Who Are the Homeless?

Few people would relish returning home each night to a beat-up van in a shopping center parking lot. But for BOB ORABONA, a homeless man living in Hawthorne, it is a big step forward.

Orabona, 32, says he became homeless 2 1/2 years ago when a motorcycle he owned “got busted up” and he lost his job as a courier in Century City. For about two years, he says, he lived where he could--with friends in Gardena, in a tent pitched in vegetation alongside the San Diego Freeway, in an abandoned building in Hawthorne, among other places.

Orabona says all the stays proved short-lived: He wore out his welcome in Gardena, California Department of Transportation police confiscated his pup tent, and the city of Hawthorne bulldozed the abandoned building he and several other homeless men had inhabited.

But Orabona improved his living conditions after earning enough cash from $5-an-hour construction jobs to purchase a $300 van. He keeps the vehicle in the parking lot of a Hawthorne supermarket, which he says has tolerated his presence there and even allows him to panhandle.

Noting that he has been landing more construction work as more foremen get to know him, Orabona said, “I’m starting to come back up.” A main cause for optimism, he says, is having a van he can call home.

“I go in at night and shut that door, and I jump on that futon I’ve got in there and I say, ‘Man, it’s great to be home,’ ” Orabona said. “It’s the only home I’ve got.”