Offer of Help Goes Begging : Charity: A self-made millionaire is trying to repay a debt to society by aiding the homeless with his own welfare program. But it is not as simple as it sounds.
Eager to repay society for his success, a self-made immigrant millionaire in the San Fernando Valley has started what is believed to be the first welfare program in the nation run by a businessman.
Dan Sandel of Devon Industries is offering 50 homeless people a job in his Chatsworth surgical supplies factory and a virtually free place to live for up to nine months.
But for all his good intentions, Sandel is finding that it surprisingly difficult to help the down and out. Social welfare agencies and government officials in Los Angeles County seem reluctant to refer clients to him, despite a clear need for additional services. By conservative estimates, there are at least 38,420 homeless people in the county on any given night and only 8,300 beds in shelters.
Of the homeless workers Sandel has found, most have far more serious problems than he anticipated. Only two of six have stuck with the program since it began two months ago: an ex-convict with a drinking problem and a recovering crack addict who was turning tricks on Skid Row as recently as four months ago.
Although some social workers say a 33% success rate is not bad for a fledgling program, Sandel is so discouraged that he has reluctantly postponed plans to buy an apartment building or house to use as a shelter.
“Something doesn’t jibe here,” said Sandel, 54, a naturalized American born in Israel. “The whole country is talking about the lack of jobs. But I can’t seem to find anyone who is homeless simply because of the current economic situation.
“If there are such people, how do I find them? And if they don’t exist--if most of the homeless are drug addicts or alcoholics or mentally ill--then maybe jobs and a place to stay aren’t the answer after all.”
Sandel’s experience calls attention to the longstanding enigma of who the homeless are and how best to help them.
Experts agree that the homeless problem is so complex that it cannot be easily fixed by well-meaning novices such as Sandel. But they say he should be encouraged to persevere with his Fresh Start program, which fits in with President Bush’s “thousand points of light” philosophy and efforts by liberal groups such as Business for Social Responsibility.
A self-made millionaire who came to this country more than 30 years ago, Sandel has long tried to repay society by doling out change to panhandlers and donating thousands of dollars to soup kitchens.
“I was literally homeless when I came here from Israel, and people here helped me,” Sandel said. “It disturbs me to see 3,000 people on TV waiting in line for 500 jobs when we’re the richest country in the world.”
When his son Ari, 18, suggested last winter that he stop giving handouts to the homeless and offer them work and shelter instead, Sandel latched onto the idea with characteristic zeal.
It was the same enthusiasm he brought to a no-smoking policy he started at Devon Industries seven years ago after a heart attack forced him to quit a three-pack-a-day habit. From his hospital bed, Sandel laid down the law: The company would no longer hire smokers, and employees were prohibited from lighting up anywhere at the company’s three sites, including the parking lot. Smokers were encouraged to take a company-paid course in how to quit.
Now only a handful of Sandel’s 450 employees smoke, and he has high hopes of achieving similar success with his homeless program.
“Have you seen the movie ‘Hero?’ ” Sandel asked, referring to director Stephen Frears’ examination of the mechanics of hero-building and hero worship. “I thought it would be like that, an inspiration to others.”
But it has not proved to be that easy.
First, an attorney took several months to draw up a liability release the homeless are required to sign before entering the program, and charged Sandel $2,500. Then, Sandel tried to buy a house or apartment building to use as a shelter, only to find that it would take at least a year to get the proper zoning permits from the city.
Impatient to start, he rented a two-bedroom apartment in September on Saticoy Street near the factory for $650 a month and hired the wife of one of his employees to find clients.
Only one agency--Skid Row Development Corp.--responded to the company’s telephone queries, and four of the people it referred have dropped out of the program or been asked to leave.
One woman could not get along with the others. Another never showed up. A third believed that the devil was after her. The fourth beat up a friend, leaving pools of blood on the apartment floor, Sandel said.
“It’s mind-boggling. I was just stunned,” said Sandel, adding that he thought mandatory drug tests and in-depth interviews would provide sufficient screening.
The two remaining women are struggling to stay in the program despite health and morale problems, and Devon Industries has had to bend rules against excessive absenteeism to allow them to remain.
