A Town Divided : Corona Residents Are Split on Benefits of Homeless Shelters

Not long ago, small businesses flourished on East 6th Street. Now many are struggling, closed or gone.

Once, the only homeless people here were transients waiting to catch the next freight train to the coast. Now the street has homeless men, women and children with nowhere to go.

Corona’s onetime retail center is in trouble. While opinions differ on the cause, all agree that the population of homeless people here grew in the 1980s, at a time when East 6th Street was continuing to lose business to newer strip shopping centers on the fringes of the city. By the end of the decade, two city churches were feeding 150 people a day.

Now, the town is divided. On one side are those who argue that the hungry and homeless must be helped. On the other are those who say the shelters and free meals are drawing more transients to an area which has enough problems.

Perhaps nothing shows the transformation of old downtown Corona more than the Rev. Timothy Waisanen’s church, Corona Christian Fellowship, a converted beauty salon that takes in almost two dozen people each night. It is one of the city’s few shelters for a rising homeless population.

“It’s just the central fact, ‘Who wants to solve this problem?’ ” said Waisanen, who opened the church in 1988 and the shelter in 1990. “Something has to be done. . . . If these people have no other way to get on their feet, we help them.”

From the bearded, outspoken pastor’s point of view, he is helping to clean up the street and helping drug addicts, alcoholics and the destitute. But many of his neighbors, while praising his efforts, say the shelter and its residents are scaring customers away. And they want the city to move it.

“People are saying, ‘Not in our back yard,’ ” said Kent Hansen, an attorney who has an office just down the street from the shelter, at a recent City Council meeting. “Well, yeah, (the problem) is in our back yard. It’s in our front yard, it’s in our side yard, and it’s full.”

Ray Radtke, who has owned Cupid’s Drive-In Restaurant on East 6th Street since 1960, said that the homeless urinate and defecate on his property and that business has declined.

“They just wander down the street looking for handouts,” he said. “It seems like you don’t get anywhere. It’s like trying to get water out of the ocean with a spoon.”

But Waisanen, along with many church and charity leaders, say that they are being blamed for problems created by a downturn in the economy and the flight of business to shopping centers in newer areas of town.

“We didn’t create the problems in this community,” Waisanen said. “The problems were here before we even got there.”

According to the most recent estimates, Corona has, at the least, 80 homeless people on any given night, although Riverside County officials say it is probably many more. Overall, Riverside County’s homeless population is estimated at 5,000, many at the western end of the county, said Jerry Doyle, a manager for the county Department of Community Services.

“It used to be I would give a sandwich to someone coming off a freight train,” said Joan McNelis, a social programs coordinator at St. Edward’s Catholic Church, which serves lunch to homeless people every weekday.

“We’d feed them. We’d go and fix sandwiches, and they would move on,” she said. “Now the homeless numbers have increased and increased. . . . We’re feeding them, but we’re not solving the problem.”

Nearby, First Baptist Church also has a meal program, called God’s Kitchen, which serves free dinners each weekday. That program, run by churches and local charities, also has been the subject of complaints that they simply attract homeless who disrupt nearby business.

In a letter to the City Council on behalf of the Corona Downtown Business Assn., attorney Evan Evans wrote that the food programs “have attracted to the community transients who scare residents of the city and discourage reputable and quality businesses from coming to the area.”

Evans wrote that the city library has had to hire a uniformed guard, in part because transients harassed library patrons. God’s Kitchen is just across the street.

But those who run the program say that the problems are overstated and that they have few options other than fulfilling the need.

“If they don’t get fed, the crime rate will go up,” said one woman organizer, who asked not to be identified.

“We are Christians,” Waisanen said. “We are to house the homeless, feed the hungry.”

Waisanen started the storefront shelter after taking in a few people into his home in 1988. Then, in the winter of 1989-90, under orders from then-Gov. George Deukmejian, the armory at City Park began providing shelter for the homeless on cold winter nights.

“The reality is people have problems and they need a place where they can go,” Waisanen said. “These people didn’t just have a need in the cold months, they had a need year-round.”

But the 40-year-old pastor is no stranger to controversial issues. He says that his support of homeless causes contributed to his defrocking as an Assemblies of God minister at Orange Christian Assembly in 1987. He had failed to win endorsement of two-thirds of the members of the small congregation in an annual election.

He made headlines earlier that year when, after serving as the marketing director of the Crystal Cathedral, he revealed that the Rev. Robert H. Schuller faked a fund-raising photo which supposedly pictured Schuller standing in front of the Great Wall of China. A church spokesman attributed the misleading photo to a “clerical error.”

In June, Waisanen’s church, which had been operating without a permit, received a conditional use permit from the Corona Planning Commission.

But Harry Ruscigno, a planning commissioner who voted against it, said: “When you have a client, it’s an embarrassment to me to drive through town and see them sleeping in the storefront. . . . I don’t think anybody wants to see our downtown become a slum district. It will happen so fast; businesses will start pulling out.”

When the issue went to the City Council, city officials surprised many by revealing that while the church needs a permit, the shelter does not. Business leaders have called on the city to establish guidelines for shelters to eliminate the apparent loophole in the law.

The council formed a committee to study the problem of the city’s homeless and of Waisanen’s shelter. That committee has been discussing moving the shelter to an industrial area, with financial support from local business and possibly the city’s Redevelopment Agency. The committee will present its recommendations to the City Council on Sept. 4.

Even so, some council members doubt that a solution will be that easy.

“No matter where you put it,” said Councilman William W. Miller, “someone’s not happy.”