Center Unwanted Neighbor to Residents : Dispute: Garden Grove homeowners want facility for mentally ill to move.

The day care center run by the Mental Health Assn. of Orange County is in a nondescript office building on Chapman Avenue, just around the corner from the prim homes along Shady Acre Street.

Inside the center, people who are homeless and mentally ill wash their clothes, shoot pool, and participate in a self-esteem group meeting.

On Shady Acre, residents on a recent weekday stood in front of freshly painted stucco houses, clipping flowering shrubs and plucking weeds from well-manicured lawns.

This typical Garden Grove neighborhood is the latest battleground in the NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) wars that erupt sometimes when social service agencies set up programs next to residential communities.

This clash pits the anxiety of local homeowners against the needs of the destitute mentally ill. On one side are 200 homeless men and women, who turn to the center each month for scarce counseling and medical care; on the other is a group of homeowners who have invested their lives and livelihoods in Shady Acre’s neat tract homes.

Weighing in early this year, the Garden Grove City Council voted to evict the center from the neighborhood, citing a city staff report and residents’ concerns that “criminals” now roam their streets.

But mental health officials are fighting back, filing suit in Orange County Superior Court last week--two days before the scheduled eviction--to block the action. The suit charges that the city discriminated against mentally ill people and caved in to the “irrational and unfounded fears” of neighbors when, a year after allowing the center to open, it decided the center needed a conditional use permit to operate in the office-professional zone.

Like other social services agencies, the Mental Health Assn. is well-acquainted with the NIMBY syndrome. Before opening the Garden Grove center in February, 1992, mental health officials had searched unsuccessfully for nine months to find a site.

They had occupied an office in the YMCA building in Santa Ana for four years, but when the building was sold in 1990, the center suffered the fate of its clients: homelessness. (Mental health officials had found the Santa Ana site in 1987 after scouring the county for more than a year to find a community that would accept them.)

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Last year, the Garden Grove building seemed the perfect location.

It is on a busy stretch of Chapman Avenue in a line of businesses that include a mortuary, an FHP clinic and a doctor’s office.

The building is large enough to house a recreation room with pool and table tennis tables, a laundry room, meeting rooms and adequate office space for the center’s 10-member staff.

Its clients are about 50 mentally ill homeless people who are shuttled daily from shelters in nearby Orange and Stanton. Here, these homeless, who have no other access to laundry facilities, may wash their clothes and take showers. They are served breakfast and lunch.

The men and women--about 200 individuals each month--attend classes that teach them self-esteem, how to manage finances and how to find and keep a job.

They play games, receive counseling and psychiatric help. They are taken on daily outings to parks, beaches and other places.

Those who visit the center are classified in the two main categories of mental illness: Some are manic depressive, people who suffer from severe depression. The others are schizophrenic, a condition that distorts reality.

The day care center in Garden Grove is among two such centers run for the county by the Mental Health Assn. They are an outgrowth of programs begun in the 1970s that moved the more capable mentally ill out of hospitals and back into the community with the intention of providing them with outpatient care. Several studies estimate that up to 50% of the 15,000 homeless population in the county are mentally ill.

The opening of the Garden Grove center brought almost immediate protests from neighborhood residents, especially those along Shady Acre.

Some complained to police and city officials that disheveled people walked in front of their homes. Others alleged that mentally ill homeless people were seen sleeping in a nearby grassy lot on Chapman, that they congregated in front of the building, and that they harassed neighborhood residents--allegations that mental health officials say have been exaggerated.

Then, a few weeks after the opening a year ago, an incident occurred that enraged some residents: A homeless man, 30-year-old Robert Hawk, who was visiting the center, was seen trying to break into the house of a 79-year-old widow on Shady Acre.

Pete Attanese, 31, a Shady Acre resident who witnessed the incident, said he called police who later arrested the man inside the day care center.

A police report states that the man confessed to burglaries, including one the night before in Anaheim.

“Hawk said he had some mental problems,” the police report states, “and that people didn’t understand why he did what he did. He said he had some problems with his mother and father and did what he had to do to make money and get away from them.”

