Street Fighters : 2 Activists Are Shaping Long Beach Homeless Into a Political Force

A San Francisco housewife who fell into poverty and an unemployed boiler mechanic with no place to live are shaping a group of homeless people into a political force in Long Beach, a city long criticized for largely ignoring as many as 5,000 people living on its streets.

Martha Bryson, 34, and Donald Sims, 39--one formerly homeless and the other homeless still--have formed the Long Beach Homeless Union, a coalition of people lost in poverty and sleeping in parks in that city.

Her clothes are tattered and his hair hangs in strings. She walks the poorest streets of Long Beach with her baby girl in tow, and he is given to occasional ranting. But in the past two months, Bryson and Sims have marched in Washington, lobbied a U.S. senator, lectured local civic groups and appeared on cable television to demand housing and dignified treatment for the city’s swelling homeless population.

“I just go to the people on the streets and I say, ‘Where have you been for help and how were you treated?’ And time after time they say they are kicked when they are already down,” Bryson said, sitting in her run-down apartment, feeding her three children from a pan of canned chili.

“You have to be holier than thou to get into a Long Beach shelter,” Sims complained. “They don’t want you unless you are going to be a success story. We’re giving them one last chance before we start filing lawsuits.”

The Long Beach Homeless Union is only 3 months old. Its members do not always keep their appointments. They borrow telephones and beg for supplies. Sims says enrollment is 200; Bryson says it’s closer to 10. A few city officials complain that the group doesn’t “play by the rules.”

But when environmentalists protested a controversial recycling plant in Long Beach last month, Martha Bryson was there, complaining about the plume of ash that she says sprinkles toxins onto people who sleep on the streets.

When social service groups could not recruit a single street person to represent Long Beach in the Oct. 7 march against homelessness in Washington, Bryson found four. She solicited bus fare for them and air fare for herself and presented U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) with 150 cards from elementary school students declaring that “children should not have to live in boxes.”

They monitor local charities and the welfare office as self-appointed advocates to ensure that the rights of the homeless are honored, and have frequently called in legal aid lawyers.

“They have merit,” said Long Beach City Councilman Evan Braude. “They are not going to solve the homeless problem, but they have made their presence felt.”

“I enjoyed talking to Donald Sims and, let’s face it, I don’t always enjoy talking to people,” said Jeremiah Bresnahan, an aide to Rep. Glenn Anderson (D-San Pedro).

Shelter directors and social workers have complained that the union members are sometimes overzealous, asking endless questions of caseworkers about confidential matters involving the lives of homeless people, invading their privacy and slowing down caseworkers struggling to restructure lives.

“I am not real clear on their rules. They need to be trained,” said Norma Mueller, executive director of Traveler’s Aid in Long Beach, a United Way group that arranges food and shelter for indigents. “But we are certainly willing to sit down and work it out.”

Long Beach officials said one union member protested when a family was excluded from the only family shelter in town, only to discover after considerable debate that the family never wanted to check in anyway.

At the same time, the union’s complaints led to establishment of a grievance procedure at the family shelter for any homeless person denied assistance.

The concept of a homeless union made a brief debut in Los Angeles in 1986 when a destitute man named Chris Sprowal attempted to organize street people. The group snarled downtown traffic in a march on City Hall, picketed a factory that made “Bag Lady” dolls, then seemed to disappear.

In Long Beach, the homeless have been mostly faceless and silent, with the exception of one unidentified woman who sometimes appears at City Council meetings but never speaks.

Some say the Long Beach Homeless Union was born from the meeting of Bryson’s history and Sims’ rage: She is a political activist who campaigned against apartheid and lived in style in San Francisco until her divorce in 1988. He is a dyed-in-the wool union man in an unkempt beard and baggy Levis who was evicted during an apartment renovation a year ago and never got back on his feet.

But others believe the union is penance for a city that has so long ignored its homeless that they are rising up in protest.

“The Homeless Union is a natural response to the incredible indifference and callousness that Long Beach has shown in its failure to address homelessness. There are some real cold people running this city,” said Dennis L. Rockway, senior counsel of the Legal Aid Foundation of Long Beach and a member of the city’s homeless task force.

