CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / GOVERNOR’S RACE : Van de Kamp, Feinstein Take Tentative Stabs at Big Problems

As they travel, the two Democratic candidates for governor share a lament: California lacks for big dreams in its politics these days.

Dianne Feinstein and John K. Van de Kamp share something else as well--they find it painfully difficult to offer up dreams that are quite as big as California’s problems without risking the much-feared label of “big spender.”

Homelessness poses such a challenge, and both contenders were enticed to a statewide housing conference Tuesday to try to take its measure. Their differing approaches highlighted a choice that awaits voters in the June 5 primary--a choice in executive styles of governance between two contenders with more or less similar hopes for a prosperous future.

Van de Kamp, the state attorney general, proposed starting small and specific in trying to stop homelessness before it happens. Voters have lost faith in the state’s ability to accomplish much at all, he said, so they have got to be shown incremental results.

His idea was simple: Provide emergency loans for mortgage payments or rent to those who face eviction because they cannot pay their bills due to some short-term personal calamity, such as divorce or job layoff.

Van de Kamp said a $5-million effort would help 3,000 families a year for starters, and maybe up to 50,000 individuals over five years. Presently, most such emergency housing aid is available only to people who already are on the streets.

“I present this program not as an end, but as a beginning--a down payment if you will--on a new era of pragmatism and compassion in state government,” he said.

Feinstein, former mayor of San Francisco, acknowledged the need to form a social consensus before proceeding on such a big problem as homelessness. Her answer, as it has been on a growing list of issues, was to propose a commission to get the debate started.

Or, in the case of housing, she called for two commissions.

First, she supported a pending bill in the Legislature to establish a “working group on the integration of homeless services.” And she added a call for a “working group on affordable housing.”

These groups would bring to the negotiating table housing advocates, local governments and state officials “to develop those kinds of programs that can provide the proper prescriptions.”

“A society that steps over and around people sleeping on grates isn’t much of a society,” she said.

The two disagreed on one element of homeless policy, however.

Van de Kamp seemed to side with a Santa Barbara man who complained of police harassment of homeless people who sleep in local parks. Van de Kamp was applauded when he said the police needed some “major sensitivity training.”

Feinstein was asked a similar question by a homeless man from Santa Cruz. But she was hissed when she answered, “I do not believe people are well served, nor the homeless well served, by homeless sleeping on streets and in parks.”

On broader housing policy, Feinstein told the 700 officials and private housing activists that California needs to expedite the sale of millions of dollars in housing bonds approved by voters in past elections.

She said her experience as mayor for two terms convinced her that property developers should be forced to contribute to affordable housing. “I am reminded of the words of President Kennedy,” Feinstein said. “ ‘If government cannot save the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.’ ”

Van de Kamp said his administration would be composed of appointees “who actually want to help people find homes” and who “will not allow local redevelopment agencies to skate around their legal obligation to provide low- and moderate-income housing. . . .

“A new day is coming--not a day when housing problems will disappear, but a day when our commitments as a society to tackling those problems will reappear. . . . It’s time we dreamed again in California.”