Homeless: El Monte’s Shadow Society : Services: They’re down and out. The census, they say, ignored them. And a church is evicting a program that brings them food and medicine.

Danny Martin hit El Monte about a year ago, stepping off a slow-moving freight train near the Santa Anita Avenue railroad trestle.

A good place to camp out, this inelegant city which serves as the San Gabriel Valley’s transportation hub. There were bushes next to the tracks where you could hide your bedroll, a brush-clogged flood control area, freeway underpasses and, across Valley Boulevard, a 24-hour bus station to retreat to when the weather got cold.

“I’ve seen worse places,” Martin says tersely.

The unemployed construction worker had joined El Monte’s elusive, shadowy society of frustrated job-seekers, alcoholics and drug abusers, undocumented immigrants, women with children, prostitutes and hobos who have been all but overlooked by officialdom.

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Census Bureau sent about 75 census takers into the streets and shelters of the San Gabriel Valley to try to get an accurate count of the area’s homeless. Faced with the daunting task of counting all the people in El Monte’s parks and washes, the census takers--”the U.S. senseless,” as one homeless man characterized them--apparently skipped the city altogether.

“This is the first we’ve heard of any problems in that area,” says Michael Weiler, assistant regional census manager for operations. “We’ll have to check it out.”

Even worse, homeless advocates say, the board of trustees of a local church is now moving to evict a program that brings food, medicine and clothing to the city homeless, estimated at anywhere from “a few dozen” to 5,000. And the city, citing zoning codes, is blocking the program’s relocation to a residential neighborhood.

It’s backlash time, say advocates of the the city’s homeless, many of them home-grown veterans of the streets.

The first thing Martin noticed about El Monte was that, compared to cities in the east, there wasn’t much in the way of accommodations--places that cater specifically to the homeless.

“Things out here are a little harder,” says Martin, 30, a slow-talking blond man who hails from Georgia, way out at the far end of those Southern Pacific Railroad tracks.

Since things started unraveling for him two years ago, with a divorce and an extended period of unemployment, the train-hopping Martin has become something of a connoisseur of accommodations. In El Monte, these are a couple of church-run food programs and IFCO, Interfaith Community Outreach, which gives out groceries and second-hand clothes and helps people get to the shelters on cold nights.

Accommodations are about to become scarcer still. The 5-year-old IFCO program, initiated by six churches from the region, is itself threatened with homelessness. Officials at the First United Methodist Church of El Monte, concerned about neighborhood complaints, have given IFCO until April 10 to vacate three church meeting rooms it has been using for the last two years. The city will not permit it to rent a three-story house on Basye Street.

“It’s not a commercial building,” says Planning Director Harold Johanson, of the Basye Street house. “We told them from the very beginning that it wasn’t a proper location.”

“We get more than 6,000 people a month going through here,” fumes IFCO manager Michael Ruggles. “If it’s not people living on the street, it’s three families staying in one little house or a large group living in a garage. El Monte thinks the way to clean things up is to throw people out and build $300,000 houses that nobody can afford.”

As darkness approached last Tuesday, a group of rumpled men in Pioneer Park considered the prospect of life without IFCO.

“We’d be Dumpster diving right now,” said one of them, gazing pensively at the pot of hobo stew bubbling on a barbecue pit in the park. They’d be digging into the trash containers behind fast food outlets, feeding on scraps and leftovers, someone else explained.

The stew is a savory-looking mixture of rice, canned green beans and corn and Mexican salsa--all from the IFCO food bank.

El Monte’s homeless population may be the most unrecognized in Southern California, homeless advocates say. None of the hundreds of people who have reported to IFCO in the past two weeks said that they had filled out census forms, says Ruggles, a woman who goes by “Mike.”

“You’re chasing shadows,” says an El Monte police officer, referring to the census effort. “It’s like saying, ‘How many sparrows are there in my back yard?’ Who knows?”

If anybody does, it’s Martin. “Give me the census forms,” says the unemployed construction worker who works as an IFCO volunteer. “I’ll find 500 people in a day.”

His expertise makes him the ideal guide to El Monte’s low spots.

Martin, who by now could probably write a Ph.D thesis on the ins and outs of homeless survival in El Monte, sets off at a brisk walk, poking into the spaces between buildings along the railroad tracks, meandering through Pioneer Park, striding purposefully past the cheap motels on Garvey Avenue.

“These are my main means of transportation,” he says, looking at his black high-top sneakers.

