Joining the Search for Shelter : Program for Homeless Mentally Ill Struggles to Find Its Own Home

The radio’s low volume lulls its listeners this late summer morning.

On nearby couches, several homeless people catch a few winks after what probably was a restless night on the streets. One woman has her purse strapped securely to her arm as she sleeps.

A few paces away, a middle-aged man irons a shirt, while others sit around a card table quietly playing a round of gin rummy. In the kitchen, a newcomer stands over a vat on the stove, stirring what will be this day’s lunch of chicken chow mein.

These mentally ill homeless people spend a few hours each day in the large room--home of the Lighthouse Program--hoping to get their lives back on track and some day find permanent shelter.

And like the clients it serves, the Lighthouse Program itself is searching for a new home.

After operating for four years out of the YMCA building on Civic Center Drive, the nonprofit Lighthouse Program is being forced to relocate by the closure of the YMCA and impending sale of its building.

But the task has proved difficult.

Program officials had hoped to move a few blocks away to the basement of a building on Santa Ana Boulevard owned by the First United Methodist Church. However, the city Planning Commission postponed voting on the relocation plans last week because the city staff forgot to notify the Historic French Park Assn.--made up of residents near the church--of the proposed shelter plans.

The city staff has recommended approval of the relocation, but only with several conditions attached that would force the Mental Health Assn. of Orange County, the program’s sponsor, to pay an estimated $20,000 for site improvements, including landscaping, construction of exterior block walls with wrought iron sections and restriping of the parking lot.

“Our people are homeless, they don’t have cars,” Lighthouse Program coordinator Mike Bouchard said, bewildered by the parking lot requirement.

John A. Garrett, director of the Mental Health Assn., said the conditions placed on the use of the church building would create a heavy financial burden for a program that operates on a $333,000 annual budget, funded through an Orange County Health Care Agency grant and supplemented by public donations and grants from United Way.

Given that some of the conditions are not directly related to program operations, Garrett has asked the Planning Commission to waive some of the requirements.

“If we were a developer, if we were the Irvine Co., I think that’s standard practice,” Garrett said. “I am just asking to be treated differently than they might treat a developer and realize there are limits to what we can do. We would like to improve the community.”

Garrett also worries that because a bureaucratic mix-up kept nearby residents from finding out about the shelter plans, neighbors may think the program tried to sneak into the church unnoticed.

“I think we have an uphill battle,” he said. “But we have four years of a good track record. It’s not like it is a new program that is not known.”

Although the neighborhood association board has not officially taken a position on the project, Mike Brajdic, president of the Historic French Park Assn., said residents already have expressed strong reservations about the shelter being moved away from the Civic Center.

“The truth is, I don’t think it’s appropriate to bring it into a residential area,” he said.

If the church building is used, he added, neighborhood children will lose one of the few playgrounds available to them.

Lighthouse officials say that between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. each day, an average of 25 clients receive breakfast and lunch, clothing, a place to shower and assistance in finding night shelter. Arts and crafts, field trips, jobsearch classes and other activities are also offered.

Orange County government caseworkers help the homeless receive regular psychiatric and medical care as part of the program’s long-term goals of helping clients find permanent housing and return to the work force.

Lighthouse clients include people like 54-year-old Dan Salaets, who said he suffered a nervous breakdown after he was forced to retire from his 31-year job in the automotive industry, experienced a turbulent divorce and lost a 27-year-old son to suicide.

Salaets said his monthlong stay in a mental hospital ended when his insurance benefits ran out, and he found himself living on the street without money, food, shelter or job prospects.

He said he still sleeps on the street at night but arrives at the Lighthouse each morning in time to make coffee and handle some chores before receiving counseling on his job search.

“They give you a lot of support and encouragement,” he said. “They make you feel like a human being, whereas out on the street, you are nobody.”

Another client, 35-year-old Ken Keegan, has been in the program for about six weeks and expects to get a job soon.

“This program is a stepping stone for me,” he said. “I see a therapist once a week, and a caseworker here helped me get (shelter).”

Lighthouse officials estimate that between 30% and 50% of the homeless population suffers from untreated psychiatric disorders. Were this program not in place, Garrett said, the people who go through the center would be on the street 24 hours a day without medication or guidance.

The Planning Commission will take up the Lighthouse issue again in mid-October, but YMCA President Gerald Nutter said each month of delay costs the YMCA $5,000 in mortgage payments, plus maintenance expenses, that would not exist if the building could be sold.

The YMCA moved its operations out of the building in May but agreed that the Lighthouse Program was needed, and so kept open a portion of the building until Lighthouse could find a new home.

Once the homeless program moves out, Nutter said, the YMCA can proceed with plans to sell the building to the city for use as a low-income, single-room-occupancy hotel.

“We are now kind of at the mercy of the city,” Nutter said.