendale and El Monte officials say they did not apply by the Sept. 28 deadline because they thought the money could be better used elsewhere, their decision has sparked criticism from leaders of national organizations for the homeless and from agencies for the homeless locally.

“It’s incredible, given the high rate of homelessness in the Los Angeles area, that these four cities will not participate,” said Maria Foscarinis, general counsel for Washington-based National Coalition for the Homeless.

Various studies have estimated Los Angeles County’s homeless population at between 30,000 and 50,000. And Foscarinis said more homeless live in Los Angeles County and New York City than anywhere else in the nation.

‘Thumbed Their Noses’

“What’s shocking to me is that towns in Mississippi, places without community development departments and professional grant bureaucrats, have managed to put together the four pages of paper that are necessary to apply. . . . But these four cities have thumbed their noses at money for people who are in desperate need,” said Gary Blasi, director of the homeless unit for the private Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, whose jurisdiction includes Inglewood and Glendale.

As an indication of need, Blasi pointed to the number of applications for emergency shelter at county social service offices that serve Inglewood, Glendale and El Monte.

According to the county, emergency shelter was provided for 683 people who applied at the Glendale office in the year ending Aug. 31, another 1,728 homeless applied in El Monte and 8,979 applied at the Inglewood-area office. The three cities make up only about one-fifth of the area served by the three regional offices.

Spokesmen for homeless groups in each of the four cities also insisted that needs of the homeless there are substantial and often left unmet.

But officials in Glendale, Inglewood and El Monte said they did not see the need, and, in Glendale’s and Santa Ana’s cases, were also discouraged by the 30-day filing period.

In Inglewood and El Monte, both predominantly minority communities whose average resident earns several thousand dollars less than the county norm, city administrators said they do not think homelessness is a local problem.

“We basically don’t have a homeless problem,” said Inglewood Deputy City Manager Lewis Pond, who directs housing and community development efforts.

Pond said he decided not to apply for the city’s $28,000 entitlement without informing City Manager Paul Eckles, who agreed in an interview that Inglewood has no major homelessness problem.

‘Beach Life More Attractive’

“All the homeless people seem to stop at the city boundaries,” Pond said. “I don’t know why. Maybe the beach life is more attractive to them.”

Nonetheless, Inglewood would have applied for the emergency grant had there been a shelter within the city to which it could forward the money, Pond said. Without a shelter, the city did not want to absorb administrative costs that the grant would not reimburse, he said.

Inglewood supports no homeless program with city or federal money, Pond said. However, officials of the Inglewood Counseling Center and the Salvation Army said they see a need for more help for the displaced.

Janice Cole, director of the counseling center, said she is trying to raise money to open a small shelter for the many homeless teen-agers who call her office for help each day.

Most Go to Los Angeles

“Inglewood has a lot of proud homeowners, and perhaps our focus has been on keeping the community growing and fighting crime and we’ve tended to overlook the homeless problem,” Cole said.

Lt. Scott Ramsey of the Salvation Army said most homeless people know about facilities in downtown Los Angeles and go there for help rather than to Inglewood.

Still, his Inglewood office handles requests from 15 to 30 families a month for emergency shelter and monthly food requests from perhaps 100 families, he said. Shelter is arranged in other cities, he said.

“There is a need in this South Bay area for at least emergency family housing. We always have a shortage for a family with children and they have nowhere to go,” said Ramsey, whose office also serves Hawthorne, Gardena and Lawndale.

El Monte’s chief administrator, Gregory Korduner, said that 96,000-resident San Gabriel Valley community has experienced little demand for homeless housing, “so without the need, we didn’t have reason to apply.”

El Monte has no homeless shelter. It forwards $3,000 annually to a community group that assists the homeless, Korduner said.

Void to Be Filled

The Boys Club of the San Gabriel Valley in El Monte sees that as a void that needs to be filled, said Executive Director Clayton Hollopeter.

The Boys Club plans to spend $300,000 over three years to set up three shelters for homeless or displaced teen-agers, and Hollopeter said the city could have contributed its $32,000 housing grant to the effort.

“It’s a shame. It’s terrible. I wish they had applied,” Hollopeter said. “There is a substantial enough problem here that they should have done it.”

Glendale City Manager James Rez, unaware of the grant program until last week, said he has heard the number of homeless in his city estimated as low as 10 to 20.

“It’s a pretty fluid sort of thing. We don’t have a chronic problem that I’ve observed,” he said.

Better Use for Funds

Glendale’s housing director, Madelyn Blake, said her office decided not to apply for homeless housing assistance until an on-going study of the problem is completed, if then.

“We thought the money would be better used (in other cities),” she said.

Glendale provides $20,000 annually to two private agencies that help the homeless and passes another $15,000 in federal money along, Blake said.

One of the recipient agencies is the Salvation Army, which through its Glendale office has arranged 450 nights of lodging this year and 1,800 free meals, about double last year’s figures, a spokesman said.

Attorney Kenneth Carlson, who founded an organization to assist Glendale’s homeless, said he would not have expected the city, whose median household income is about the county norm of $26,000 a year, to apply for the grants.

No Problems

“This is Glendale. We don’t have problems here,” Carlson said sarcastically. “This is the same city that was considering enacting an ordinance to arrest the homeless for vagrancy about a year ago. If an emergency shelter might present an inducement for these undesirables to live in our community, then we don’t want the money.”

Santa Ana officials acknowledged a homeless problem and said they intend to apply for a share of additional Housing and Urban Development grants that will be awarded soon as part of the same homeless housing package that included the $50-million emergency program.

Santa Ana decided not to apply for its guaranteed $66,000 grant because, in the month it had to consider a project, it could find no private agency interested in jointly sponsoring a shelter, Housing Director Patricia C. Whitaker said.

“I don’t think this reflects an insensitive nature of the city,” Whitaker said. “We are looking for a public-private partnership to make sure the project works and is on-going.”

She noted that the federal grant carried no promise of follow-up funding.

Reinforcing Image

Jean Forbath, executive director of the long-established Share Ourselves homeless assistance program in Costa Mesa, said she was astounded that Santa Ana did not apply because it “probably has the largest concentration” of Orange County’s estimated 5,000 homeless people.

“Orange County has a reputation for not having needs, and when you turn money back like that it just reinforces that image,” Forbath said.

Whitaker said Santa Ana did contribute $100,000 in federal funds last year to the city’s new YWCA homeless shelter. It currently is supporting no homeless program, she said.

In addition to Los Angeles’ $947,000 award, other Southland governments receiving the emergency housing grants are: Los Angeles County, $504,000; Long Beach, $89,000; Compton, $36,000; Pasadena, $30,000; Pomona, $27,000; Orange County, $79,000; Anaheim, $39,000; Ventura County, $35,000; Oxnard, $32,000; Riverside County, $101,000; Riverside, $32,000; San Bernardino, $29,000; San Bernardino County, $117,000; San Diego County, $97,000; San Diego, $179,000; Kern County, 72,000.