For O.C.’s Teen Homeless, Few Doors to Knock On

They are called runaways and throwaways.

Each year, hundreds and perhaps several thousand of these young transients, some not even teen-agers yet, wander the streets of Orange County--seldom in large groups, and therefore mostly unnoticed.

“After I ran, I walked the beaches for about four days,” said one 16-year-old from Anaheim. “Then someone stole all the things I was carrying with me. So I turned myself in to police. They had a hard time finding me a place to stay.”

The reason is painfully clear: Orange County has only five shelters with a total of 38 beds to care for an estimated 2,500 to 10,000 adolescents that child-care experts say roam county streets, alleys and beaches each year. And officials say the ranks of homeless adolescents are swelling, though exact numbers are unknown because no government or private agencies track homeless teen-agers.

Often called “runaways,” many of the youths have actually been tossed out of home by their parents and are known by child-welfare workers as “throwaways.”

Typically, they are very young--some still in grade school. The average Orange County runaway, according to one expert, is just 13 and was born here. Some are on the street only a few days. Others bounce around for weeks. They come from wealthy families and poor ones, too, and the reasons they are homeless vary as widely as their backgrounds. But they share one thing in common: They temporarily have no place to call home. And Orange County, despite its immense wealth, robust economy and population of 2.3 million, has few places to house them.

“I had trouble finding a place to stay because two shelters said they were filled up when I tried to get in,” said a 14-year-old girl who ran away from her family in Costa Mesa “because they were hitting me.”

The girl ultimately found a safe haven at Casa Youth Shelter in Los Alamitos. She was a lucky one, officials say.

“There are only a handful of beds for teen-agers (without homes) in all of Orange County,” said Carol Kanode, a school nurse who is spearheading a drive to build a shelter for teen-agers in Huntington Beach. Scheduled to open next summer, the shelter will add 20 new beds for homeless teen-agers--a 52% increase in the current allotment of beds countywide for juveniles.

But Kanode and others familiar with the problem said the need for shelters far outstrips the available beds, even with the addition of the Huntington Beach home.

“Every community ought to have its own shelter for these kids,” said Irene Briggs of the county’s Child Abuse Registry.

Only the cities of Garden Grove, Los Alamitos, Laguna Beach, Tustin and Fullerton have shelters that accept teen-agers.

Teens seeking temporary shelter can usually find it, but it often means they wind up living far from home, an arrangement experts say is counterproductive to repairing the youths’ morale and outlook. Kanode said young people need to live in, or close to, their own community while living away from home, but the shortage of beds in Orange County makes it nearly impossible.

To place homeless teen-agers as quickly as possible, existing shelter operators are in constant contact, swapping information on available space.

“It’s called the Orange County Shelter Network, and we try to keep track of how many beds are open,” said Anne Fox, director of the Odyssey Program youth shelter in Fullerton. Despite such cooperative efforts, Fox acknowledges: “There’s always more demand than supply.”

Child-care officials say that abuse, neglect and even death threats drive many children to risk the unknown of street life to escape the horrors of home life.

Recent interviews with teen-agers at Casa Youth Shelter revealed, in part, why youths flee home.

“When I was 7, my father punished me by driving me to Norwalk, dropping me in the middle of town and then leaving me there,” said one 16-year-old runaway. He eventually found his way back to his central Orange County home, he said, but “I still don’t know how.”

All his life, his father has terrified him. And now that he is out on his own again, his father has threatened to kill him if he returns home.

Another youth, a shy, frightened-looking 17-year-old from Temecula in Riverside County, said he left home because he was an adopted child and his mother, who frequently hit him, no longer wanted him.

“I used to be scared of her,” he said. “So then I started thinking, ‘I’m not going to let her do this to me any more.’ ”

So he ran away and, through the help of friends in Orange County, found his way to the Los Alamitos shelter.

Phyllis Phillips, a staff worker at Casa Youth Shelter, said the boy’s tale has a troubling ring to it.

“Many of these children who come here have been in danger all their lives,” she explained. “It’s only when they get older that they realize that they have to get away from that danger. The younger children don’t know what to do.”

Cassy Tindall, assistant director of the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center in Westminster, said many homeless teens “come from dysfunctional homes where they have had physical, sexual or emotional abuse.”

She said that various pressures on teen-agers, including peer pressure and “mixed messages” from commercial television about how teen-agers should behave, sometimes overwhelm troubled youngsters.

“Kids today face a lot of pressure, much more than most adults were exposed to when they grew up,” Tindall said.

In Orange County, cultural pressures also can lead to a family giving up on a child. One 14-year-old girl at Casa Youth Shelter said she was from a Cambodian family that had immigrated to the United States when she was an infant.

“My family didn’t want me to do things like other Americans, such as dating,” she said. “They were always hitting me. Finally they told me to get out of the house.”