Tonee, 27, is an ex-convict and recovering alcoholic with a tear-drop tattoo under her left eye who served a five-year prison term for a crime she declined to reveal. Her older sister was the one kicked out of the program for assaulting a friend.
Karen Johnson, 31, is a recovering crack addict and former prostitute with less than four months sobriety. She has four children whom her mother and a friend are raising.
Five days a week, the former Skid Row residents rise before dawn and take the five-mile bus ride to Sandel’s factory. From 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., their job is to put at least 300 disposable needles an hour into little red boxes for the minimum hourly wage of $4.25, or $170 a week before taxes.
“Every day, I say I’m going to quit, but she keeps my courage up,” Johnson said of Tonee.
Monotonous as the job is, it offers the women a chance to save at least $2,000 apiece for the six- to nine-month period during which their monthly rent is only $100 each. And like all Devon employees, they are eligible for raises, promotions and tuition assistance once they have been with the company for six months.
Home is a freshly painted, air-conditioned apartment on the second floor of a 45-unit building inhabited mostly by working-class Latino families. To outfit the apartment, Devon employees donated surplus furniture, bedding and kitchen utensils, including a microwave oven.
“We didn’t have to bring nothing but ourselves,” said Johnson, reveling in the unaccustomed luxury.
When Sandel conceived the program, he imagined he would be helping the recently dispossessed middle and working class. But one minor incident out of the women’s daily lives illustrates the gap between Sandel’s expectations and reality.
Neither woman had ever used a dishwasher before moving into the apartment. When they ran out of powdered detergent recently, they used liquid dishwashing soap. The soapy water overflowed and damaged the linoleum.
“This guy says he’s been homeless, but the struggle he’s talking about is like the Depression,” Johnson said. “He’s never been down, down, like me and Tonee.”
Some experts are not surprised that Sandel has had problems attracting and keeping homeless workers.
“Serious mental illness, substance abuse and family breakdown are the norm, not the exception” among the homeless population, wrote Richard W. White, a federal anti-poverty program administrator from 1964-1981, in “Rude Awakenings: What the Homeless Crisis Tells Us.”
According to this school of thought, Sandel is the victim of a ruse perpetrated by liberals who portray the homeless as “just like you and me” in order to raise charitable donations and support for social welfare spending, White and others say.
“There are no purely economic homeless, period,” White said in a telephone interview. “If there were, we would have solved the problem long ago.”
But other experts who believe the homeless are a diverse group, including those capable of working, are startled by Sandel’s difficulties. They say more people are out on the street as the result of political and economic causes, including the sharp decline since the 1970s in low-income apartments and federally subsidized housing.
“One out of three homeless people could go right back into the work force,” said Dr. Ellen L. Bassuk, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and president of a Massachusetts-based organization that finds permanent housing for the homeless. “There’s got to be something problematic with the Fresh Start program or the agencies he’s tapping into.”
With no contacts in the tightly knit world of social service providers, Sandel has been at a distinct disadvantage.
More than two dozen private and public welfare agencies the company contacted have failed to refer clients to the program, or even return phone calls in many cases, said Phyllis Horan, a former operating room nurse Sandel hired as the program’s part-time coordinator.
“The feeling I’m getting is they don’t care . . . it’s like it’s not in their job description,” Horan said. “I’m frustrated because there have got to be people out there--I can’t believe all the people who got burnt out and lost their jobs in the L.A. riots have all found jobs and shelter by now.”
Part of the problem is the agencies are “understaffed, underfunded and overwhelmed,” said Tanya Tull, founder of Beyond Shelter, a private, nonprofit agency that relocates homeless families. “They are too busy trying to provide food and shelter for these people to think of the next step,” she added, promising to help Sandel.
“I got 220 calls a day when I ran a 70-bed shelter in West Hollywood,” said Bob Erlenbusch, head of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Homelessness. He promised to help Sandel find clients.
Others suggested that Sandel may have to modify his expectations and accept recovering addicts, as he has reluctantly done. Others, including Arnold Hiatt of Business for Social Responsibility, suggested that a longer preparation period might have resulted in fewer problems.
Close to giving up at times, he is trying to take satisfaction in helping a handful of people. “There is a saying in Jewish,” Sandel said, “that if you help one person, you are helping the whole world.”
