Crowded Out, They Still Wait : Welfare Recipients Affected by Fire Department’s Orders

Although in recent years she has slept on park benches and often gone hungry, Maria Marquez said she still has her “pride.”

“I had a beautiful home and a nice car, just like they do,” said Marquez, 46, signaling with a defiant nod at the rows of middle-class homes down the street from the welfare office where she and about 40 others waited for the doors to open Friday morning.

“It makes me want to cry, the things they say about us,” she said, wiping away tears with her fingers. But what gets her angry, she added, now directing an angry glance at the county office, “is the way they treat us like animals here.”

Like the others, many of whom had slept in the bushes overnight to get a good place in line, the homeless Marquez said she has spent many hours over the last several months standing outside the county welfare office on Maclay Avenue in San Fernando and has yet to receive the assistance she seeks.

Like other badly overcrowded welfare facilities throughout the county, the San Fernando office was ordered by fire officials in April to clear its overflowing waiting room by moving people outside. This, in turn, has prompted complaints from neighbors who say the overflow crowds have brought drugs and public drunkenness to the neighborhood, and city officials have threatened to close down the county facility.

A similar scene occurred last week outside the Southwest regional office of the Department of Public Social Services on Imperial Avenue, where even larger crowds of homeless men and women, poor immigrants and welfare mothers were forced outside after fire officials ordered hundreds of people out of an overcrowded waiting room.

For those standing outside--often four to six hours at a stretch and sometimes longer--the wait and bureaucratic confusion is nothing new.

“This is how it’s always been,” said Allen Hanna, a homeless Vietnam veteran, as he waited for the San Fernando office doors to open. “The only difference now is that we’re waiting outside, instead of inside.”

While the arrangement has satisfied fire officials, it has brought loud protests from neighbors in San Fernando who say that those who have been made to wait outside the welfare office for food stamps and other public assistance often sleep in their yards, litter their streets and may even be responsible for burglaries in the neighborhood.

“There’s a total lack of control of the situation by the welfare department,” said Joan Lewis, 32, watering her lawn, just a block away from the corner welfare office.

“I can’t go to the corner (for cigarettes) without getting propositioned,” she said, adding that her 11-year-old daughter has had to contend with similar insults.

But Lewis does not blame the disruption to her neighborhood on the welfare recipients. “I know how frustrating it can be,” commented Lewis, who said she received public assistance a few years back. “It’s not the people’s fault. It’s the system that’s not handling it well.”

While welfare officials maintain that they are doing their best to serve the growing number of indigent in the county, homeless advocates say that services have progressively deteriorated and that the overcrowded conditions are merely the latest symptom of an under-funded system bursting at the seams.

“This is a chronic problem,” said Gary Blasi, director of the Homeless Project at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. “All major welfare offices are almost always overcrowded beyond their legal capacity, but it generally gets ignored.”

While agreeing that overcrowding is a common problem at welfare offices, fire officials say they only act on it when it is brought to their attention, usually through telephone complaints from anonymous callers. Although fire officials conduct annual fire prevention inspections of the facilities, these are unlikely to turn up violations since the overcrowding fluctuates dramatically, becoming especially marked at the beginning of each month, officials said.

Department Orders

Since January, the Los Angeles Fire Department has ordered three county welfare offices to clear overcrowding problems in their lobbies, said Fire Capt. John Walters.

“They obviously have a problem that they don’t have the manpower to solve,” he said. Typically, Fire Department personnel assist the offices in setting up a system for lining up overflow crowds, he said.

Colleen Moskal, spokeswoman for the social services department, said the overcrowding problem started this year and is usually restricted to the beginning of the month, when assistance checks are mailed.

“We try to avoid (overcrowding) as best we can and move to expeditiously process people through our office,” Moskal said.

But it appears that demand has outstripped services. Moskal said that the number of people receiving aid from the county has grown by more than 3% over the last year, to more than 915,000. The largest increase has occurred in the general relief program, which serves about 46,000 indigent adults.

Meeting the Demand

The county has tried to anticipate the increasing demand by budgeting funds to expand the reception area at the Southwest regional office and by attempting to find a larger facility to house the San Fernando office, she said.

“Management is investigating some other means of expediting services,” she added. “But it’s all still very much in the planning stage.”

One stop-gap measure under consideration at the Southwest facility is to provide seating under large outdoor tents, said office manager James Adams. “We’re also looking at better organizing our staff to speed up the process,” he said, noting that budget cuts have reduced his staff by more than 10%.

Blasi, the homeless advocate, lays the blame for the strained social services at the feet of the Board of Supervisors.

“This is another clear example of the board’s complete indifference to the situation that the homeless and the poor find themselves in,” he said.