For the Homeless, Some Unorthodox Success : Shelters: Pasadena’s pilot program discards tough love approach, blending intensive management with greater autonomy.

For months, 26-year-old Francoise Parker and nine other homeless people had slept under a rickety, tent-like encampment at Pasadena’s Memorial Park, eking out a sorry living recycling cans and bottles.

Then one day in April they were persuaded to leave the park for a converted church hall--and a surprisingly dramatic transformation began for most of them.

Within 45 days, three of the 10 had found housing. Within six months, seven had moved into an apartment, rental house or were staying with a friend. (The remaining three went back to the streets). Six had applied for work or found jobs. Four had enrolled in--and later completed--residential drug rehabilitation programs. Each had obtained valid California identification.

Their lifeline was a $15,000, city-funded pilot program aimed at quickly turning around the lives of the chronically homeless by giving them a remarkable degree of personal autonomy in a group shelter.

The Pasadena program turned the traditional homeless shelter notion of tough love on its head. It left it up to the individual to show up for counseling sessions, go to bed at a reasonable hour and stop drinking or using drugs. Rule breakers--who in most shelters are kicked out or lose privileges such as telephone use--were left to deal with their own conscience and asked to focus on individual responsibility.

The lesson, sponsors say, is that flexibility makes it easier to attract the hard-core homeless to shelter programs, and grooms them to carry on their own lives once they leave.

“(Other programs) really don’t treat you like adults,” Francoise Parker said. “They treat you like kids, like you don’t have a mind or opinion of your own, that you’re really not capable of doing anything by yourself, that you always have to be guided by the hand.”

The numbers of people who succeeded in the pilot program “are some of the best I’ve heard,” said USC geography professor Michael Dear, author of “Malign Neglect,” a book on homelessness in Los Angeles.

However, the gains came at a high price.

In many bigger programs, homeless advocates say, one case manager might have to juggle 15 clients or more. By contrast, Pasadena had six case managers for the 10 homeless people. In addition, one social services agency agreed to pay the first and last month’s rent for those who found housing.

“I’ve never seen anything--in this region at least--so intense, with the hand-holding aspect of it,” said Ruth Schwartz, executive director of Shelter Partnership, a countywide nonprofit organization that works with groups that serve the homeless.

Pasadena city officials began their plan to move the homeless people from Memorial Park in response to numerous complaints and a local theater group’s request to use the stage for rehearsals.

First, social service providers had to persuade park regulars to clear out for good and move into the church hall. In exchange, they offered a promise: This program would be different from all the others that the participants had turned their backs on.

The targets were people who had been on the streets for four years or more and could not abide by the simplest of rules in a traditional shelter, said Joseph Colletti, director of Lutheran Social Services in Pasadena, which coordinated the project with three other agencies.

The program was helped not just by the high number of case managers, but by the fact that the park group had already lived together like a family.

They had stuck together through the worst of times, sleeping under the graceful arc of Memorial Park’s Art Deco band shell in the heart of the city, their encampment strung together with overturned shopping carts, rope and canvas.

Parker, the only woman in the group, had started running away at age 12 after endless fights with her mother. She started to use drugs and alcohol regularly, and was on and off the streets for years. She got married, but her husband was jailed on a parole violation and she did not want to stay in his grandmother’s house anymore. So in December, 1993, she started sleeping at Memorial Park.

There, she whiled away the days drunk--on beer or vodka--or high on crack cocaine. She tried to ignore the way passersby averted their eyes. Parker, who is 6-foot-1, countered by dressing defiantly, in tight bike shorts and crop tops that clung to her bony body. She cursed up a storm, spitting out angry words. And she carried a hammer to protect her self-esteem more than anything else, ready to strike at the smallest of slights.

Parker scoffed when social workers came to the park, promising a quick program to get her off the streets. She had tried four other longer recovery programs and either quit or got kicked out. But everyone else was packing it up for the park relocation program, so she went too.

Case managers asked participants to set the rules; no one told them what to do. The group decided to set an 11 p.m. curfew--but latecomers would not be punished--and share cleaning chores. Everything else was up to the individual. Nobody nagged them to go to 12-step meetings, nobody reminded them that they should use the free phone to check on job openings.

In other programs, Parker’s schedule was dictated minute by minute, from 5:45 a.m. to 5 p.m. In one program, she could not have a radio, and her telephone privileges were restricted. In another, she could not talk to male participants. In still another, she was not allowed to leave the building for 14 days. And in all the programs, any major rule violation--such as falling off the wagon--meant that she was shown the door.

One night, Parker rolled into the Pasadena shelter at 2 a.m. after a night of drinking beer and smoking marijuana. The next morning, she confessed to a case manager.

“How are you feeling?” the case manager joked. There was no lecture, only: “Are you sure that’s something you want to do?”

That marked a turning point for Parker, whose guard came down.

“If I want to (make progress), let me do it at my pace,” Parker said. “Just don’t steadily keep cramming me with (lectures), because the more you cram me with it . . . I’m going to look the other way, and I’m going to do what I want to do. . . . Let me gradually get it a little at a time.”

Parker’s husband, 32-year-old Samuel McWhorter, joined the Memorial Park program when he got out of jail, replacing one person who had dropped out.

Six months later, the couple had rented a room in a house with four roommates. Parker had completed a three-month substance abuse recovery program. She got a maintenance job with the city of Pasadena’s parks department, adding income to her husband’s job as a construction worker. She gained 50 pounds and sometimes wears dresses or skirts. Now her speech is measured and if she slips up and swears, she says: “Pardon my French.”

The no-rules concept is rare but picking up speed in social services circles, said Dear of USC.

The Pasadena program is the first that Dear knows of in the nation to use the maximum flexibility concept. The city of Los Angeles is planning to open a $4-million drop-in center in the industrial zone east of Downtown using the same policy; it could be running in about two years. According to the city’s proposal, the center would have only minimum health and safety rules in a setting “that respects human dignity and does not feel oppressive or institutional.”

Shelters and recovery programs have to impose rules and structure in order to manage huge groups of people and keep them on track, said USC religion professor Donald Miller, author of “Homeless Families: The Struggle for Dignity.” But too many rules can backfire.

“It strikes me that what Pasadena was able to do is put an enormous amount of resources in intervening in the lives of a small number of individuals,” Miller said. “Having the freedom to do that allowed them to relate to people in much more adult ways, and in honoring the people that they were dealing with, they empowered them to be responsible adults.”

In the Memorial Park program, case managers were crucial. Parker’s managers helped her track down her birth certificate from Frankfurt, Germany, and clear a couple of warrants for drinking in public. In addition, a case manager used contacts to help get the city maintenance job and find her the room to rent. Another took her shopping for basics, such as an alarm clock. Even now, almost six months after the program ended, Parker calls one of her case managers almost daily.

“Each thing represented another breakthrough,” Colletti said.

Eventually, besides Parker and her husband, three people found work--two in the delivery department of a local newspaper, and one as a restaurant janitor. Six others receive disability income or are unemployed.

Case managers are happy enough with their numbers to plan another project, tentatively set to begin in February. The new project will target chronically homeless women. Longtime homeless women, who are commonly assaulted on the street, tend to shy away from traditional social service programs, Colletti said.

Parker started off that way. Now, she lives in a drafty room, with old sheets covering the windows and an empty dresser drawer spilling over with bread, peanut butter and boxes of macaroni and cheese.

“It’s privacy,” she said. “It’s mine.”