Help for Homeless Now as Close as Phone

Harry Mills, 46, says he has been a homeless California drifter since 1968. That’s when he left Norfolk, Va., “in search of myself.”

Mills spends the winters in San Diego, where he says it is warmer than most places in California and “a hell of a lot warmer than most places in America.”

Still, for the homeless, no place is paradise, Mills said, not even San Diego. But he was upbeat Monday after hearing about a new, free telephone that hooks up a homeless person immediately with a person who knows all about services.

For Mills, services mean primarily a place to sleep for the night--or, for that matter, the week or the month. A block from where Mills was panhandling Monday morning, a group of civic and business leaders were announcing the program that Mills said was long overdue.

Info Line is a San Diego service that has been around for years. Its newest wrinkle is this free, dedicated phone line (meaning you don’t have to dial or put money in) that tells the homeless where to find food, shelter, jobs, even educational and legal services.

This Info Line for the homeless is next to the public restroom at the Civic Theatre at C Street and 3rd Avenue downtown. It began operating Monday, when sponsors announced its formation at a press conference at the site.

“I hope this is the first in a series of free, dedicated phone lines for the homeless,” said City Councilman Ron Roberts, who, along with a handful of other San Diegans recently instituted Real Change, designed to educate panhandlers about where they can go for free meals.

Roberts and the backers of Real Change--Ron Oliver, executive vice president of the Central City Assn.; Frank Landerville, project director for the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, and Mary Colacicco of the Travelers Aid Society of San Diego, among others, say it has worked well since its inception in early December.

Harry Mills, who’s homeless, said Real Change has left him baffled.

“There are plenty of places to get a free meal in San Diego,” he said, “but I don’t want to go to ‘em because I don’t want to stand in line for an hour or an hour and a half. I would rather panhandle. I can eat better that way and don’t have to wait in line. I think that program’s a joke.”

Mills said the Info Line for the homeless is a good idea because his biggest problem two weeks out of every month is finding a bed.

Colacicco said the potential pitfall of the dedicated phone line is that it may, on occasion, convey false hope.

“The most recent estimate is that we have 6,000 homeless people on the streets of San Diego,” she said. “The only negative of this phone system may be that hope will be offered when none is available; in other words, we won’t have any shelter available for the night in question.

“The good part of it is that it allows the homeless access to an information line when they don’t have the 20 cents needed to get connected. They can find out for free about resources, such as shelter availability. I don’t know how much shelter is available at the moment, but it’s not enough. It’s never enough.”

Charles Wigle, a spokesman for Info Line, said the service is open seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. He said the calls it receives come from teen-agers with drug problems; destitute families with no resources or contacts, and the elderly, among others.