Critics Dispute Need for Plan to Aid Redondo Homeless

Insisting that “we can’t sweep the problem under the rug,” a Redondo Beach church has made a controversial request to distribute free food and clothing to the homeless in a city where officials contend there are few, if any, street people.

Hope Chapel, in a request backed by Mayor Brad Parton and scheduled to come before the City Council on Tuesday night, has asked to set up a trailer in Dominguez Park as part of a 45-day pilot project to gauge the extent of homelessness in the South Bay. Once there is a head-count of the homeless, the program could offer expanded services to homeless families or transients stranded in cold weather, said Ron Mason of the chapel’s Haven of Hope Ministry.

But the request has met resistance from city officials and neighbors of the park, who argue that the program will encourage transients to come to Redondo Beach.

“If you offer food and clothing to homeless people, they’ll go to wherever you offer it,” said Recreation and Parks Director Robert Atkinson. In a letter to the ministry, Atkinson expressed doubt “that there is a public need among existing residents of Redondo Beach” for a homeless program in a city park.

“This is a densely populated beach city,” Atkinson explained in an interview. “There is not much open space here for homeless people to live.”

Local advocates for the homeless dispute that.

“Every community has its homeless, and every community will deny it,” said Leslie Morris Godwin, coordinator of Crossroads in Redondo Beach, a satellite of Culver City-based Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center.

Crossroads is the only local shelter in Redondo Beach, and its six beds are reserved for the homeless mentally ill. Residents are unaware of the local street people, she said, most of whom travel to shelters in San Pedro, Long Beach or inland to Lawndale for help.

A 1986 United Way study, she said, found that 7% of the county’s estimated 35,000 homeless were in the South Bay-Long Beach area, and Crossroads outreach workers have reported that there are at least half a dozen homeless people in every park in Redondo Beach.

Mason said the church’s project--which would offer blankets, warm clothes and packages of non-perishable food one day a week for a month and a half--stemmed in part from his personal experience.

“I used to get on my bike early in the morning and ride down The Strand,” he said, “and I’d see people sleeping on the beach and in the parking lots. It got so I started putting peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in my backpack to feed them.

“Just a month and a half ago, in Riviera Village, I met a guy at a Winchell’s doughnut stand living out of a shopping cart. . . . In a two-hour period, I’ll bet I could find you four or five people living on the streets of Redondo.”

Mason said the ministry went to the city for space because the church has no grounds on which to set up the project on its own. The Redondo Beach branch of Hope Chapel is so new, he said, that weekly church services have to be held on the Redondo Union High School campus.

He acknowledged that Haven of Hope might have gone to another church for help. The ministry chose not to, he said, because “it’s not just a church problem, it’s a city problem.”

Mason added that he was encouraged by news stories about Parton, who is a fundamentalist Christian, and thought that Parton would support the ministry’s plan.

Parton was, in fact, receptive.

“There is a homeless problem in Redondo Beach, whether you want to face it or not,” the mayor said, adding that he was the one who told Mason that before going ahead with his plan, he should get approval from the parks department. “I think this would be a great way for the city to help, in our own little way.”

But not everyone on the City Council or in the Dominguez Park neighborhood agrees.

“This is the first I’ve heard that there is a growing need to provide a facility like this in Redondo Beach,” said Councilman Stevan Colin, who represents the district encompassing the park.

“I’m not aware that there is a large population of homeless people in Redondo Beach, compared, say, to downtown, where the problem is obvious.”

Moreover, Colin said, Dominguez Park would be unsafe for homeless people. The parking lots, he said, are the base for crews who are resurfacing the streets in the southern half of the city. And transients might be tempted to trespass on the fenced-off corner of the park where two historic houses are being restored. Propped precariously on cribbing, the houses are cordoned off because they lack foundations.

“I’m sure that if we looked, the city could find a much safer place,” Colin said.

And while some residents admired the idea, those closest to the park were skeptical.

“I live right across the street from the park, and I don’t think I’d want it there, what with the (Little Leaguers) there playing baseball games,” said Harold Wheaton, 69, who has lived in the neighborhood 35 years.

“You don’t know what kind of people it would bring in. There’d be people from downtown Los Angeles and all over, coming here to get a free meal.”

Mason said he is not surprised at the reaction.

“We realize that most members of our community would not want these people in their neighborhoods, but we can’t sweep the problem under the rug,” he wrote in his Oct. 27 letter to Atkinson.

He expects, he said, to “get raked over the coals” when he makes his pitch to the City Council.

“I’ve never spoken in front of anybody before, and I’m scared to death, but I’m going to do this anyway,” he said. “I’ll probably go down in flames, but I’m going to give it a shot.”