Homeless Family Haven to Close Soon

Standing in the yard of a makeshift Oceanside trailer park, Tara Bass squinted in the bright morning sunlight and considered the weird twist of fate that will soon cost her two homes in as many months.

In mid-May, the 23-year-old former soldier and single mother of three joined North County’s growing homeless population. A quarrel with her mother put Bass and her young family out on the street.

Pacing the lobby of a ramshackle motel, she slipped her last quarter into a pay phone to summon the help of local social service workers. Bass got a break when she landed temporary housing at the Gateway Family Community, North County’s first homeless shelter to cater exclusively to families.

But now, as Bass spends most days tending to her son and two daughters, ages 6 months to 4 years, a hard-luck mother reckons with her most recent bad news. Within weeks, the ambitious Gateway shelter project will close its doors.

For Bass and 14 other Gateway families scrambling to secure other accommodations, the end is like a trap door opening beneath them. On June 30, they will form the last graduating class of a homeless project that Oceanside officials have heralded as an unqualified success--while it lasted.

“Gateway may be closing, but we assisted a lot of people during the time we were open,” Oceanside Housing Director Richard Goodman said. “Just because we couldn’t solve the overall problem of homelessness with this shelter doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have done what we could.”

Nobody feels worse about Gateway’s closing than Tara Bass. Although she would have been required to move after 60 days to find her own lodging, she says she still feels a sense of loss.

If not for herself, she feels sorry for those homeless families who would have followed in her footsteps.

“This was my last resort,” said Bass, a bodybuilder with a bone-crusher handshake. “I called other shelters, but they all told me there was no other place for a mother with three kids.

“Now, when this place closes, there will absolutely be nowhere for a mother like to me to go. It’s funny, a homeless person talking about good luck. But I just feel lucky that I got here when I did, one week before they took their last client.”

Though it was only envisioned as a short-term solution to Oceanside’s homeless problem, Gateway Community showed what can be achieved when politicians, volunteers and businessmen work together, city officials said.

Since it opened in May, 1990--with much of its $1.5-million price tag covered by local business donations of time and labor--the shelter has been fully booked with single mothers and fathers and their anxious broods, including a homeless man with seven children and many couples working minimum-wage jobs who struggled to provide for their families.

Over the years, Gateway has offered 146 homeless families as much as two months of rent-free time to collect their breath and decide what step to take next to get back on their feet, social workers say.

The project also represented the first time in California that trailers were used to temporarily house the homeless, city officials say.

The two-bedroom trailers provided more privacy and a homier atmosphere than the dormitory-style shelters in most big cities. A small staff helped direct clients to job counseling opportunities and housing leads.

Officials bemoan the fact that their program is reaching its end just when it is needed the most--as more homeless families are landing on the streets of North County than ever before.

According to recent census statistics, only 5.5% of Oceanside’s estimated 838 homeless residents are housed in any of the city’s shelters. The rest live on the street.

The problem of homeless families has been particularly thorny, city officials say. Often living out of their cars or wandering in groups, they meet with red tape and rejection at most shelters.

A 1988 Oceanside task force proposed that the city make helping homeless families a priority, which led to Gateway’s opening several months later.

“We realized at the time (that) there was no shelter in the North County that we knew of that would take intact families,” Goodman said. “The way things worked in most places, if a family walked into a shelter, the father, mother and the children were all divided up, and we didn’t think that was right.”

The elation over Gateway’s success is tempered by the frustration of no longer being able to meet a very definite need.

“Just ask the people we helped whether they were glad for that roof over their heads, however temporary,” Goodman said. “For three years, we filled an unmet need. But we just weren’t able to keep doing it. This whole concept of housing assistance for poor people is just so difficult.

“It’s like bailing against the tide. And there’s no end in sight.”

As their short-term lease expires on the property in northeast Oceanside, next door to the San Luis Rey Mission, officials lament the difficulty of securing space for any long-term social projects in Southern California.

The land for the shelter was rented from an order of Catholic nuns for $1 a year for three years--with the understanding that the grassy field would then be vacated for development.

“This was just a three-year deal,” Goodman said. “The problem here in Southern California is that, with land prices so high, we have to be creative to get the interim use of the land before it’s developed. There’s no golden hand out there that’s just going to give you land.”

The Gateway project had its bright moments--as well as challenges--from its inception.

After finding the site and a deal to rent the trailers, plus a $200,000 government grant, officials set out to convince neighbors that a homeless shelter in their midst would not be the end of the world.

Goodman recalled a meeting where city housing officials appeared before a local homeowners group to present their case.

“They tarred and feathered us,” he said. “They were convinced that any homeless population nearby would soon be raping them and stealing from them. It was really hard to reason with them.

“I mean, we knew it wouldn’t happen. But they thought it would. They were legitimately scared. And there was very little we could say to change that.”

Within months after the center’s opening, the same people who had complained about the project were stopping by to donate food and clothing to needy parents and children.

One homeowners’ group recently sent a letter to the city saying it would have no objection if the shelter remained open for another six months. But officials were unable to negotiate a deal to continue renting the trailers.

“As long as the situation there remained the same as it is now, I personally would have no qualms with those people staying there,” said Robert Medlin, president of the board of governors of the 328-member San Luis Rey Homes Inc. “That project is doing good to give homeless people a second chance. Who could oppose that?”

Former Oceanside City Councilwoman Lucy Chavez, who lobbied hard for the Gateway Community while in office, lamented that Oceanside could only do so much on its own to tackle homelessness.

“Homelessness is just too big a problem,” she said. “The true solution comes from not just one program but from a variety of sources putting their heads together--federal, state and county, not just one small city.

“The loss of this program hurts because we made some real inroads, and now we have to surrender that turf all over again,” Chavez said. “In a better world, there would be more programs like Gateway, and they’d be year-round.”

Gateway officials took in their last family in early June. By month’s end, residents will be required to vacate and city officials must have the 15 trailers off the property by July 31.

Marva Bledsoe Chriss, executive director of the nonprofit group in Oceanside contracted to operate Gateway, said its absence will be felt immediately.

Many homeless families make only enough money to live part-time in local motels, and fathers, mothers and children alike must constantly deal with the emotional stress of life on the street.

“These families are the hidden homeless,” she said. “You don’t see them sleeping in doorways or bothering businessmen. They’re too busy looking for a secure place to park their car for the night.”

Bledsoe Chriss said she sees the great need for the center in the great numbers of people that have been turned down at the fully booked center.

“It’ll just be sad to have all these people rolling in off the street and have to tell them that we have no place for them. We made a difference in people’s lives, and we won’t be able to make that difference anymore.”

Bledsoe Chriss said 90% of graduating Gateway families were able to move in to more permanent housing.

“The most important thing we did there,” she said, “was give people a chance to regain their dignity.”

These days, the grass grows tall at the trailer park as families prepare to leave. Salvation Army trucks haul away donated clothing that won’t be needed.

On the wall of the tiny office hangs a collection of photographs of the families who have passed through the makeshift trailer park. There are smiling faces. Young boys in baseball caps, fathers clutching daughters in their arms. And there’s a snapshot of the baby born while her parents lived at Gateway.

Come graduation day, Tara Bass hopes to be able to move into a new apartment with her children. But, whatever happens, she thanks the staff for saving her the pain of having to swallow her pride, get on that Greyhound bus and head back to Milwaukee to live with relatives.

Now she plans to stay in San Diego County no matter what. For her and others like her, she said, Gateway was a second chance.

City officials can’t help but agree.

“This was a project that worked,” housing director Goodman said. “The bummer with the whole thing is that we’re going out of business.”