Today, he walks with a slight limp--a bad sign. “My knee is throbbing,” he says. “That usually means rain.” When it rains, you have to start looking for a place to stay dry.

“Most people head for the RTD station,” he says. “I like the post office.”

He stops to show you his own place, a tiny back yard facing the tracks. “The guy in the house is very friendly,” says Martin, who has constructed a platform bed there out of discarded wood. “If it rains at night, we throw this together.” He points at a pile of boards and corrugated metal which can be fashioned into a lean-to.

There are campsites in the nooks between buildings, in culverts near the Rio Hondo and under the bushes in Pioneer Park, where someone has set up a small pyramid tent. A large group of “illegals,” as Martin calls undocumented immigrants, has staked out a crawl space directly beneath the tracks on the Santa Anita trestle.

“In the morning, you’ll see about 30 of them coming out of there,” says Martin.

You carve out a sleeping space wherever you can. George, a short man with a mustache like an overgrown hedge, its ragged edge covering his mouth, sleeps in a wheel-less jeep behind a body shop on Garvey Avenue. His friend Manuel lives with two other men in an abandoned furniture warehouse on a side street.

Manuel leads you through an open window, guiding you hospitably around the “apartment” that the men have fashioned there, as if it were a Pasadena condominium. “ . . . Here’s another room back here, and there’s running water in that sink there,” he says, stepping over a pile of trash.

Most of their days are spent trying to attend to personal hygiene. When you’re on the street, says George, the first thing you get to know is where to find running water. “There’s a place behind a gas station where you can take a duck bath,” he says. Everybody carries a piece of soap wrapped in a paper napkin.

One of those gathered around the stew pot, a man dressed in a bulky ensemble of two shirts, a sweat shirt and a jacket, talks about the difficulties of staying presentable and looking for work. He punctuates every sentence with the word “honestly.”

“We work real cheap, just for the heck of it. Honestly,” he says. “We just want to survive. Honestly.”

Another man speaks of his stay in a Los Angeles Skid Row hotel. “Every room has its own pair of mice,” he says. “Charlie and Mitzi, they were mine. You can’t have food in the room, no friends. There are drugs all over. I made a choice. My choice was to sleep out here.”

For the women, the first priority every morning is usually lining up a warm, dry place for their children before night falls. “You’ll see women out here prostituting themselves, just so they can get a motel room to put their kids in for the night,” says Martin.

One woman stood in front of a motel on Garvey Avenue and told of camping out the previous night at Legg Lake, a county recreation area south of the Pomona Freeway.

“We were sleeping in the grass, and they turned on the sprinklers at 3 in the morning,” she says. She looks at her 6-year-old son, a tired-looking youngster with fresh scabs on his lip and nose, sitting in the front seat of a friend’s van. “I gotta get inside tonight.”

Many of the city’s homeless receive “general relief” from the state Department of Social Services. Most use the money for brief cleaning-up respites at city motels. “At 30 bucks a throw in a motel, there goes your check in 10 days,” says Kenny Watson, a Pioneer Park regular for the last seven years (or, as Watson himself puts it, “seven Christmases”).

City officials say they are deeply concerned about the homeless, despite their refusal to allow IFCO to move to Basye Street. The city council last week approved a $40,000 grant to the El Monte/South El Monte Emergency Resources Assn., a food distribution program that on a busy day hands out 20 boxes of groceries to poor and homeless families.

But the city has received numerous complaints about derelicts in residential neighborhoods, such as the Tyler Avenue neighborhood where IFCO operates. “There have been people defecating in front yards, urinating, sleeping on the property,” says Johanson.

IFCO Director Sylvia Franco acknowledges that some of her clients have been occasional public nuisances. “I sympathize with some of our neighbors,” says Franco, whose program provides bathrooms for its clients. “I’m a homeowner myself. But instead of complaining, they ought to join us and go down to City Hall to demand public toilets out here. Going to the bathroom is a normal function.”

Martin is getting a little restless lately. There’s a claustrophobic streak in most of the long-term homeless, says Ruggles. They don’t like sleeping inside anymore, and they don’t like staying put for too long.

“I know one man who goes to visit his daughter sometimes,” Ruggles says. “But he has to sleep by the door so he can feel the air blowing on him.”

Martin says he’s going to do what he can to make sure IFCO keeps operating (he’s been trying to approach all the candidates for the City Council in next week’s election), but then he’ll move on.

“I might go to San Francisco, see what’s there,” he says. “I’d like to see how they do it up there.”