Near Hospital : Plan Pushes Housing for Mentally Ill

Ventura County officials are backing legislation that would allow the lease of surplus state property near Camarillo State Hospital for construction of housing for the area’s mentally ill.

But a patients’ rights advocate said that such housing could keep recovering patients away from the schools, jobs and recreation they need to begin living normal lives.

Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) introduced a bill earlier this year that would allow the long-term lease of about 15 acres of state land to a private developer for $1 a year for the construction of condominiums or single-family homes for the mentally ill.

The bill, which received unanimous support in the Assembly and is scheduled for hearings before a Senate committee later this month, has won support from the county Department of Mental Health, as well as from several county mental health organizations.

McClintock said he hopes the bill will pass this summer and construction of housing will begin as early as next year.

“The most serious problem facing the mentally ill is finding shelter,” said Leo O’Hearn, a director of the California Alliance for the Mentally Ill and president of Camarillo Hospital’s Families and Advocates of the Mentally Ill.

“We need to accommodate hard-to-place patients, those who are ready to leave the hospital but are not ready to live in the community,” O’Hearn said.

County mental health officials say that lease of the land for the proposed $1 a year would provide incentive for a private developer to build housing needed by some of the area’s mentally ill patients.

The private operator of the facility would provide treatment and meals for tenants, county officials said. Patients would pay monthly rent from their Social Security benefits, county officials said. It is too early to say how much rent patients would pay, they said.

“We usually have about 70 patients that we must send to facilities outside of the county,” said Bill Wakelee, chief of adult services for the county mental health department.

If the legislation is successful, the County Board of Supervisors would solicit bids from developers to build and operate as many as 150 homes, Wakelee said. Both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties would also participate in the pilot program, he said.

But former mental patient Robert Barr, president of Ventura County Support and Advocacy, said the plan is a step backward for treatment of the mentally ill.

“The state decided some years ago to let people out of hospitals and back into the community,” Barr said. “These people are not going to learn a means of handling themselves in the community if their community is made up of only mentally ill people.”

Barr said that although there is a desperate need for more housing for the mentally ill, he questions whether patients will want to live in a housing tract that is more than 5 miles from the nearest city, Camarillo.

Nancy Nazario, the county’s patients’ rights advocate, agreed that the proposed housing might not be right for patients attempting to move back into society.

“The purpose of board-and-care homes is to let people try to live in a normal environment, with access to movies, drug stores, the market and parks,” Nazario said.

However, she said: “It might not be the most ideal place, but we need all the resources we can get.”

McClintock said his proposal is not designed to isolate the mentally ill or to replace residential-care facilities now in several county neighborhoods. About half of the county’s residential-care facilities have closed in the last year, in part because of complaints from neighbors and because of high costs, he said.

“Because there is no intermediate ground between institutionalization and the freedom of private neighborhoods, we are getting patients in neighborhoods whose behaviors are inappropriate and are jeopardizing those programs,” McClintock said. “This will fill that gap and open up some more beds.”