Soup Kitchen Invades ‘Riviera’ : The poor: Amid the pricey homes and shiny yachts of Dana Point, a free lunch means a lot.

Million-dollar homes command ocean vistas in this seaside community, where a suite at the city’s Ritz-Carlton costs up to $2,000 a night and where real estate brokers refer to the area as the “California Riviera.”

But in the shadow of this affluence are dozens of people who fashion shelters out of the underbrush near the railroad tracks and in dry riverbeds. Their plight is shared by scores of other homeless people in the South County who go virtually unnoticed every day.

On Monday, the Mildred-Rose Memorial Foundation opened a soup kitchen in Dana Point to try to ensure that the poor and homeless don’t go hungry.

“The poor here are invisible, but their poverty is at the Third World level,” said Marc Ely-Chaitlin, president of the nonprofit foundation, who was himself homeless for a year. “This is a good opportunity for some noblesse oblige, because the wealthier you are, the more you owe the community.”

The soup kitchen opened in a five-unit apartment building that the foundation leases in Dana Point’s Lantern district for $5,000 a month. Other units house undocumented immigrants, drug addicts, the mentally disabled and other people “who are down on their luck,” Ely-Chaitlin said. The soup kitchen is an empty room with bare walls. Inside, visitors sit on wooden benches around an outdoor picnic table donated by Ely-Chaitlin’s sister. Pieces of paper towel serve as a tablecloth.

David Wayne, 32, of Dana Point was the kitchen’s first guest on Monday. The menu was simple: beans and ham-hock soup, a piece of bread and apple juice.

“It’s happy here . . . a happy feeling,” said Wayne, who is mentally disabled.

Next to him, five children of the Velasques family, who live in the building, ate their lunch.

“This is what we need here,” said 42-year-old Patricia Maki, who lives nearby. “You see people living in the bushes and wonder if they’re getting any help.”

Social workers welcomed the start of the soup kitchen, saying they hope it will bring some relief to the growing numbers of homeless people in the South County.

“We’ve been getting calls from the police and the community about the people on the streets,” said Ellen Gilchrist, director of the Episcopal Service Alliance, an umbrella group that provides food and counseling to 1,500 South County families every month.

The agency’s Anchor House shelter in San Clemente had to temporarily stop serving daily hot lunches to about 40 homeless people a few months ago when donations of food and money declined drastically.

Ely-Chaitlin, a former volunteer at Anchor House, said the discontinuation of the hot lunch program prompted him to start the new soup kitchen.

Authorities say many of the homeless people coming to the area are undocumented Mexican immigrants who hitch rides on box cars in San Diego, jumping off in Dana Point when the train slows down around a curve in Capistrano Beach.

With the expensive homes in Dana Point in the background, the illegals spend their first nights sleeping in the underbrush around the hills and dry riverbeds in the area. Eventually, some of them erect crude shelters made from refrigerator cartons and other materials and then gather on street corners in search of day labor.

Ely-Chaitlin, who lives with his parents in Capistrano Beach, said his agency caters to these immigrants, but he added that the typical homeless person in the South County is a young white male.

The soup kitchen will have to struggle to stay open. It still lacks furniture, some basic kitchen utensils and a steady source of food donations.

It also lacks a permit to operate.

Minutes after the soup kitchen opened, a representative of the county’s Public Health Department and a city code enforcement officer arrived to remind Ely-Chaitlin that he needs permits to continue. But they did not shut the soup kitchen down, pending a review.

Dana Point Mayor Bill Bamattre said the city would be concerned about “the kind of traffic the kitchen would generate and the kind of hours it would keep.”

Bamattre also said that the city was not approached for financial help, although “we have a pool of $50,000 for community-services grants, and we could have used some for that.”

Ely-Chaitlin said he considered several cities in the South County but was frustrated by their bureaucracies. His agency, operated entirely by volunteers and with private donations, decided to take on the task by itself.

“We had to throw it together, because the need was so pressing,” he said.

Gilchrist said she hopes Ely-Chaitlin succeeds. “He is a fine young man who has dreams and tries to put them into action,” she said. “The need is very great . . . and we need lots of action.”

Times correspondent Frank Messina contributed to this report.