Homeless Furor : Santa Ana Officials Defend City’s Record of Assistance, but Some Advocates of Poor Believe More Should Be Done

Pat Ford lives amid the government buildings in downtown Santa Ana, and life there of late has been as hard as the concrete porch he sleeps on.

Two weeks ago, Ford’s belongings were pulled from the bushes and carted off by city maintenance crews who, for the past month, have been throwing away unattended belongings in the city’s parks and the Civic Center.

Ford, 45, scraped together a sleeping bag, a quilt and some more clothes from friends and the Salvation Army. But last Wednesday, when he went off to get cleaned up to look for work, he got cleaned out again. The worldly possessions he had so carefully stashed in the bushes were gone when he returned for them.

“As soon as they saw there was nobody sitting here guarding the stuff, they took it,” Ford said. “No one has ever come down and said, ‘Leave. We don’t want you here.’ Out of the blue, they come over and take everything.”

Political Motivation Suggested

Since they were first ordered to remove unattended belongings from public property about a month ago, city maintenance crews have collected enough clothes, bedrolls and sacks to fill five 1-ton trucks, according to city officials.

Some critics of the new policy suggest that it is politically motivated, and advocates for the homeless have criticized the campaign as cruel punishment for people already down on their luck. But Santa Ana Mayor Dan Young has defended the policy as part of a much larger effort in what was a decaying city a few years ago but now is undergoing what Young proudly calls “one of the great renaissances in urban American history.”

“We’re involved in a five-year program to improve all of our residential neighborhoods in the city . . . and that includes cleaning up neighborhood parks . . . where these vagrants are camping out and have trashed them,” Young said.

The cleanup campaign has thrust the city’s efforts to deal with its homeless population into the limelight. And while some social service groups and homeless advocates say the city is doing its part, others are unhappy with what they see:

- A 1988-89 Community Development Block Grant budget that social service groups say gives short shrift to low-cost housing providers and services for the homeless.

- A recent meeting of city planning officials and social service groups to discuss restrictions that may soon be placed on groups providing meals to the homeless in parks and at shelters.

- Alleged city opposition to a proposal by the Community Development Council, the county’s anti-poverty agency, to staff a trailer with medical and social services personnel and move it from park to park to contact the homeless and provide them with referrals to other county programs.

“They have made a decision that they’re just going to force the homeless people out of the city of Santa Ana,” said Scott Mather, chairman of the Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter in Costa Mesa and an outspoken advocate for the homeless in all parts of the county. “That’s not the way you deal with the problem.”

Mather and representatives of other groups that run meal programs for the homeless in Santa Ana met with city Planning Director June Catalano last week to discuss restrictions that the city may impose on those programs. Catalano said her staff is still exploring the legal issues involved, but she expects to present an ordinance to the City Council in August that would restrict the groups’ operations to certain areas of the city and would require that they have conditional-use permits before setting up food lines.

The permit process, which includes a public hearing before the City Council, would enable the city to make sure there are enough bathrooms where the meals are served and that the food is properly prepared and contained, Catalano said.

Mather sees it as an effort to keep groups from helping Santa Ana’s homeless.

“They wanted to know why we came to Santa Ana,” he said. “It would not surprise me if this became a regulation that would be impossible to qualify for.”

Mayor Young disputes any suggestion that the city is turning its back on the homeless. But he also said the city has an obligation not to surrender its neighborhoods and business districts to large numbers of homeless.

An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 homeless people live in Orange County, and about half of those are believed to spend most of their time in Santa Ana.

“We do more for the homeless than any other city in Orange County,” Young said. “We put $100,000 into the construction of (the YWCA’s) homeless facility for women. . . . They’re feeding them in our parks. . . . We provide very substantial amounts of support to a variety of agencies that help.”

But at the same time, Santa Ana cannot and should not be asked to accommodate the majority of the county’s homeless, Young said.

“They’re attracted here for the primary reason that social service agencies set up mobile feeding vans at some of (our) parks,” he said. “They know they can get a meal, and we think that’s great--it’s a magnificent idea to give them a meal. But why not in all 27 cities?

“We’ll continue to do our bit to help our fellow man. . . . But we need to share the burden more equally. We have asked them to set up shop for people in other parts of the county, and they haven’t done it.”

In addition to the meal programs, four of the largest shelters in the county are located in Santa Ana: the Orange County Rescue Mission, the Salvation Army, the YMCA and the YWCA’s hotel for women. Some of those who work with the homeless in Santa Ana agree with Young’s contention that the city is doing its part.

John Lands, executive director of the Rescue Mission, said the city “is supportive” of efforts to help the homeless but is “caught in the middle.”

“The city feels they’re doing what they have to do because people who live in the area complain,” Lands said. Of the recent confiscations of unguarded belongings, Lands said, “There has to be a better answer. I wish I knew what it was.”

Mary Douglas, executive director of the Santa Ana YWCA, which operates a hotel for homeless women downtown, said the homeless problem “belongs to all of us. It’s very easy to say the city should do it, the county should do it, the government should do it. But everyone has limited resources. . . . The city has been most supportive of the work we’re doing here. I don’t think they are changing the level of commitment.”

In addition to the city’s $100,000 construction grant, the YWCA received $66,000 earlier this year in federal money through the city to operate its hotel. The city applied for the money after a newspaper article pointed out that Santa Ana was one of only a handful of eligible cities nationwide that had failed to apply.