This was the most serious of 21 incidents reported to the police in the 14 months the center has been open.

After the attempted break-in, center officials sought to allay residents’ concerns. The center installed security cameras outside the building to monitor clients and stop them from wandering down Shady Acre. Center director Roy Snapp-Kolas also held two open houses so neighbors could meet the clients and see firsthand what the center did for them.

The residents remained unmoved.

Floyd Pescuma, 70, a retired Pacific Bell manager, has been one of the most vocal of residents opposed to the center.

Pescuma and his wife, Dorothy, 68, moved into their Shady Acre home about 35 years ago, a year after the subdivision was completed. They have testified against the center before the City Council and Planning Commission. Theirs are the first two signatures on a petition of 115 residents who want the center relocated. Once the couple drove to the Mental Health Assn.’s other day care center in Costa Mesa; they noted that it was appropriately in a commercial district.

Floyd Pescuma keeps on file copies of the police report on the attempted break-in, letters from neighbors who oppose the center, and several planning staff reports and meeting minutes.

Pescuma said he and his neighbors are not against the center. It’s difficult to say that the center should not be located there “without sounding like jerks,” he and others said.

“We are not cowering in our houses, but we don’t feel as safe as we did before,” he said.

In summing up the opponents’ arguments, he said: “It’s the effects on the neighborhood. It scared some of the neighbors. Our whole point is the location. They’re in the wrong location for this type of operation.”

Carol Busby, director of programs for the Mental Health Assn., said the center’s quarrel is not with the neighbors but with the city. City officials told the association in 1992 that they would not need a conditional use permit, she said, then capitulated to residents’ complaints.

Busby said the association could not afford the $200,000 it would cost to relocate, even if it found another location.

Dr. Ike Kempler, a county physician and psychiatrist who visits the center weekly, said the fears of residents are not borne out by studies of the mentally ill. Such people are no more prone to violence than the rest of the population, he said.

“This is an asset to the community,” Kempler said about the center. “It should be a model for other communities because . . . every community has this population.”

Among them is 62-year-old Rose, a mother of three who has been going to the center for the last few months.

Rose, who asked that her last name not be used, is a schizophrenic. She became homeless after a traumatic divorce and now lives in an Orange shelter. She had lived in her car for 18 months until one night she landed in the hospital after a suicide attempt, she said.

The hospital social worker referred her to the mental health center, which she described as the best thing to happen to her in the last three years.

“If people would just understand, they would have compassion,” she said, blotting her tears with her index finger. “We are not dangerous people. This place gives us a place to go, otherwise we’re out on the streets.”

Then there is John Seltzer, 24, who said the cause of the neighborhood uproar is a stereotypical view of the mentally ill.

“People think we’re babbling idiots or psychopathic killers,” Seltzer said. “If they only know how good this place has been to me.”

Seltzer, who suffers major depression, said the center is the reason he is still alive. Before he came to the center more than a year ago, Seltzer was roaming central county and sleeping “under almost every brush in Santa Ana and Orange.”

With the center’s help, Seltzer, a graduate of Back Bay High School in Newport Beach, enrolled in a vocational program and later found a job with a Huntington Beach doctor. He was able to afford his own apartment, but just as he was about to be promoted to office manager, the doctor died in a car crash on the San Diego Freeway.

“I’m not here to camp out on their lawn,” said Seltzer, who is again seeking work. “I want to be able to get ahead in life.”

Center representatives met with city officials late last week to discuss moving the center elsewhere in Garden Grove. City Manager George Tindall would not provide details, saying the lawsuit prevented him from commenting.

But social service workers across Orange County are crossing their fingers.

Among them are Jean Forbath, a co-founder of Share Our Selves, one of the county’s largest charities, which only a few years ago was evicted from the Rea Community Center in Costa Mesa following similar complaints.

“Everyone says that this is a wonderful program, but it doesn’t belong here,” Forbath said about her experiences with the NIMBY syndrome in Orange County. “We have to be sensitive to the neighbors’ complaints, but it’s an issue not only of charity, but an issue of justice. We have to give up a little of our own comfort so other people” can have some comfort.