Cuts May Double Homelessness, Experts Say : Poverty: L.A. County will slash general relief payments for some to $212 next month. An increase in encampments, panhandling and crime is seen.

With Los Angeles County slashing its welfare payments for single adults to a level that will not even pay for a room in a Skid Row hotel, thousands of people are likely to become homeless in coming months.

The payments, called general relief, are the only lawful source of income other than food stamps for more than 100,000 destitute adults.

Last year, Los Angeles County gave these paupers $341 a month. Then, pleading poverty, the county reduced its payments to $293. In September, it will slash them to $212.

“How can a man live on $212?” asked Skid Row hotel owner Michael Kishner. “How can he pay the rent?”

The answer, according to many homeless advocates, general relief recipients and hotel owners, is that he cannot.

Best estimates now are that between 40,000 and 75,000 people are homeless in Los Angeles County on any given night.

Some predict that those numbers will double.

“You’ll see increases in encampments, increases in panhandling . . . levels of degradation unheard of before,” said Jamie Court, a staffer at the Harbor Interfaith Shelter in San Pedro.

“People talk about the Big One,” said county welfare worker Norma Pearson. “This is the Big One.”

But how quickly and dramatically the cityscape changes will depend on a number of unpredictable factors, such as how many general relief recipients will be able to stay with friends or family, or will double, triple or even quadruple up in cheap apartments.

People who live with family members or roommates make up the vast majority of general relief recipients. And it is unclear whether they will be able to keep a roof over their heads.

Paul Koegel, a RAND researcher who studies homelessness, said their margin for maintaining shelter will be dramatically reduced by the lower payments, and any kind of crisis, even a brief illness, could put them over the edge.

How the housing market will react is another mystery. County Chief Administrative Officer Harry L. Hufford predicted even worse slum conditions. “This is tragic stuff,” he said. “The marketplace will produce something which is undesirable for almost any human condition. . . . There’s also going to be dislocation, no question.”

Some increases in crime and health problems seem inevitable as well. Judging from experience, welfare worker Arthur Ellerd said, some relief recipients will supplement their checks by dealing dope and some will turn to prostitution.

Others will steal.

“Hey, what would you do?” asked a recipient who declined to give his name. To qualify for general relief, people are allowed to have no more than $50 to their names.

Recipients such as Michael Yocum, a soft-spoken 38-year-old who says he cannot work because of a back injury sustained while cleaning buses, are trying to sort out their options. Yocum pays $235 for his room--a bargain even by Skid Row standards. But soon his rent will be more than his welfare check.

On medication to help him cope with despondency and rage, Yocum shuddered the other day as he gazed out the window and contemplated joining a passing parade of raggedy people pushing shopping carts, criminals pushing drugs, and down-and-outers curled in cardboard boxes on the sidewalk.

“You hope you don’t end up like that,” he said, as a tear coursed down his cheek.

The cuts were approved last month by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which was facing an unprecedented budget shortfall. Anti-poverty groups are challenging the action in court, asserting that the county broke the law in the way it calculated the cuts.

The county justified going below the $285 minimum grant allowed under state law by maintaining that the free medical care it provides the poor is worth $73 a month.

Anti-poverty groups say that because the county is obligated to provide the medical care, it cannot figure that into its general relief equation.

Even if the advocacy groups win in court, they may only succeed in stalling the cuts for six months. That is because a new state law takes effect next year that allows any county that can prove it is in budgetary distress to reduce general relief to a flat minimum of $212 a month.

“The best we can hope for is a delay,” said Barbara Zeidman, assistant general manager of the Los Angeles City Housing Department. “There is no reprieve.”

Owners of some of Los Angeles’ least desirable housing say they cannot cut prices enough to serve general relief recipients on a reduced budget and stay in business.

Kishner, owner of Skid Row’s Ford Hotel, said he might be able to knock $10 off his $260-a-month single room occupancy rates and still make his mortgage payments. But what would be the point? His rooms would remain unaffordable to the general relief recipients who make up most of his tenants.

“The people would have to go on the street,” he said.

John S. Hong, who manages the St. George Hotel on Skid Row, said he lowered rents last December to accommodate those hit by the county’s last reduction in general relief payments from $341 to $293. But this time, Hong said, the best he probably will be able to do is come up with a 25-day rate--giving general relief recipients 25 days of shelter and five or six days of homelessness per month.

