Workers Build Better Life for Themselves, Homeless

Lawrence Valadez has done 12 years’ worth of drugs on the streets of San Diego, but on Wednesday he worked to get people off the streets in Escondido.

Valadez and 17 other ex-cons and recovering drug and alcohol abusers began refurbishing 16 apartment units, which will become North County’s largest transitional housing project for homeless families with adult males.

The apartments, at the corner of Washington Avenue and Aster Street in the heart of a low-income neighborhood, were bought by the North County Interfaith Council last month after the organization received $434,000 in state aid and won approval for an additional $1.7 million in federal funding to carry out the project, called Genesis.

Valadez, who is part of Victory Outreach, a Christian program based in San Diego, has been off the streets for nine months and feels that projects like this give substance abusers a chance to redeem themselves.

“It’s just being able to put back something into the community that we took out. Now is our chance to come in and do something good,” Valadez said.

“It’s a blessing to be a part of this,” the 39-year-old hair stylist said, as Christian music blared through a boom box at the site.

Organizers hope to turn the two-story beige building with tattered green trim into a housing project that will open in late December and serve 220 adults and 470 children over the next five years.

North County Interfaith Council, which also runs five other shelters in the area, will screen the residents and provide them with counseling, day care and other social services.

Families, which must include a male over the age of 12 to be eligible, will be allowed to stay at the apartments for up to a year as they try to get themselves back on their feet.

“It’s an opportunity for folks to really make a change in their lives. We’re not into warehousing people,” said Suzanne Pohlman, executive director of the council.

Although there are no accurate figures on how many homeless families are in North County, the council served 4,317 homeless parents and children in fiscal year 1990-91 alone, Pohlman said.

Families make up the fastest-growing group of homeless; the number of homeless parents and children helped by the agency was 1,721 in 1988-89 and is up 251% over then, Pohlman said.

“This project doesn’t begin to make a dent in the need, and that is really sobering, but it is a beginning,” she said.

“Until this point, every homeless family that had an adult male or male over the age of 12 had to go to downtown San Diego for services,” Pohlman said.

Every other shelter for the homeless in North County is exclusively for men or women or families headed by women without teen-age or adult males.

Residents in the area of the Genesis project don’t seem to mind having it next door.

“It’s going to be beautiful, I guess,” said Will Toledo, 28, who has lived in the neighborhood for 12 years and visited the men renovating the apartments. “They’re Christians, and they’ll pray for you.”

The council, founded in 1979, consists of 70 member institutions and 35 affiliated organizations in San Diego County representing a variety of religious faiths and provides legal services, shelter, food, clothing and other social services for the needy.