Meeting the Problem of Homeless Families : Social services: A coalition is formed to address health care and jobs for a growing number of needy in Hollywood, Wilshire and Pico areas.

When Linda A. got sick in July, she lost her job and was forced out onto the streets of Los Angeles, with her ailing husband and two young daughters in tow.

Since then, it has been a constant struggle to survive, much less find a school for her children, medical attention for her husband, Charles, and a job for herself.

“We had to sleep in parks and churches--all of us,” said Linda, who asked that her last name be withheld. “We were out on the street, and there was nowhere to turn.”

Though they have since found temporary respite at a Mid-Wilshire shelter, Linda and her family are part of what social service workers and government officials say is a disturbing homelessness trend among families. Officials say the number of such families is growing at a rate that far outpaces the growth of the overall homeless population in Los Angeles County.

The problem is especially critical in Hollywood, the Wilshire and Pico areas and other parts of the Westside, according to advocates for the homeless.

In those areas, even middle- and upper-middle-class families can’t buy a home because of the high cost of real estate, and many find it hard to pay for an apartment’s security deposit when their paychecks stop coming. And there is no room and long waiting lines at shelters that do accept families.

Linda, 34, discussed her family’s plight last Wednesday from her room at the Gramercy Place Shelter, which provides individual units for 11 families and one unit for three single women. The same day, the Coalition for Homeless Families With Children was holding its inaugural meeting a few miles away in Hollywood.

The new group, which met at the Roosevelt Hotel, was organized by the Northwest Local Planning Council of the United Way Metropolitan Region. Its purpose: to address the many needs of homeless families in its district, which consists mainly of Hollywood, and the Wilshire and Pico areas in Los Angeles and West Hollywood.

“There is certainly a need and a demand to do more, to provide more, to offer more and care more and problem-solve more in meeting the needs of homeless people in our community,” said Patricia Occhiuzzo Giggans, chairwoman of the local planning council and executive director of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women.

United Way started forming the coalition a year ago to address such issues as access to health care, family and street violence, education and employment in the district, Giggans said. Because homelessness of families touches on so many of those issues, the planning council decided to focus on homeless families as a means “to bring our creative energies together,” she said.

More than 100 people attended the meeting, many of them from area shelters, homeless advocacy groups, Los Angeles and West Hollywood city governments, the Los Angeles Free Clinic and area hospitals and religious organizations.

The coalition members pledged their cooperation in identifying the most basic needs for homeless families, such as increased shelter space, access to medical care and job training, and gaps and overlaps in existing services. They agreed to meet again in January.

A Westside Shelter and Hunger Coalition already exists to serve people in West Los Angeles, Venice and Santa Monica, an area considered to be second only to downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row as a regional magnet for the homeless, according to John Suggs, coordinator of the beach communities’ coalition. Suggs said another one is definitely needed on the eastern fringes of the Westside.

Many families teeter on the verge of homelessness in the areas east of the beach communities, and many parents already are forced to live with their children right on Hollywood Boulevard and parts of the Wilshire corridor, according to Gary Yates, chairman of the Coordinating Council of Homeless Youth Services in Los Angeles.

Yates, an administrator at Childrens Hospital in Hollywood, is a 20-year veteran of building coalitions among child welfare groups and homeless advocates. During his keynote address, he warned that coalition members need to remain committed through times of scarce funding and when the tension inherent in coalition maintenance gets overwhelming.

One clear gap in services for homeless families, Yates said, is in job retraining. He said many workers who have lost their jobs need help getting back into the job market and finding stable employment without losing their housing in the process.

Councilman Michael Woo told the coalition members that efforts are under way in Los Angeles to address the pressing need for more affordable housing, such as setting aside redevelopment money for low-income apartments. Woo also said he has proposed creating a “deposit guarantee” program through which poor families could borrow money to pay security deposits on an apartment.

Other reform measures are also in the works. The city’s $100-million housing bond measure, Proposition K, would provide nonprofit groups with $80 million to buy and rehabilitate thousands of substandard low-income apartments. Another $10 million each would be used to build homeless shelters and to provide loans for low-income home buyers.

The city’s Housing Authority, meanwhile, recently won a $66-million federal grant to work with nonprofit agencies to help get nearly 2,000 homeless families off the streets and into permanent housing.

Yet the needs of homeless families and children often receive low priority. “In many ways,” said Woo, “their needs get ignored or not treated with the same level of urgency” as homeless individuals and others in need of aid.

Sometimes, even when assistance is available, efforts to create low-income housing are met with opposition. Such was the case when Woo proposed building housing for homeless families on an empty lot at the corner of Franklin and La Brea avenues, he said.

“This has been one of the tougher controversies I have ever been involved in,” Woo said. After considerable negotiation and compromise, he said, “that project is going to go ahead--despite the fact that we had a number of community meetings, which I would describe as being the closest thing to a lynch mob I have ever seen.”

A study released last May by Shelter Partnership Inc., a nonprofit group that provides technical assistance to shelters, put the number of homeless families in Los Angeles County at more than 16,000, representing about 50,000 people. Typically, according to Jeff Schaffer of the Partnership, such families are composed of a single woman with two children.

The county’s overall homeless population was estimated by the report to be between 100,000 and 160,000.

Although comparable estimates do not exist for the Westside, coalition members and advocates for the homeless say the numbers are large and growing.

Joann Zgonc, student support services counselor for the Los Angeles Unified School District, said thousands of homeless children cannot attend school because they have no address and because of other restrictions.

Zgonc said there is a growing awareness among school officials of the problems faced by homeless children and that the district is trying to loosen its restrictions to better accommodate them.

She also said the state’s recent estimate of 14,000 homeless children in Los Angeles was far too low. “That’s the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “We know there are more than that.”

For Linda, the news of the fledgling coalition was of little solace last week. Foremost on her mind were concerns over her children’s education and welfare. The 60 days she is allowed to stay at Gramercy Place are about up, and her attempts to find affordable housing in Palmdale or at another shelter have so far failed.

Her oldest daughter, 12-year-old Crystal, was recently able to enroll in school by using the shelter as an address. But she has been kept back a year because of so much missed work and now must leave that school too.

“The kids always ask me, ‘Mom, what are we going to do after this?’ ” Linda said. “My kids do have fears and nightmares, and I have to be strong for them.”

“It’s a hard life,” said Linda, “and we pray to God we make it through this world.”