Commentary : Homeless Test County’s Morality

Morality is a large part of our public life: Witness the turbulence swirling about Jimmy Swaggart or the sanctions unrest in South Africa or the Iran-Contra indictments.

Yet for all our concern with morality we are confronted daily with an immense evil that few seem to care about and fewer still seek to halt. That evil is homelessness in Orange County, and its companions: poverty, illness and hunger.

For most, accustomed to our county’s image of prosperity, it is virtually impossible to believe that thousands of Orange County residents are living in conditions reminiscent of the Appalachia of three decades ago. For the few who become aware of this issue there is always the comfortable lie that the poor deserve their rags, malnutrition and loss of dignity.

The truth is a horrifying indictment of Orange County’s values and priorities--both public and private:

* As reported by the California Department of Economic Opportunity, 55% of the heads of all of our poverty-level households work--and still they are poor.

* When the County of Orange decided to find out how large an hourly wage was needed to equal the value of welfare benefits, it discovered that it did not even pay two-thirds of its own clerical staff an income equal to welfare.

* A large local homeless shelter reported in 1987 that 23% of its clients’ income came from employment and 33% came from some form of public assistance.

* As has been widely reported, per capita giving to charities in California’s large counties averages 5% of income. In Orange County the average is 1%.

* And during the first five years of this decade, a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity, the percentage of Orange County residents classified by the federal government as poor nearly doubled.

The relative few who are trying to work with the homeless are confronted with massive barriers of ignorance, fear and selfishness.

Ask the people who tried to rehabilitate a Santa Ana hotel for low-income senior citizen housing about the neighboring church that first used its political clout to stop the project, and then bought the property and leveled the building. Or ask the church in Anaheim that wanted to use its surplus school rooms for a closely supervised, nighttime-only shelter for homeless families, which had the idea scuttled by wealthy neighbors’ threats to the City Council.

You might also ask the City Council of Irvine, which courageously stood up to vocal citizens who were more concerned about shelter for stray dogs than poor people, and which successfully sought funding for a shelter, about a local congressman’s backdoor political maneuvers that nearly scuttled the project.

Our moral ambivalence about the homeless is easily illustrated: How can local officials hail the state’s decision last winter to open national guard armories as temporary shelters as a breakthrough while remaining silent about the state’s failure to distribute federal emergency funds for the homeless, which have been in state coffers since October, thus denying this assistance to the poorest of the poor during the worst winter months? How can millions join their hands across America in an afternoon’s surge of social consciousness and never ask why it took so long to distribute the relatively few dollars left, after expenses, to programs actually serving the homeless?

Finally, how can anyone take seriously the efforts of a local task force dealing with homeless issues which has spent nearly a year planning how to plan a plan of action which is still in the planning stage?

All of this is an unnecessary evil. It takes only $4 per day to shelter, feed and assist the homeless in such areas as job hunting in a county where the bumper of a Rolls-Royce costs $1,536. Every government entity and many private corporations have surplus buildings and property which could, with minimum expense, house the homeless while helping them to help themselves back to self-sufficiency. The issue is seldom lack of resources--it is usually lack of concern, leadership or, in a very real sense, a lack of morality when it comes to the poor.

In spite of it all, there are a few pockets of genuine concern linked to action. There are the overcrowded and underfinanced shelters and programs like the Homeless Action Project, which seeks to serve the poorest of the poor, largely through the efforts of the homeless themselves. By communicating their plight to those with resources, by linking those in need to such basics as food, shelter, medical care and job training, and by seeking to end their invisibility by educating the general public, HAP is trying to focus the wealth, talent and influence of Orange County on an evil that can be ended.

However, HAP is small, the problem is great, and tonight it will again be cold and dangerous for those trying to survive another evening of homelessness. There will be no end to this evil until Orange County’s moral outrage about homelessness is at least equal to how it feels about philandering TV preachers, freedom in Africa or profiteering patriots.