ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : Even $50,000 Leaves Very Little Change in Lives of Homeless : The true cost is to the psyche. For 15 mistreated human beings staked to $3,300 apiece, it’s a lot, but at the same time, it’s not nearly enough.

A few weeks ago, 15 homeless friends in Santa Ana could have pooled their pocket money and they might have come up with 90 cents. A day later it would have been $50,000.

That was the amount settled on them for having their belongings confiscated and trashed by Santa Ana City park workers 18 months before. The award had been wrestled from the city by their lawyers and certified by a federal judge. If left each plaintiff with $3,300 plus change.

A sun-shiny ending would have them all using the money to get shelter and find work. That hardly any did may suggest to the more thoughtful that homelessness in this county is harder and more expensive to cure than it is to recognize, predict and prevent.

As you may have read, some of the money went for booze. Some served to test the limits of a compulsive gambling habit. If we leap to the conclusion that money given the poor is money down the drain, we have to jump over a lot of facts to get there.

Legal Aid has paid me to keep track of the 15 claimants through months of litigation. I know them and have a curbside acquaintance with hundreds of other homeless in central Orange County. So I can state with modest authority that they’re not itinerant sunbathers. Not one is homeless by choice or unemployed by choice.

Many are ill, with chronic and uncared-for maladies. You can’t buy back your health with $3,300. Others have mental difficulties. Most--though not all--are feebly educated, and life on the street has aged them past the point where they can easily break old habits and learn new things. Some are alcoholic and it’s surprising more aren’t.

In the pharmacopoeia of the sidewalk, liquor plays a dangerous part. It is the cheapest medicine you can buy, kills aches and pains for a while, supplies warmth, shortens nights made endless by lack of family or television, hardens the habit of homelessness and destroys ambition. No arguing that drinking may cause homelessness. In my rounds, in four years, I see more evidence that the homelessness has caused the drinking.

Total poverty is itself a hard habit to break. One $3,300 recipient discarded his worn-out discount clothes and bought a brand-new set of discount clothes. Another found herself shelter in a cut-rate motel but wouldn’t pop for the expense of a room phone. Still another got her hair styled and couldn’t think of anything else she wanted right then.

Living meal-to-meal engenders a weird kind of negative pride. You get proud of not having starved, not having frozen, not getting thrown in jail. It is the pride of having survived one more day against heavy odds, but it stuns the ability to think past the next meal. A sudden windfall can be a shock to people for whom money lost any redemptive meaning.

Especially if the newspapers are looking over your shoulder, wondering if you can establish yourself in an affluent society on a windfall of $3,300.

With all the planning in the world, $3,300 doesn’t go far in Orange County. It is not going to buy you a well-salaried job or a $200,000 house. It’s enough to get you off the street for three months and back on it again as stony-broke as before.

But my newly rich street friends are observant. They’ve seen more and more of their homeless food lines crowded with families who do have shelter and are paying so much for it they can’t afford groceries. At feedings in Santa Ana and Garden Grove the homeless are now a minority, outnumbered by working families impoverished by the rent they have to pay. Go see it yourself and understand why costly shelter is not an attractive option for people who’ve learned to survive without it.

Homelessness is a deep hole to fall into and a deeper one to climb out of. The ones who made the best of the $3,300 claim are those who got their lives more or less in shape during 18 months of waiting. They can now afford things (like the hair-styling) that are trifles to us and luxuries to them.

Santa Ana’s image makers should be delighted that its homeless population is reduced by four. Chuck Daigle took his piece of the $50,000 settlement and got a job in Las Vegas. John Close and Sandra Lundnait wrote me a happy letter from a $250-a-month apartment in Salt Lake City and say it’s the first time they ever breathed clean air.

A tall, square-shouldered old man named Bill McInnes was living in the rail yard, sleeping on cinders, when the money settlement came through. He bought himself a van and left the county with hardly a word to anyone. McInnes is not exactly a transient. He was born in Newport Beach 71 years ago, worked all his life in the local construction trades, and built a good many of the shelters in a county that no longer has shelter for him. I doubt we’ll be hearing from Bill.

It may be small comfort to lose a human landmark like that, and smaller comfort to know that to make it in this abundant county some of us have to leave it.