A FORUM FOR COMMUNITY ISSUES : Community Essay : Safety, My Daughter and the Homeless : As a local church tried to establish a shelter near a preschool, a father asked how this society could leave such misery on its streets.

Not long ago I had to vote on whether to allow a church in my neighborhood in Pasadena to start a small shelter for the mentally ill homeless.

My daughter attends preschool there, at Westminster Presbyterian on North Lake Avenue. The shelter was proposed for another section of the church’s labyrinthine basement. The people served would have been bused in at 9:00 each night and out in the morning at 6:30--all were to be mentally ill homeless men and women who had been screened by another local organization, Pacific Clinics, which was working actively with them during the day. No walk-in traffic would have been accepted, and a security service was proposed to check the grounds during the night.

Extraordinarily, City Council member Rick Cole and the church made opening the shelter contingent on the approval of the church’s neighbors, through ballots sent to 750 homes. Legally, no approval of any kind is required for any shelter or residential-care facility under six beds, and there are such facilities already in our neighborhood.

My wife, Janet, attended one of the meetings for the shelter while I took care of our daughter. We discussed the proposal at length and convinced ourselves that under the plan the preschool and mentally ill populations would not overlap, and that while there might be a chance of a mentally ill person coming back during the daytime, it would add only an increment of risk to the preschool. The school is a good one and the people at the church believe they must have a responsible connection to the community. I respect this. When I received my anonymous ballot, I could not do other than vote yes, for the shelter. But I wasn’t happy.

I am not happy that I had to weigh risk to my daughter and the security of our neighborhood against the needs of people in misery. We make no attempt to take care of the mentally ill in an effective, societal way. Are we back in the Middle Ages, when “poor Tom” was “a’cold” and Crazy Jane talked to the bishop? Where is our government when people are sleeping under bushes and going through the trash at the local hamburger stand? Our closest governmental representative, himself a near-volunteer, as Pasadena’s government is structured, asked for our assent to let other volunteers and not-for-profit professionals make a tiny dent in this problem. Taking care of the mentally ill shouldn’t depend on this.

When the votes were counted, the neighborhood did not approve the shelter.

Serious mental illness is an organic disability. But with the advent of the major antipsychotic tranquilizers, the authorities figured they could calm down the mentally ill long enough to shove them out onto the city streets. After a while, an inordinate number of the hospitals’ former charges had stopped taking their phenothiazines and were back to their original condition, now without shelter and reliable food. This was the result of an unusual meeting of the minds of Democrats and Republicans. People on the right, like Ronald Reagan in California, wanted to save money and didn’t believe, despite the piety of their public utterances, that they had any responsibility to anyone. The left, led by radical psychotherapists and civil libertarians, found a strange and even romantic coincidence between the words freedom and mental illness.

The habitability of our streets took it on the chin. Anyone who walks, rides the bus or attempts to exit a car is allowed to share in the misery and fear that inhabits extreme mental illness. I walk to the neighborhood doughnut shop and there they are, bereft, talking to themselves, panhandling. The owner of the shop, a Chinese immigrant, is our local “point of light,” attempting to deal with them, sometimes even employ them. An uneasy balance is achieved.

But where has the responsible center of our polity gone? Why have we left this problem to volunteers, passers-by, uneasy neighbors and the police? It’s as if we are ourselves crazy, as a society.