The Changing Face of Homelessness in O.C. : Recession: It’s no longer just street people who fill shelters. Many had homes but lost them with their jobs.

Unable to sleep in a gymnasium full of homeless strangers at 4:30 a.m., a salesman who earned $60,000 last year pulls a dime from his jeans and buys a cigarette.

A middle-aged woman who owned a Nordstrom’s charge card four years ago sits on the edge of her Army-issue cot at the Santa Ana armory. Nearby, a former accountant is snoring louder than the ex-prison inmate bunking next to him.

As the state’s recession deepens, homeless stereotypes in Orange County are being challenged by a new breed of homeless person--one who is more used to living in a home with a two-car garage than on the street.

“It’s frightening out there,” said Sandee Gordon, director of the 110-bed Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter in Costa Mesa, one of the county’s largest.

“Whether people are degreed or day laborers, it’s all the same,” Gordon said. “We’re seeing people in our shelter who had six months’ savings in the bank and went through that. I’ve lived in Orange County all my life and I’ve never seen it this bad.”

What the newly homeless find is a county that is poorly prepared to handle additional demands on services. Not including the seasonal armory shelters, there are 1,000 temporary beds for about 12,000 homeless people, according to estimates from advocacy groups for homeless people.

Most of the beds are in transitional, 60-day shelters. In a county of more than 2 million people, there are fewer than 100 beds in year-round, emergency shelters that serve single, homeless men.

“There is real desperation out there and fear from those who are impoverished in Orange County,” said Dolores Barrett, social services director for the Salvation Army in Santa Ana. “We see it in the form of aggression from our clients and it comes from a fear there isn’t going to be enough food, or rental assistance.”

Homeless ex-professionals can be found anywhere along the chain of shelters, from the transitional homes scattered across the county to the Santa Ana Civic Center, where many homeless people still stay despite a recent ban on overnight camping imposed by the Santa Ana City Council. But not all give up hope of rekindling their careers.

Lee Zapatke is well-known among homeless people at the Civic Center. As he walks past the benches leading to the Pagoda--a landmark where many homeless sleep--Zapatke is greeted by old friends who shake his hand and bum cigarettes.

Zapatke says he was was once a top auto salesman who earned more than $100,000 annually and candidly admits that a drinking problem cost him his livelihood. He can afford to be generous. After calling the Civic Center home for almost a year, he enrolled in a welfare-required job program at Goodwill Industries in Santa Ana. After a month in the program, he was hired as a supervisor.

Zapatke, 42, who says he attended college, still lives at the Salvation Army Hospitality House, but he plans to move into a house or apartment with friends.

“I used to be like everyone else,” he said. “I had a home and several cars and all the good things that people get used to. I’d see these people walking down the street and look down on these dirty, unsavory-looking people.

“I never thought I’d be lumped with them, but living on the streets has changed my outlook considerably.”

Once he lived on a champagne budget, but with fork in hand, Zapatke wolfs down the shelter’s Saturday dinner special that has been the same for the past 14 years--beans and franks, simmered with bacon and onion.

“I never got real badly depressed like a lot of guys because I always had a goal to get out of here,” he said. “I know attorneys and accountants living at the Civic Center who always had to come all the way back, right away.”

“They’re never willing to accept anything less than what they’re doing before and they never land any kind of job and keep failing,” he said. “I’m taking small steps up the ladder and I know I’ll get out of here.”

Less than a year ago, welfare, rent assistance and homeless shelters were just words that Mary Fuson read in newspapers and heard on television. Then financial disaster struck when her daughter, Chandra, was born three months premature.

Medical complications developed and Fuson, 37, took a leave of absence from her job as an assistant director of an after-school program for a local school district. Fuson said her husband left after months of enduring the stress of their ill daughter and dealing with the bills.

Two months ago, her bank account shrank to $60 and she had to leave the $1,200-per-month rental home in Orange that she and her husband had shared.

“I got on the phone and started dialing the numbers of shelters I’d been told about,” she said. “All I heard from them is, ‘No, no, no, we have no room.’ Finally, after about 15 tries, I found this place.”

Fuson lives in a 60-day transitional shelter that has converted an apartment complex into communal-style dwellings for homeless people. Four families live in each apartment. Each family has a bedroom and shares a common area with two stoves and two refrigerators.

Privacy is sacrificed, but the shelter provides food along with self-help programs like job workshops. Fuson says she has met people in the shelter who worked in construction and engineering fields.

“But I still miss my old home,” she said. “I think what I miss most is wrapping my comforters around me and curling up in front of the TV with my remote.”

Since she has become homeless, Fuson sits down every evening with her journal and reflects about what has happened to her family, which also includes two sons, 16 and 20 years old. The younger boy lives with her and the older one lives in an apartment.

Dennis Davis, 41, who ran a Costa Mesa warehouse for 18 years, isn’t as lucky as Fuson. If he doesn’t live on the streets, he stays at emergency shelters such as the armories, where personal space is limited to what can be stuffed under a cot.

Sitting on his cot at the Santa Ana armory on Warner Avenue, which the county opens to the homeless when the weather turns cold, Davis puts life in a shelter in perspective.

“It’s not raining in here,” noted Davis, who has been living on the streets for about a year. “Also, the food’s not bad and at least there’s a lot of it. I appreciate what they’re doing for us here.”

With his neatly trimmed, graying beard and clean, powder-blue sweater and slacks, it’s hard to tell that Davis has been looking futilely for a job for more than a year.

Lack of a stable job reference is a problem--Davis says he was laid off by his previous employer. Not owning a car and having to carry his wardrobe in a backpack also make it difficult to prepare for interviews.

“It’s hard to escape the feeling that I deserve all this,” he said. “There’s got to be a reason why I’m here. I must have done something to make it happen.”

Depression is a major problem among the homeless, said Susan Oakson, director of the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force, a private, nonprofit group.

“No matter how intelligent or capable they are, many homeless people just do not believe things can ever get better for themselves. You talk to them and get that real dead feeling of hopelessness,” she said. “They talk to you and what you hear is the sound of someone who has given up.”

After being homeless for 18 months, Jim Zale, 39, a former computer programmer who was recently evicted from a Mission Viejo townhouse, wasn’t so sure he would escape the streets until he got a job as a hotel desk clerk. He will continue to live in parks and under freeways until he can save enough to rent an apartment.

“It’s hard. There’s no trust out here,” Zale said.

Zale said he used to work for an aerospace contractor but lost his job during mass layoffs about two years ago. With only a few weeks’ salary saved in the bank, Zale lived off credit cards for several months until his financial resources ran dry.

“Jobs for my industry are tight,” he said. “I stayed with friends, but when it got to the point where I felt I was sponging off them, I did what I had to do.”

In the last 18 months, Zale has learned which churches serve the best meals on which days. Experience has taught him not to walk on the street with a backpack or anything that would mark him as homeless.

“I’ve also been beaten up by kids who just don’t like homeless people,” he said. “It was right out here by McDonald’s (on 1st and Main streets in Santa Ana) and plenty of people saw it, but nobody helped.

“We’re used to the good life that’s supposed to exist in Orange County,” he said. “People here are either really well off or just hanging on, a paycheck or two away from disaster. Either way, they fear the homeless because we represent what can happen to them.”