City, State Efforts Lag : L.A. Rental Crisis Swells Ranks of the Homeless

Jackie Lee and her five children sat on a bus bench on Jefferson Boulevard 19 months ago, homeless and heading wherever the next bus would take them. A man pulled up and told the distraught mother about a place that would help. Peering into his eyes, the grateful woman decided he was sincere and accepted a ride.

Lee, 29, today is a “house mother” who looks after other homeless families at the Bible Tabernacle in Venice, the shelter that helped her through the frightening first months of homelessness.

A former customer service representative, Lee once had a decent home in Southwest Los Angeles. But when she and the childrens’ father broke up, she found she could not afford rent.

“My dream is to let my babies have a home again,” Lee said. “My prayer every night is, ‘Lord, just give me back what I had. And if me and their father don’t get back together, then at least make me strong.’ ”

Her story is told every day in a city where an estimated 35,000 are homeless and the streets are no longer the lonely outpost of alcoholics and schizophrenics. One in five homeless people is believed to be a child.

The burgeoning homeless population--the highest per capita in the nation--is the most visible and troubling evidence of the city’s affordable housing crisis. In the absence of massive new federal help, many experts argue that it is now up to the city and state to come up with some fundamental answers.

While the city, Community Redevelopment Agency and nonprofit and private developers have added thousands of shelter beds and renovated hotel-style single rooms along Skid Row and elsewhere in the last few years, few officials believe that such shelter can resolve a crisis whose roots can be traced in large part to the city’s dramatic economic boom.

With Los Angeles land values bounding upward, the livable $300 apartment common in many cities has become a historical oddity. At the same time, a huge influx of low-income families, including untold numbers of Latin American immigrants, arrives here daily in search of the California dream.

“I used to spend all my time fighting to get people out of slums,” said Gary Blasi of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. “Now I spend all my time fighting to get people into them.”

Worked With Poor

Blasi, who has worked with the poor for many years, believes that if the housing situation “keeps deteriorating this fast, neither you or I are going to want to live here 10 years from now.”

Despite the mounting pressures, critics point out that Los Angeles and the state have badly lagged in creating low-cost housing.

“What we need is real housing, and, frankly, we have been blaming the federal government for this for eight years, and we’ve got to act like adults now and come up with our own plans for meeting these needs,” said Sydney Irmas, chairman of the mayor’s Blue Ribbon Committee on Housing.

But what has gone wrong? Why has homelessness--a story so jarring and new in 1982 that national news magazines coined the term “nouveau poor” to describe its victims--become a permanent part of the urban landscape?

Housing experts and economists say the Reagan Administration has contributed to a severe nationwide shortage of low-cost housing, slashing federal help by 78% since 1981. Particularly on the West Coast, intense competition for cheap housing has been fanned by skyrocketing rents and the inability of renters to buy costly homes, which further pinches the rental supply.

Welfare Payments

Nationwide, real wages keep falling for working-class families, inflation has eroded welfare payments by nearly 15% since 1970 and families headed by single mothers with one income have doubled since 1967. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, the nation’s poor are simply getting poorer.

Completing the picture are schizophrenics and other mentally ill people who were turned out of mental wards in the 1970s during a policy shift toward neighborhood care centers. Not enough centers were constructed, so the mentally ill began living outdoors.

Without bolder efforts, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Gloria Molina said, the high rents, a persistent welfare underclass and a growing number of low-paying jobs will “keep pushing those on the bottom of the income scale right onto the street.”

According to experts, 10% to 25% of the homeless are actually employed and could pay rent, but they cannot save the $1,000 to $1,500 move-in costs for the cheapest Los Angeles apartments.

“People arrive at LAX thinking this will be their turning point and are horrified to find it costs $600 a month just for rent,” said Michelle Whiting of the Travelers Aid Society.

Blasi said high rents, which have jumped more than 100% since 1980, also lead to many evictions in Los Angeles, and about one-third of evicted families end up homeless--many just for a night, but others for months. Luckier ones double up with others, a phenomenon that has contributed to overcrowding in an estimated 21% of the city’s 479,000 rent-controlled units.

Lisa Korben, of Legal Aid’s Eviction Defense Center, said: “Reagan will say there’s a safety net, but there isn’t. If they lose a job and the rent isn’t paid, they get a three-day notice to pay.

“They’ll be in court in three weeks. We try like hell to win for them, but if we lose, God knows what becomes of them.”

Lorri Arbuckle, 25, a single welfare mother seeking help recently at the crowded legal center west of downtown, held her squirming 3-year-old and wondered what would become of the two of them.

Arbuckle was trained as a medical assistant and hopes to land a job soon. But when her welfare check was 20 days late recently, her $485 rent became overdue. The landlady refused to accept a late payment, and she now faces eviction.

“I spent two years living with a friend and saving up $1,500 so I could go out and live on my own, and now this happens,” she said. “I’ve never been evicted in my life, and I don’t know what I’ll do if it really goes through.”

Jennifer Wolch of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at USC and co-author of the book, “Landscapes of Despair,” said the pool of “proto-homeless”--those living in a house or apartment, but teetering on the brink of homelessness--has grown dramatically.