The Adam Walsh Child Resource Center helps locate missing children, but does not have its own shelter.

“We don’t know how many (homeless teen-agers) there are in Orange County because nobody keeps track of the number,” Tindall said. “But I would say there are thousands of teen-agers out there that are in need of temporary shelter and intervention.”

And many turn to crime to make money and friends, said Briggs of the county’s Child Abuse Registry.

“Some (newly divorced) parents with teen-aged children find they have to live in shabby hotels, and they end up telling the kids that they should go out on their own,” she said. “And at 14, or even 17, kids can’t make it, and what they do is turn to crime.”

Said one 17-year-old Santa Ana girl at the Los Alamitos shelter: “I know of runaways who’ve had to sleep under bridges and live in bushes. I lived in a bush myself for a while. You can see why some girls turn to prostitution. It gives them a warm place to spend the night.”

Sometimes runaways work together. For example, in the spring of 1988, Huntington Beach police broke up a teen-age prostitution ring composed of runaway girls. The man who employed the girls, ages 14 to 17, paid them off in drugs, police said.

Police say they are unable to arrest runaways unless they’ve committed a crime, so the most they can do for homeless teen-agers is direct them to the few shelters that exist in the county.

Unlike Los Angeles County, where Hollywood is a magnet for runaways, Orange County has no central strip where homeless teen-agers congregate on a permanent basis. However, in the summer months, many street children flock to the beach communities. The Huntington Beach Pier is a big draw, police say.

But when the weather turns cold, many of the homeless youths move in with friends and their families.

One 16-year-old from Buena Park said he lived away from his family for five years after his parents tossed him out when he was 9 years old.

“I lived with my gang, my home boys,” he remembered. His parents let him come home again at 14, but again ordered him from the house two years later. Now he is living at the Casa Youth Shelter.

The county’s five existing shelters for homeless children receive a mixture of federal, state and county money, but depend largely on private donations to remain open.

Most shelters allow runaways to stay up to two weeks, usually enough time for staff to determine whether a youth and his parents can reconcile their differences or find the youth an alternative home. Sometimes a homeless child will be placed in a county-sponsored “emancipation training program” that helps teen-agers under 18 learn a job skill.

County officials have long operated Orangewood Children’s Home in Orange, a facility for abused, neglected or abandoned children of all ages. The facility occasionally takes in runaways, but those are usually special cases.

William G. Steiner, executive director of the private fund-raising foundation for the home, said about 3,000 children a year are placed in the facility, which only has 166 beds.

“Therefore we can only take runaways who are in really serious jeopardy of their lives,” he said. “Our beds are too precious to be used (as a temporary shelter) in solving family problems that led to the running away.”

Steiner praised the new Huntington Beach shelter as a sorely needed facility.

“The county certainly needs a network beyond the available number of beds, and any expansion of beds available is well received by those of us in the field,” he said.

Those lucky few who have experienced shelter life believe it has turned their lives around.

“This place is a total trip,” said the 16-year-old Anaheim boy who wandered along local beaches before receiving a bed at Casa Youth Shelter. “They don’t lock you up. They give you freedom. They listen to you. They give you a warm place to sleep and good food.

“Now I’m going to work to get my life together,” he said. “I’m going to get a GED (diploma) to finish high school. And I’m going to study art. I always wanted to be an artist.”

Another 16-year-old boy at the shelter says he has also found new direction because of help from the staff. His plans do not include going home “because my father said he’d kill me.”

“I’m going to finish high school, go to a junior college and then a four-year college. I’ve always liked working with animals,” he said. “I’m going to be a veterinarian.”

SHELTERS FOR CHILDREN

The following are the names, addresses and telephone numbers for shelters for homeless children and runaways in Orange County:

AMPARO--12922 7th St., Garden Grove. For ages 11 to 17. Has eight beds. Usual maximum length of stay: two weeks. Phone (714) 638-8310.

CASA YOUTH SHELTER--10911 Reagan St., Los Alamitos. For ages 12 to 17. Bilingual staff. Has 12 beds. Usual maximum length of stay: two weeks. Phone (213) 594-6825 or (714) 995-8601.

COMMUNITY SERVICE PROGRAMS YOUTH SHELTER--980 Catalina St., Laguna Beach. For ages 11 to 17. Has six beds. Usual maximum length of stay: two weeks. Phone (714) 494-4311.

LAUREL HOUSE--13631 Fairmont Way, Tustin. For ages 13 to 17. Has six beds. Usual maximum length of stay: four to six weeks. Phone (714) 832-0207.

ODYSSEY PROGRAM-- Headquarters, 204 E. Amerige Ave., Fullerton. For children of all ages through 17. Offers up to six beds in temporary foster homes. Usual maximum length of stay: 15 days. Phone (714) 525-5838.

No PLACE LIKE HOME: The drive to open a new youth shelter is far from over.