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The Stealth Homeless--Unseen, but They’re There

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Times Staff Writer

Lucky, 37, figures he is living up to his name lately. He and three friends have an abandoned garage in Costa Mesa as a shelter, for the time being.

Until last summer, Lucky was among the many homeless who slept in parks and alleys in Costa Mesa. But since August, when Costa Mesa police began a crackdown on transients, many of those homeless have scattered.

“The police announced they were gonna run everybody away, so we knew ahead of time,” Lucky said recently between spoonfuls of chili at a local soup kitchen. “So when we got run out of here, we stayed under the freeways before we found the abandoned garage over here. We’ve been there for about two weeks.”

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Costa Mesa police began citing transients last August after numerous residents near the Rea Center, on the 600 block of Hamilton Street, complained that more and more homeless people were sleeping near the center and in Wilson Park on Wilson Street.

Vice Mayor Orville Amburgey said the city therefore decided to begin strict enforcement of a law several years old which prohibits people from staying in parks after midnight.

Now, residents, police, and advocates for the homeless agree, the parks are almost free of transients at night, but the problem is not solved.

“They’re gone from here,” said Jean Forbath, director of Share Our Selves, an organization at the Rea Center that provides food and clothing for the homeless. “Now they hide behind the dumpsters at the DMV. . . . They pass through the side streets to get there so they won’t be seen,” she said.

Officer Garth Wilson, who participated in the city’s first sweep in August, said police “efforts last summer are still showing. We pretty much got them out of our areas, but you can still drive down East 17th Street and find them sleeping on a bench at a bus stop.”

Police Capt. Tom Lazar said residents still call with complaints of people sleeping at bus stops, in shopping centers, or near their homes.

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Janice Davidson, who lives on Arnold Avenue behind the center, carries a camera with her wherever she goes, taking pictures of any of street people she sees in her neighborhood, to use later in her fight against the Rea Center.

“There are fewer people sleeping at the center, but more people sleeping in our back yards,” she said. “There’s a woman who lives on the corner of Roth and Arnold who has a man sleeping in the middle of her ferns and plants.”

Merle Hatleberg, director of the Someone Cares Soup Kitchen, located at the Rea Center, said transients who are run out of a place eventually return.

“If they get booted out from over here they’ll just move somewhere else,” she said. “They just make a circle and go from point A to point B to point D and back to point A again.”

Some of the homeless, unable to find shelter, have resorted to roaming the streets and sleeping in bushes and behind shopping centers rather than taking the chance of sleeping in the parks. John, 38, and his friend Joe usually walk the streets when they can’t find a place to lay out their bed rolls for the night. Occasionally, John said, he has walked up to 15 miles in a night, just to keep moving.

Larry Haynes, a staff member at the Orange County Interfaith Shelter in Costa Mesa, said many of the homeless men are “more careful now,” because they can’t afford to be stopped by police again.

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“Now, there’s a whole lot more desperation in their voices, because they really can’t afford to get arrested,” he said. Some men, Haynes said, have outstanding warrants for failing to pay other citations.

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