She and other homeless experts, including Maxene Johnston, director of the Weingart Center on Skid Row, said many from that group slip into homelessness “following one unfortunate event, such as a divorce or loss of a job.”

A study by the city’s Rent Stabilization Board showed that Los Angeles families making $10,000 or less annually--about $5 an hour and below--pay 58% to 68% of their incomes for rent. Those living in apartments built after 1978, which are not protected by the city’s moderate rent-control laws, pay the most.

Bob Erlenbusch of the Health Access Coalition of Southern California, said that for those paid minimum wage or relying upon Social Security or welfare, “just one big health problem, and they are without a home.”

“That’s how close to the edge they are forced to live,” he said.

“One of the real tragedies is that general relief--the county welfare for single people--a few years ago was the same amount as rent in a flophouse,” Erlenbusch said, “so somebody down on his luck could at least get by.”

Now he said, general relief pays about two week’s rent, “so people spend two weeks indoors and two weeks out.”

That is how Leona Tarvin, 22, lived for two years. Tarvin had a troubled childhood in Watts and was a ward of MacLaren Children’s Center until, at age 18, she was released.

“I never got along with my people, and they told me no way can you come back here, so I lived on Skid Row, in shelters and alleys,” she said.

Tarvin, who has stayed at the Bible Tabernacle for several months, said: “I try not to think about the past. For a lady, it was very much to bear.”

It is these newcomers to homelessness that are the greatest worry to the experts, because while they are easiest to help, they are nevertheless slipping through the cracks and joining the ranks of long-term street people.

Each extra week they stay on the streets increases their risk of spiraling downward, making it vastly more difficult--and far more costly--for social service agencies to help them return to the mainstream.

“If he really gets used to being dirty and gets socialized that way, I don’t care who he is, we may never get him back,” said Johnston of the Weingart Center.

Some studies have found that homeless individuals spend about 32 hours a week standing in lines for showers, food, beds, phones, appointments with social workers and job interviews.

Johnston, whose program is considered one of the best in the nation, said being homeless “is a full-time job.” She said people must be lent a hand, “like a personal shopper who sees to your needs at Nordstrom.”

“If they need a counselor, give them a counselor. If they only need a rental deposit, help them save it. If they want drug rehab, find it,” she said.

It was the center’s personal approach that saved Bennie Smith from rough times. Smith, 53, a disabled Korean War veteran on Social Security, was asked to leave his Southeast Los Angeles apartment when his rent became overdue. Lacking cash because his monthly check was late, Smith used a bus pass to go straight to Skid Row.

Janet Larkly, manager of social aid at Weingart, helped him get medication for his borderline diabetes and heart trouble and made Smith open his first savings account in 20 years.

“Miss Janet said, ‘How can I help you?’ ” Smith recalled.

Two months later, he had saved enough money for rent, and Larkly helped him find an apartment nearby that had been built by the CRA especially for the disabled and priced at just $227.

“I am tickled to death,” Smith said.

Johnston hopes to create a mini-village around the Weingart Center on Skid Row, a community she envisions as filled with homeless services, light industrial jobs, low-cost housing and drug rehabilitation programs. It would be an “urban campus” where the homeless could get back on their feet.

Johnston is looking to the city for some of the start-up funds, which could become available if the courts lift a $750-million spending cap now limiting how much the redevelopment agency can spend downtown.

If Mayor Tom Bradley and the agency can persuade a judge to lift the limit, $4.25 billion in downtown property taxes would go to the agency over 20 years. Bradley wants half to be used for low-cost housing and homeless programs citywide, but a bitter controversy is already brewing over how the money should be spent.

The CRA has financed extensive renovations of old hotels on Skid Row, and nonprofit developers have also begun to make an impact in the area.

In addition, the 78-bed Los Angeles Mission, which uses Bible study and job training to reach the homeless, will open a new center next year with 296 beds, including a section for women only. Mike Edwards, associate director, said the privately funded, $11.25-million complex will offer a recreation yard, running track, medical and dental care and literacy program. Meanwhile, he said, “we’re turning away between 35 and 50 people every night.”

But Johnston said far more financial help is needed to bring housing, businesses and jobs to Skid Row.

Outlying Populations

Wolch and Johnston believe that hubs for outlying homeless populations must also be created in areas such as the San Fernando Valley and the Westside.

“This is something the ‘not in my back yard’ crowd is going to have to come to terms with,” she said.

Poverty agencies have found that most communities in the region--even in the suburbs--have a steady homeless population. On the Westside, they sleep on the beach and at shelters such as the Bible Tabernacle. In the Hollywood Hills, they bed down in Griffith Park and among the ruins of the Erroll Flynn estate, now a park.

Stan Keasling, executive director of the Rural California Housing Corp., an advocacy group in Sacramento, said Los Angeles will need a huge infusion of federal and state funds to stem the tide, plus innovative local programs now under-funded or non-existent.

Keasling, who vigorously backed the $300-million Housing and Homeless Bond Act approved by voters Nov. 8, said California residents “are seeing other people in the streets, and they are finally asking, ‘Why?’ ”

Statewide, the bonds eventually will create 8,000 low-rent apartments and 33,000 shelter beds and rehabilitate 22,000 hotel rooms.

