Testimony : ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT POVERTY IN ORANGE COUNTY : ‘The Poor Are the Underpinnings of Our Lifestyle’

I have lived in Orange County for 31 years. We came down here because my husband, Frank, an aerospace engineer, was transferred from Los Angeles. When we first moved to Orange County there were bean fields all over the place. We’ve seen Orange County change from a bedroom community to a very urban community where we have a large impoverished community with 10,000 homeless.

We want to be the world headquarters for large corporations, the financial center of banks and brokerage firms, have premier performing arts centers and the most beautiful and safe planned communities. But we don’t want to pay attention to the people whose hard but low-paid work makes all that possible. We’re greatly annoyed by pleas for affordable housing, care for the poor, better public transportation, better bilingual education and better human relations between the police and the community.

We’re annoyed by these pleas because we see them as needed by “others,” not by us. We’re becoming afraid because there are so many more of the others. And the others are different from us not only because of race or ethnicity but because they’re poor, and that’s not what Orange County is supposed to be.

We founded SOS out of St. John’s Church in Costa Mesa in 1970 because there were a lot of social needs in Orange County that were not, and still are not, recognized. We were motivated by the statement by the U.S. Catholic bishops which said we must attack the causes of poverty. That’s hard to do. We still work in the migrant labor camps right in the shadow of the L.A. Times (building in Orange County) and South Coast Plaza, where living conditions have been horrendous for the last 20 years.

Now SOS, which is a volunteer organization separate from the church, serves 30,000 people a month with emergency food and medical care.

We have a very large blue-collar community that just hangs on by their fingernails to live and survive here because they can’t afford the high cost of housing. Clerks in our stores, the people who mow our lawns, who take care of our children so we can have our two jobs, nurses, schoolteachers, mail carriers, people in lower paying jobs really have a hard time to live, but what would we do without them?

We can’t have the lifestyle that we’re trying to maintain without the people who we resent. We want to have a beautiful environment. We want to have the arts. We want to have beautiful homes. We want to have glitzy shopping centers. And yet we are surprised that the people who keep all that in shape for us have impacted the county. We somehow are really surprised that they need places to live, that they need access to health care, and education for their kids that can prepare them to live in our community.

The reality you don’t see is that we have 20 people living in a two-bedroom apartment and they yell and scream about these awful people crowding into this apartment and deteriorating our neighborhoods. But the reality is that we are lacking something like 50,000 to 100,000 low-income units in our county, which accounts for the overcrowding and the homelessness.

There’s no medical care for the many poor who don’t qualify for welfare except in the emergency room, where they’re billed for it. The only dental care that a poor person can get through the county is to have their teeth pulled instead of a root canal, and then they pay $20 an extraction.

People say they can go to the county hospital but they don’t realize we don’t have a county hospital; it was sold to UC Irvine and the prices are horrendous. They don’t realize that Orange County comes in second to last of all counties in California in the amount of money spent for indigent medical care.

At SOS we’ll have a young person who is a drug addict who’s desperately trying to get into treatment and he’s waiting to get into Phoenix House or one of the few other residential drug programs for indigents, and it’s full. He has to call every day to see if there’s a bed and he has to keep fighting, and if he doesn’t call he’s put down at the bottom of the list. The point is these people lose their resolve; they go back on the drugs.

We have 21 or 23 detox beds for indigent alcoholics in all of Orange County. And people talk about all these drunks cluttering up their streets and making their lives miserable. Those of us who enjoy the Orange County lifestyle, which is wonderful, close our eyes and, I think, our hearts to what’s keeping us up: The poor are the underpinnings of our lifestyle.

Orange County is using illegal aliens now as a smoke-screen, as a scapegoat, because that way we get the white lower-income people to jump on board and say the immigrants are the problem. But we had our class differences before the immigrants. One of our sons was on the football team in the high schools in Costa Mesa about 12 years ago. They had a great team and they were beating the pants off one of the schools in Newport Beach and the Newport stands started to cheer, “Hey, hey, that’s OK, you’re gonna work for us one day.” One of my daughters used to teach ESL (English as a second language) to the maids from Pelican Hill and Newport, and their employers wouldn’t even drive the people who worked for them to classes. One woman got home from school late one night and they wouldn’t let her in and she slept on the patio in the rain.

The woman who takes care of other people’s kids in Pelican Hill goes home to a crowded apartment in Santa Ana where there are 14 or 15 people living. She hasn’t seen her kids all week and she finds they’ve been home from school because they’ve been sick, and nobody’s been home with them. She has to try to find somebody now to take care of them. The clinics are closed, so she has to take them to the emergency room; she has no benefits in her job, she has no vacation pay. So she goes to the emergency room to have her kids treated for maybe strep throat. She gets billed for the use of the emergency room and this takes a week’s wage.

Then we see families with two and three children who are living in their cars. Every time I try and see if there’s room in shelters or if we can put people in a motel and see the look on the children’s face of anxiety, wondering are we going to have a place to stay tonight--is she gonna get us in somewhere? This is Orange County, this is an awful hidden part of our lives that we really don’t see.

This poverty affects all groups. When I see a homeless family living in their car, it’s usually an Anglo family. The immigrant families usually crowd in with each other. We don’t do that in our Anglo community. The majority of the homeless families are Anglo and I think that’s something we don’t want to admit, either.

In this year’s budget, public protection, which is the sheriff and jails and the prosecution, gets 50% of net county dollars. Health care gets 8.8%, which is typical of our priorities. I think crime prevention also requires decent housing, adequate health care, educational programs that really help the kids develop.

We’re still hanging on desperately to a vision of Orange County that no longer exists, and until we acknowledge in a meaningful way that Orange County is no longer a white upper-middle class enclave, is no longer just Disneyland, a place of orange groves, pristine beaches and gated communities, we won’t come up with effective solutions for what the real Orange County is.

To Get Involved, call (714) 642-3451.