THE HOMELESS: HOW ONE CITY COPES : Santa Monica Finds Transients Are Here to Stay : Residents’ Complaints Have Grown, but So Have Offers of Food, Other Services

The scene outside the fancy restaurant at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Ocean Avenue was surreal.

As well-heeled restaurant patrons deposited their cars with busy valet parking attendants on a recent Friday evening, a man in a business suit wrestled a homeless man to the ground. Quickly and efficiently, the suited man twisted his target into a military-style restraining hold, pinning him to the ground with the weight of his body.

He waited for the police.

The suited man turned out to be the manager of Ocean Ave Seafood, one of the many trendy restaurants along cliff-side, sea-view Ocean Avenue in downtown Santa Monica. Arich Berghammer said the disheveled transient had been pestering customers, refused to leave when asked and then “started swinging” when Berghammer insisted he move on.

‘Enough Is Enough’

“After dealing with transients in Santa Monica, you know how to do this,” Berghammer said of the way he had subdued the homeless man. Usually, he said, the numerous homeless who loiter near the restaurant and across the street in Palisades Park do not cause problems; but once in awhile, and more so in recent months, Berghammer says he has found it necessary to be forceful.

“You try to be compassionate, but enough is enough,” said Berghammer, who ultimately did not file criminal charges against the man.

The incident underscores a predicament facing Santa Monica: A liberal city, where the official policy toward the homeless has been one of tolerance and leniency, now finds itself in danger of being overwhelmed by a growing, increasingly desperate and--some say--more aggressive transient population.

Critics argue that by being lenient, Santa Monica has become a magnet for the homeless; some of the homeless themselves concur. But several city officials and advocates for the homeless disagree, saying Santa Monica is merely suffering part of a greater, national problem and has a duty to be compassionate.

When a social worker was stabbed to death, allegedly by a mentally ill homeless man, in Santa Monica last February, it was only the most dramatic incident in what law enforcement officials say is a disturbing trend that finds the homeless more frequently involved in crime, either as victim or culprit.

In December of last year, two homeless men were killed, their bodies found in the park where they slept. A third transient was accused of the slayings. Days later, a transient involved in another attack on a homeless person was held on attempted murder charges. In March, the body of a murdered transient woman was found in the bushes along the Santa Monica bluffs.

Social Worker Slain

And less than two months after social worker Robbyn Panich was slain, another counselor was allegedly stabbed by a drifter. She survived.

The Santa Monica Police Department offers a breakdown: In 1985, there were nine homicides in the city, including one transient victim; there were no transient suspects. In 1988, victims in seven of the city’s 10 homicides were transients; eight transients were arrested as suspects.

While homeless are still more often the victim than the perpetrator of violent crimes, the reverberations nevertheless are many. Social workers throughout the Westside are attending special self-defense training sessions. Fights among transients have broken out on feeding lines. Waitresses at some downtown restaurants insist on being escorted home or to their cars when they leave at night.

Social service workers say it is no wonder tensions are running high among the homeless. The longer people are forced to live in the streets, they say, the more angry they become. The social workers blame cutbacks in mental health and emergency medical care, greater availability of cheap drugs, less money for rehabilitation, a growing disparity between rich and poor that is especially pronounced on the Westside.

Pressure Shows

“People deteriorate; it’s not like you can leave folks on the street for five years and it not have an extreme impact on them,” said Vivian Rothstein, executive director of the Ocean Park Community Center, which sees hundreds of Santa Monica homeless.

“The accumulated pressure on them is really showing. They are much more disturbed and angry than they were before,” she said. “They are immensely, massively disabled.”

Despite such levels of desperation, many Santa Monica residents in the private and public sectors are scrambling for ways to deal with the homeless: A city attorney hands out sandwiches every Saturday on the front lawn of City Hall; businessmen pay the homeless to clean up a park; a one-of-a-kind shelter for mentally ill homeless women opens; a councilman enlists the help of developers to bring trailers to the city for use as temporary housing.

By some estimates, Santa Monica spends $1.5 million a year on homeless programs. This is a story of how one city copes.