Braude, considered the councilman most sympathetic to the homeless, says the city has done less than it should but more than its detractors acknowledge. “As much as I think we do not do enough, I do have to categorically deny that we are doing nothing,” he said, pointing to a new city program to research low-income housing and the hiring of a $40,000-a-year homeless coordinator.

“Our city manager has made it very clear to us that the county, state and federal government have the primary responsibility for the homeless,” he said.

Under state law, programs for the indigent are the responsibility of county rather than city governments.

But Long Beach lags years behind other cities, regardless of where the responsibility lies, argues Rockway, whose legal aid foundation sued Long Beach for failure to provide adequate low-income housing, but lost in a judgment issued this week. An appeal is likely.

In January, 1987, he notes, Long Beach and San Jose appointed separate homeless task forces. Two months later, San Jose accepted their recommendations and committed $1.5 million for a city-run shelter.

Long Beach took nearly a year to accept its task force report and another 18 months to study it. In the end, the city rejected virtually every recommendation of substance, he said.

“To this day, there is no city-run emergency shelter in Long Beach, despite a demonstrated lack of shelter beds,” Rockway said. “They love to study it to death.”

While Santa Monica, San Francisco, New York and Boston require developers to contribute to low-income housing, growth-minded Long Beach rejected such a plan last year.

Many cities require landlords to show just cause for eviction. But in Long Beach, Rockway noted, “all a landlord has to do is give you 30 days’ notice.”

“Yes, the city could do more, but that money has to come from somewhere. Are the taxpayers willing to pay for it?” asked Long Beach’s homeless coordinator, Sheila Pagnani.

“We are always hearing that we should do more,” City Manager James Hankla said. “But everything we are doing now is our responsibility under the city charter. The county is given the responsibility of caring for indigents, under the law.”

While the bureaucrats were debating the politics of poverty, Martha Bryson slid in status last year from dissident housewife to homeless mother of three.

When she and her husband divorced, she discovered that a 10th-grade education limited her earning power, so she rented an affordable house and went back to school.

When the landlord decided to move into the house himself, she spent $200 on ads looking for an alternative--a roommate or a live-in job. Though she never had to sleep on the street or eat from a dumpster, her homelessness forced her and her children to sleep on friends’ couches or floors.

Bryson moved to Long Beach to be near family and paid $325 for a bedroom in someone else’s apartment until the manager asked them to leave. Her former father-in-law, Long Beach political activist Sid Solomon, helped her secure her present apartment, which is $125 a month more than she says she can afford on her monthly relief check. A couple of days before Christmas, she says, they ran out of food. They ate meals provided by charities until her next check arrived.

Bryson says she and hundreds like her are caught in a terrible cycle.

“Anyone who pays more than 50% of their income for shelter is homeless,” she says. “It is only a matter of time before they run out of money for food, go crazy from worry and are on the street again. It is psychological torture, especially for children who have to wonder where they will live next week or next month or, worse yet, where they will sleep from night to night.”

On the street she met people like Sims; Annette Bennett, a 60-year-old woman who lives in an alley; Angela Streat, eight months pregnant, 20 years old and living on the beach; and a woman known only as Valerie, who resides with her 9-year-old daughter in a North Long Beach home plagued by rats, roaches and broken plumbing.

Working out of Bryson’s small apartment, they came up with a name, designed a letterhead and wrote bylaws. Local civic groups donated a post office box and set up a checking account. The Legal Aid Foundation agreed to provide counsel.

But there have been setbacks. Bryson and Sims are arguing over who should run the group and have threatened to form separate coalitions under different names.

The union’s members come and go. For instance, a 50-year-old woman named Myrtle who joined in the march to Washington recently met some people from Utah and liked them so much she moved there.

But local activists who have spent years working to persuade the city to do more for its poor are hoping the poor themselves will muster the strength to move a political mountain in Long Beach.

“For a long time the city has denied there are as many as 5,000 homeless people and has downplayed the numbers,” said Alan Lowenthal, president of Long Beach Area Citizens Involved, a local watchdog group. “We have tried for years to change them. Maybe the missing link is the homeless people themselves.”