Demand Forcing Homeless Shelters to Turn Away Many Poor

When a homeless woman and her two children wandered into the Neighborhood Housing Services office in Santa Ana recently, director Douglas Bystry tried to place them in 10 different shelters--all with no success.

“It was so frustrating,” said Bystry, a La Habra councilman and homeless advocate. “There were no beds available.”

Experts say that’s not surprising. As Orange County’s needy population and the demand for social services skyrocketed in the past year, so has the demand for shelter. And while Neighborhood Housing Services, a private, nonprofit agency that provides home improvement loans to low- and moderate-income families, is not set up to help homeless people, those that are find they cannot help many of those in need.

At the Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter in Costa Mesa, the 20 beds available on an emergency basis are usually claimed by 10 a.m. The Shelter for the Homeless in Westminster, which offers transitional housing for up to four months in nine locations, gets 10 times more requests for beds than it can accommodate, its director estimates.

Telephone calls to the 27 shelters on a list provided by the Homeless Issues Task Force this month produced nothing but a few vacant beds for troubled youths, some answering machines and instructions to call back in the morning.

“Everyone has a next-to-impossible time finding help,” said Susan Oakson, coordinator of the task force, noting that there are an estimated 10,000 homeless people in Orange County and only about 600 beds.

Billie Shinde, 29, knows firsthand about the shortage of beds.

Shinde came to Orange County late last month with her husband, her brother and her two children, the younger just 6 months old, after being evicted from an apartment in San Diego County.

“I lived in Orange County a couple years ago. I was happy here. I loved it here and wanted to come back,” said Shinde, who worked as a data-entry operator until she had the last child. So they gathered their belongings, boarded a Greyhound bus and headed north.

After using up their $2,000 savings on motel rooms, they landed at the Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter in Costa Mesa, where they were told they could stay for three days.

The family made its way from agency to agency in search of a place to stay until it could get on its feet. The results were not too promising.

“We’ve been out every day from 8 to 4 and haven’t gotten anything but a bag of groceries, some damn bus tokens and a lot of ‘I’m sorrys,’ ” Shinde said as the family prepared for dinner recently on its final night in the Costa Mesa shelter.

Late the next afternoon, they still had no place to go and Shinde was dipping into her last dollars to make final, desperate calls from a public telephone in front of a grocery store.

“I guess we’ll just find a patch of grass somewhere to sleep,” said Billie’s husband, Vicral, 23.

The ordeal of finding a bed can be the most difficult for families and single women, some shelter administrators say.

“There seem to be less shelter beds for women, especially women with children,” said Jim Palmer, a consultant with the Christian Outreach Rescue Mission in Santa Ana, which has 65 beds for men and eight for women. “We’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of women and children asking for help in the last three years.”

Social service agencies like Episcopal Service Alliance, which provides food, clothing and other assistance in addition to shelter, estimate the demand for service has gone up as much as 40% in the past six months.

Many shelters say it’s difficult to quantify the increased demand because so many callers are told there’s no room. “Shelters are usually so busy that it’s very difficult to keep records,” Oakson said. “And once you’re full, you can’t get any fuller. I don’t know of any shelters that haven’t turned people away and aren’t turning people away every day.”

Homeless advocates say the skyrocketing price of housing, combined with few jobs, has pushed some people over the edge into homelessness.

“We have seen a real increase in the last year. Go to the downtown of any city and you’ll see more and more homeless, more and more poverty, more and more desperation,” said Larry Haynes, director of Mercy House, a long-term transitional housing program for men in Santa Ana. “It’s not so much that we have more people moving into Orange County. What we’re finding is that more people here are finding themselves homeless.”

A recent study by the Homeless Issue Task Force found that 41% of the homeless have lived in the county for 10 years or more.

And contrary to popular belief, summer can be a difficult time for many of the shelters.

“This is the time of year when the money doesn’t come in as much,” said Dennis White, executive director of the Episcopal Service Alliance, which relies on private donations as well as government funding.

“Even if they think about the homeless, people think they don’t have to fight the cold and things like that in the summer. And a lot of people are on vacations. At this time of year, we always see a decrease in funding, but this year because of the increase in numbers, we’re feeling it more,” he said.

In response to this trend, the United Way of Orange County has donated $25,000 to kick off a campaign to raise $1 million for struggling shelter and food providers in the county.

The campaign, to be launched Monday, is also seeking donations of 500,000 pounds of food and 1,000 volunteers for local agencies.

“We believe that once the Orange County community understands how desperate the needs are, they will be motivated to act,” said Oakson, one of the campaign’s organizers.