Outside of Skid Row, the outlook for housing appears equally bleak. San Pedro’s Harbor Interfaith Shelter recently surveyed 35 low-cost housing providers in its area, and almost all said they would not be able to continue housing general relief recipients.

Even most nonprofit hotel operators say they will not be able to make ends meet. Candy Rupp of the Skid Row Housing Trust, which operates nine hotels, said she could not reduce rents below $235 unless the county agreed to pay hotel operators directly. That, she said, would protect her against deadbeats.

Perhaps the one exception is the SRO Housing Corp., a Skid Row nonprofit organization that prides itself on efficient management and has about 600 beds for people on general relief. Director Andy Raubeson said he plans to cut already low rates for these tenants from $195 to $180 a month.

Counties are required by state law to support indigents and for years have maintained, against all evidence, that the grants provided are more than enough to pay for housing. Only this month, welfare officials in Los Angeles reluctantly gave up the pretense under pressure from anti-poverty groups.

The officials dropped a longstanding requirement that people produce rent receipts in order to stay on the dole, acknowledging that many of the receipts they were getting were phony.

County officials now acknowledge that substantial numbers of people on general relief are homeless, but say they do not have an estimate of how many. Sketchy survey data compiled by private groups indicates that the number may be as high as 25,000.

Hotel owners say that many of their general relief tenants pay for shelter only part of the month and live on the streets the rest.

One survey by the city Housing Department suggests that current benefits are enough to pay for three weeks of shelter in a typical single-room-occupancy hotel; and next month’s reduction will be enough to pay for two weeks.

General relief recipients are scattered throughout the county. But Skid Row is a mecca for many of them. So much food is given away there that no one with the energy to stand in a line will go hungry. The liquor stores open at 6 a.m. sharp. Drugs are available in quantities to fit any budget. And there are many temporary shelters and other social services--including free legal help.

“I got lawyers down here,” said James McGowan, a 45-year-old who said he is a Vietnam combat veteran with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

McGowan said he sometimes stays with friends on the Row--”when you’ve got a jug anybody will let you in”--sometimes checks in to shelters and sometimes builds himself a “cardboard house” on the street.

In Los Angeles County, the number of people on general relief has doubled in the last three years, reaching more than 105,000. By contrast to neighboring counties, that caseload is staggering. Orange County, which plans to reduce its payments from $307 to $299 next month, has only about 4,000 people receiving such assistance.

Ventura County, which will pay $295 a month after Sept. 1, has only 355.

*

About half the people on general relief are physically or mentally disabled.

Some are clearly crazy, like the old woman who complained to a stranger in Westlake the other day that too many bombs were going off.

Some are fresh out of jail or just off probation, such as Taykeen Allen, a high school senior from South-Central Los Angeles who said his sister suggested that he apply for the dole as soon as he got off probation and turned 18.

Some are abused and neglected children who have grown up without skills; mothers who have lived for years on Aid to Families With Dependent Children, whose children are now grown, and some are just working stiffs who have exhausted their bodies, their savings and their unemployment and had no place to turn.

To hear welfare workers tell it, more and more are former members of the middle class who never expected to need a safety net.

They are people such as the homeless man who pulled a photograph out of his back pocket the other day while applying for general relief.

The photo showed him looking dapper in a tuxedo. He offered it as some proof that he once earned $25 an hour as a carpenter, and had a house and a boat, before bad luck, injuries and a building slump sucked him relentlessly into what he described as quicksand.

“You cannot get out,” he said sadly, predicting that he would not be able to put a roof over his head even after he got his welfare check.

Little Relief

Hard economic times have seen the number of single adults on general relief in Los Angeles County more than double in the last three years. At the same time, the amount of monthly subsistence the county provides them has plunged.

YEAR: PEOPLE ON GENERAL RELIEF (IN THOUSANDS) 1990: 49 1991: 56 1992: 80 1993: 105

YEAR: MONTHLY PAYMENTS PROVIDED BY L.A. COUNTY 1990: $312 1991: $341 1992: $293* 1993: $212**

* Took effect in December, 1992

** Slated to take effect Sept. 1

Source: Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services