GLENDALE : One-Stop Center to Open for Homeless

A coalition of Glendale charities and city officials has expanded its efforts to aid the city’s homeless by opening a new “one-stop center” for the needy and reopening the city’s only homeless shelter.

The new center, at the Salvation Army’s Glendale headquarters, offers health screening, job information and help with welfare and Social Security issues.

Since it opened last month, the center has assisted about 30 needy singles and families.

Meanwhile, the Glendale Cold Weather Shelter, which provided meals and beds for several hundred homeless people last winter for the first time, will reopen Monday.

“The cold weather program was very successful last year,” said the Rev. Greg Roth of Glendale Presbyterian Church, a member of the Glendale Task Force on Homelessness. “The volunteers who helped feed the homeless and staffed the shelter overnight were so surprised by the diversity of homeless people that came.

“The most common comment was, ‘These folks could be my own children.’ ”

The task force was formed by local leaders in 1992 to begin tackling the problems of a homeless population estimated to number 260 to 360 people on any given night.

The task force studied the services available to the homeless from local charities and sought to fill the gaps, with a view to helping the homeless become self-sufficient.

Its formation followed the release of “The State of the Streets,” a 1992 report by local charities that broke down Glendale’s homeless into categories: 50% were “temporary homeless” who sleep in motel rooms or friends’ homes, 30% were “chronic homeless” (including drug and alcohol addicts, the mentally ill and veterans), 10% were frail elderly and another 10% were found to be non-Glendale or transitory homeless.

The task force’s first proposal was to open the winter shelter; this past May, it proposed establishment of the one-stop center.

Future projects may include new temporary and transitional housing and a homeless outreach program.

Roth, who has worked with the city’s homeless for more than a decade--even presiding over the funerals of 15 homeless people--said he is glad that the problem he has been working on for so long is finally receiving serious attention.

“We’ve come a long, long way,” Roth said.