But Keasling bemoaned California’s persistent failure to follow other states, whose leaders responded to Reagan’s housing cuts by making housing a significant part of the state budget.

“Massachusetts spends $18 per capita on housing, and California spends 46 cents,” he said. “The difference is the inspired political leadership from the Massachusetts Legislature and governor, something we have not seen here.”

Numerous Shelters

Boston officials said state programs have created significant permanent housing for the homeless and added numerous shelters. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, Boston has 5,000 homeless and 2,350 beds, enough for nearly half its street population. By contrast, Los Angeles’s homeless population, estimated by the coalition at 35,000 to 50,000, is served by 5,000 shelter beds.

At this point, however, it is unlikely that the strained federal and state budgets will provide significant new funds to fight homelessness.

Constructing housing for the poor is extremely expensive because it requires huge public financing to make up for low rents that cannot even begin to meet mortgage payments on the new buildings.

The cheapest low-cost apartments being built in Los Angeles by private or public concerns, for instance, are for people making half of the city’s median income, or a couple earning $15,300 a year. Rents range from $299 to $353 for one bedroom.

Far more common, however, are one-bedrooms priced at $444 to $567 for people making 80% of the median income. Such units require far less public backing.

“But what if you make 20% of median income?” asked Gilda Haas of Legal Aid. “I am talking now about thousands of full-time workers and welfare families. Nobody is building housing for them.”

Duke Ingalls, 41, is one homeless man who hopes to save enough money to have a place of his own by Christmas. He makes less than $8,000 a year helping assemble electronic components and is living at the Weingart Center until he saves the rent.

“I’m looking in Glendale near my job, but there’s nothing less than $425, and I only take home $158 a week,” he said. “I can afford to share an apartment, so that’s my plan. . . . Moving out of Skid Row is the main thing.”

Most observers believe that the private sector and nonprofit developers will have to be given local incentives to build more low-cost housing.

Nathan Shapell, a major Los Angeles builder involved in homeless issues, said business leaders “better wake up pretty quick if they want this city to continue to be a good place to live.”

Several months ago, he asked developers and corporate leaders to contribute money to finance homeless shelters and low-cost housing. He fell well short of his goal.

“At the first cocktail party, I wanted $1 million, and I raised it and was very, very pleased,” Shapell said. “But then, people were supposed to call others to raise more money, and instead of commitment, I found I was alone.

“Shame on us, in a rich state like this, that we are talking, constantly talking, but doing nothing,” he said.

Richard Weinstein, dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, believes that the city’s upwardly mobile population is engaged in a subtle self-denial that anything is wrong, an attitude he said affects policy makers.

“At the national level, we don’t like to look at the reality that our businesses are increasingly owned by the Japanese . . . and that American products aren’t as good as they used to be,” Weinstein said. “At the local level, people do not want to believe that other people are living in cardboard boxes.”

Even if innovative local measures are taken, labor experts believe that Los Angeles’ low wages, which have helped fuel the city’s boom, will continue to divide the city into two vastly different communities of “haves and have-nots,” said Wolch of USC.

Cathy Grannis, an attorney specializing in wage disputes affecting the poor, said most of her clients “earn an average of between $1 and $2 an hour.”

“It’s terrible and it’s illegal, but it is happening,” she said.

One man she represents was a janitor who was picked up for work every day in a van without windows. He could not see where he was going and did not know where he was working.

“He worked there for several months for $55 a week for 55 hours of work,” she said. “The entire janitorial crew was Guatemalan. The employer chose them on purpose because he knew they were desperate for wages.”

Most experts fear that this ever-growing economic gap between the city’s low-wage earners and the upwardly mobile will continue to promote homelessness as land values keep escalating and gentrification invades forgotten areas of the city.

“They’ve paved (badly deteriorating) San Pedro Street from Little Tokyo down to our block,” said Johnston of the Weingart Center. “When they start building new roads in a place like Skid Row, you know somebody’s coming.”

WHO PAYS THE HIGH COST OF HOUSING

ONE-BEDROOM LUXURY RENTAL

Rent: $900-$1,200/month

Construction: $45,000-$55,000

Amenities: $1,000-$2,000

Land: $15,000-$25,000

“Soft costs” (architect, fees,

interest): $14,000-$18,000

Total Cost: $75,000-$100,000

WHO PAYS?

The renter. Rent is set high enough to cover monthly mortgage, upkeep, property taxes, plus a 10%-12% return to developer that grows with each subsequent rent increase.

ONE-BEDROOM AFFORDABLE RENTAL

Rent: $444-$567/month*

Construction: $40,000-$50,000

Amenities: 0

Land: $10,000-$25,000

“Soft costs”: $13,000-$16,000

Total Cost: $63,000-$91,000

WHO PAYS?

The renter and the public. Rent is far too low to cover mortgage, upkeep, property taxes or return to developer. Shortfall is met by public subsidies, corporations seeking tax credits, low-interest bond issues, foundations or other help.

* Rent levels set by government for low-income units in Los Angeles.