“I don’t want to say anything more about that,” Douglas said.

Douglas does disagree, however, with the mayor’s contention that it is the meal programs that lure the homeless to Santa Ana.

“If you’re a metropolitan, urban area as Santa Ana is--the county seat--they’re going to be here,” Douglas said. “They can’t survive on a grassy knoll somewhere. They have to be able to access the dump truck behind Ralphs and Alpha Beta, the all-night coffee shops. That’s how they survive.”

The city’s comprehensive homeless assistance plan, which it must submit to the federal government to receive certain kinds of funding, says: “Since Santa Ana is the county seat, a substantial portion of these individuals will, from one time or another, utilize the assistance provided by area agencies.”

Some of those critical of what they perceive to be a hardening of the city’s stance toward the homeless point to the upcoming November council elections as the motivation. A vocal group of residents have complained bitterly the past year about syringes and human waste left behind by the homeless, and a few business owners threatened at a recent council meeting to move out of town if their area--near the Orange County Rescue Mission on West Walnut Street--was not cleaned up.

Police Chief Clyde L. Cronkhite has announced that vagrancy will be one of several “quality-of-life crimes”--the others include drug trafficking, gang activity and prostitution--that his officers will focus on this year.

“It’s politically nice, it’s palatable, it’s something people want to hear: ‘All right, we’re going to clean it up,’ ” said Helen Brown, a community activist and president of the Civic Center Barrio Housing Corp., which builds and refurbishes housing for people with little income.

“Next summer, I could probably do a homeless project. Nobody would (care),” Brown said. “They’re only watching them right now. . . . (They) need the votes.”

Young denied that public pressure or politics was behind the city’s recent efforts to clean up the parks. “Not in my mind,” he said. “We are not going to allow our public sidewalks and parks to be littered.”

Young’s chief foe on the council and probable opponent in the November mayoral race, John Acosta, is the only council member to publicly oppose the city’s disposal of unguarded belongings in parks.

“I think it’s deplorable that we take these people’s personal property and throw it away at the dump,” Acosta said. “Granted, I support the businessman 100%. They have every right in the world to complain that the homeless people are impacting their business . . . milling around, sleeping around, defecating and urinating on your property. However, I don’t think that the approach that the mayor has ordered and authorized . . . is the right answer either.”

Acosta said that if someone would donate the property, he would put together a coalition to build a homeless shelter with donated labor and materials that could be run by the city, county or a consortium of cities or nonprofit groups.

Santa Ana’s new policy on unattended belongings in parks is not the only thing that upsets advocates of the homeless. Some also are complaining about the city’s allocation of Community Development Block Grant funds, which are disbursed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development each year. The funds are intended to benefit low- and moderate-income groups, to eliminate or prevent slums and blight, or to address community needs “that present a serious and immediate threat to the health or welfare of the community,” according to HUD literature.

A coalition of social service groups objected to the city’s use of the funds this year to build a new fire station in a largely industrial area while not funding low-cost housing programs or efforts to aid the homeless.

The group, headed by Alice McCullough, board chairman of Relampago del Cielo, a Latino cultural group, was successful in persuading the city to allocate funds for some groups that would otherwise have gone without, but not for programs benefiting the homeless.

“That was our major disappointment,” said McCullough, who served as the city’s grants coordinator for 10 years before opening her own consulting business. The coalition had asked that $75,000 be budgeted for homeless programs and $240,000 for Brown’s Civic Center Barrio group, but the city denied the request.

The city’s own Parks and Recreation Department had also asked for $23,000 in block grant funds for a program that would have paid hotel bills for homeless people in some circumstances. But that use was found to be outside the federal guidelines for the grant program, said city grants coordinator Raymond J. Crisp.

Civic Center Barrio was denied funding because the group already has received more than $600,000 in block grant funds since 1980, as well as other city money, Crisp said. “They’re in relatively good financial shape,” Crisp said.

Brown agreed that the organization is healthy, but she said the absence of new block grant funds will keep her from developing low-cost housing projects. “Homelessness is a situation where there is a lack of affordable housing,” Brown said. “We do affordable housing.”

Donald Sizemore, a member of the city’s Planning Commission and former director of planning for the Community Development Council, said Santa Ana officials opposed a CDC proposal that would have helped get homeless people out of city parks.

The proposal was to equip a trailer with medical facilities and transport it to parks around the county, focusing on those in Santa Ana, and refer the homeless to mental health, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs. According to Sizemore, Santa Ana officials wanted no part of it.

“Here was this resource, and the feedback I got was, ‘It’ll be a magnet to attract these people to the parks,’ ” said Sizemore, who quit the anti-poverty agency in May. “There was always a need to talk to somebody else. There was always a need to have another meeting.”

City officials, however, deny that they stalled the project and say that any delays were due to internal problems at the agency, which has been plagued by dissension and resignations in recent months.

“I don’t recall any discussion of our trying to inhibit Sizemore’s activity at all,” said Pat Whitaker, housing manager for the city. “It’s not an activity that we would frown on.”

Lenny Wiggs, community services supervisor for the Parks and Recreation Department, said he heard about the program only in its early stages. “As far as I knew, it was a figment of their (the CDC’s) imagination,” he said. “I didn’t think it ever got off the ground.”

The agency’s president and chief operating officer, Clarence (Buddy) Ray, said the project died because there was not enough time or money to launch it.

For whatever reason, the trailer now sits idle in the CDC’s parking lot, where it is being used for storage.