Topanga Canyon Residents Fail to Shut Down Soup Kitchen

Leaders of a group that serves soup to transients looking for work in rustic Topanga Canyon said Tuesday that they will continue to feed the hungry despite demands from residents for them to stop.

The decision by PATCH (People Assisting Topanga Canyon With Helping Hands) to continue feeding up to 40 homeless men a day came in spite of community opposition voiced during a contentious town meeting Monday night.

Residents of the area argue that the free food offered by PATCH attracts men from other parts of Southern California, some of whom do not leave at the end of the day but set up illegal campsites in the surrounding brush. Residents say those camps pose a fire threat and create sanitation problems.

PATCH has responded that the same number of men show up at the spot whether they offer food or not and that by feeding the workers they may be preventing them from cooking in the brush. Even so, they decided to move the soup kitchen from where the day laborers congregate outside a post office to a church about a quarter-mile away.

Organizers said by separating the job gathering spot from the soup kitchen, residents will see that the workers do not show up solely for free food.

Nonetheless, PATCH officials are not happy about moving.

“Now the hungry people in the canyon are going to have to come to us,” said Susan Petrulas Nissman, one of PATCH’s co-founders. “It’s discouraging when something like a soup kitchen is politicized.”

Residents predict that moving the soup kitchen will not quell the dispute. “That’s not what the community decided,” said Terry Sweeney, a member of Concerned Topangans for Public Safety, a group formed last month to rid the community of day laborers. “They’ll probably create quite a ruckus.”

Galvanized by a canyon fire earlier this year that authorities believe was ignited by a transient cooking on a makeshift stove, about 200 residents packed a meeting of the Topanga Town Council Monday to discuss what to do about the men seeking jobs who gather each day in the center of town.

In addition to requesting that PATCH stop serving meals, residents decided unanimously to ask that no one hire workers from the site and encouraged residents to drive to the San Fernando Valley or the Westside to find day laborers, with the hope that as the jobs disappear so will the men.

They also called for the creation of a task force composed of the public agencies that have jurisdiction over the area to roust illegal campers from the rugged hills between the San Fernando Valley and Malibu.

Residents at the meeting also decided to investigate other ways of hiring workers and to create a group to clean up areas of Topanga Canyon using day laborers.

What good the measures will do remains to be seen. The Town Council has no power of enforcement. Already PATCH has defied Monday’s vote. And board member Marty Brastow said she thought that few residents in search of day laborers would be willing to drive 20 minutes to the Valley when plenty of men are waiting down the block.

“Who knows?” she said. “The men are here because there is work and the community up to this point has been willing to provide it.”