The drop-in office run by the Ocean Park Community Center accepts homeless people for 90 minutes each morning, but on a recent day it was past deadline and people were still arriving in quest of free food, clothing and counseling.

Tactfully and gently, staff worker Richard Cassidy turned them away, telling them they were too late for that day and offering them a list of other agencies that might be able to help.

“It’s hard to say no, but we really have to,” Cassidy said, adding that if the center accepted people as they streamed in all day, the staff would be overwhelmed.

The drop-in center has seen the number of people seeking help double in just the last six months, up to 180 a day.

Part of the increase is because the center moved from Ocean Park to a larger facility near downtown Santa Monica, but it also reflects growth in the area’s homeless population, center directors say. Last year alone, the center saw 5,000 different people. Officials believe the total will be higher this year.

Numbers Increasing

“We are starting to see a lot more families, single parents with kids, or both parents and kids, more substance abusers, more veterans. In the sub-groups of homeless across the board, the numbers are increasing,” said Terence Hill, who runs the center.

At the center, housed in a converted surgical-instruments factory the city is providing rent-free, dozens of people mulled about or sat on benches, taking numbers to await used clothing or free groceries. Some stared vacantly, looking down and out, while others were talkative and energetic. Two women wore meticulously applied makeup.

Cans of pork and sweet potatoes, boxes of macaroni and cheese, and jars of baby formula line shelves on one wall. Some food is donated, the rest purchased. One volunteer obtains leftover food from on-location movie shoots.

Hill said that after the stabbings, several of his volunteers threatened to quit out of fear. In response, homeless advocates enlisted the help of the Chamber of Commerce, which last month sponsored a six-hour training session on how to defuse potentially violent situations. Sixty people attended.

In addition, Hill said, staff members will meet with police later this month to discuss security, and the professional counselors make it a point to be present in greater numbers when volunteers are working.

“I think the fear is subsiding now, but we are not taking it for granted,” he said. “All it takes is one person acting out in a crowd of 150 to make it look like the homeless have gone mad” when the problems are isolated incidents.

Shelter for Women

Next door to the drop-in center is a new shelter for mentally ill homeless women, called Daybreak. Intended as a model program, the shelter opened in February with federal grants and is one of only two in the state, according to Executive Director Rothstein.

Daybreak attempts to reach out to a particularly difficult population. Women often become more isolated on the streets than men do, social workers say, because of fear and the need to protect themselves.

“We’re serving a population that many people feel can’t be served or doesn’t want to be served,” Rothstein said. “We are showing that is not the case, that treated with respect, they will come off the streets.”

The shelter, its high walls painted in shades of salmon and blue and decorated with colorful tapestries and drawings, has a small kitchen and individual curtained cubicles with beds for 15 women. It is designed to create a home-like environment so that the women, who will remain for six months, can re-learn basic skills, such as how to sleep at night instead of during the day, how to cook and maintain personal hygiene, how to take medicine, and what counselors call “anger management.”

Re-Enter Society

Ideally, the women become reconnected to society, eventually attain some level of independence and can live in some form of permanent housing.

Many of the women have not lived indoors for five years, Rothstein and Daybreak Manager Beth Wagner said. Rothstein and Wagner say they have encountered terrifying medical problems, even a case of cancer, that have gone untreated for years. A couple of women were pregnant.

Suddenly, Daybreak coordinators found themselves confronted with problems that a small, community-based nonprofit organization such as theirs is ill-equipped to handle. After all, it is an emergency shelter, not a medical facility, Rothstein points out.

“So where does a homeless woman who is mentally ill and has no money go to deliver a baby?” she asks. “These are problems no other sector of society is handling. (But) we can only handle a piece of the problem. . . . We can’t do it all.”

On Saturday mornings, the city attorney of Santa Monica, Robert M. Myers, and members of his staff gather early on an upper floor of City Hall. There, among the filing cabinets, legal briefs and computers, they put together scores of sandwiches and then dole them out to long lines of homeless people who file past the City Hall front steps onto the manicured lawn.

Myers and company have been doing this for a year and a half. On peak days last year, Myers estimates that he had about 100 customers; this year it easily reaches 150.

The city attorney sees his efforts as part of a socially conscience duty to help.

But Myers has come under fire for what some see as excessive leniency where the homeless are concerned.

“There are some crimes I simply won’t prosecute,” he said, giving as examples public drunkenness and sleeping in a public park. Other violations are examined on a case-by-case basis, but, in general, Myers maintains that the criminal justice system, with its revolving-door jail cells and lack of social services and counseling, fails the homeless.

Jail Program

Instead, he and the Ocean Park Community Center have set up a “jail outreach program.” Every morning, a counselor meets with Myers or his assistants to discuss cases and determine whether the homeless people detained on a particular day can be incorporated into an agency’s social service program.

“We’ve told the homeless they are not part of society,” Myers said. “Thus it is unrealistic to expect them to obey all the rules of society.”

The position is not popular with everyone. Police officials, claiming their hands are often tied when it comes to cracking down on law-breaking transients, have openly criticized the city attorney’s reluctance to prosecute. And many critics blame this leniency for attracting the scores of homeless who now roam Santa Monica’s streets.

“Our tolerance definitely extends an invitation (to the homeless) to come here,” said City Councilwoman Christine Reed. “It has a higher impact than Martin Sheen inviting them to Malibu.”

Reed said she receives numerous complaints about vagrants, especially from senior citizens and women who feel threatened or intimidated by aggressive panhandling.

“More and more, they feel they can no longer lead the life they led in Santa Monica four years ago,” Reed said. “They don’t feel they can comfortably go downtown or wait at a bus stop. It’s an emotional ordeal, especially for older women, and I find it heartbreaking.”

Terry McKnight, 50, figures he’s been homeless on the Westside “off and on” for 17 years. He has become something of an advocate for the homeless, advising his comrades on where to get the help they need and how to survive on the streets.

“I tell people to find hide-outs around trees . . . out in the bluffs,” McKnight said. “That’s the only way to do it. Otherwise, they’re subject to being beaten, stabbed or getting robbed.”

Sporting a bicyclist’s helmet, McKnight has become a regular fixture at the evening feedings in Palisades Park, the stretch of grass and palm trees overlooking the ocean that is home to scores of homeless.

For the last three years, every afternoon, six days a week, the park has been the scene of a feeding program sponsored by a group of Westside homemakers, artists, show business folk and others. They load a picnic table with food for transients who line up by the dozens. Much of the food is donated by Santa Monica restaurants.

“We see the same faces over and over again,” Antoinette Bill, one of the volunteers, said on a windy afternoon recently, after dishing out chicken wings and turkey-noodle soup. “A lot of new faces too. It’s the consistent ones that are the most difficult. You know that for them, this is it.”

Program Must Move

But two problems are forcing the program to move. One is security; recently, rowdy fights have been breaking out as people wait for food. Also, area merchants have complained about the presence of homeless in the park and are urging the city to clean it up.

By the end of this month, the program will move to grounds between City Hall and the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

“We like being outside, but it gets disruptive,” said Mimi Adams, who heads the program, called FAITH, which also tries to find housing for some of the homeless. “We’re dealing with people who are very unhappy.”

Although many businesses complain about the homeless, others have taken a new approach. The Chamber of Commerce, which five years ago printed advertisements in newspapers calling for the removal of “drunks and derelicts” to make Santa Monica safe again, recently set up a committee on the homeless.

Among the committee’s efforts is assisting Councilman David Finkel in his search for a piece of property where the city can set up 10 trailers for the homeless. The trailers will come from Los Angeles, which acquired them a couple of years ago but has been able to place only a few because of neighborhood resistance.

Chamber of Commerce members have experienced a major shift in attitude, Finkel said.

“They realized you can’t just say, ‘Get rid of them’ and solve the problem,” Finkel said. “They realized you have to roll up your sleeves and get into the issue (and) get into what you have to do to help.”