City Cutting Back on Meal Programs for Homeless : Santa Monica: Council members place new emphasis on long-term solutions to help get people off the streets.

Santa Monica’s trademark serve-all-comers meal programs for the homeless are quietly vanishing.

The shift, nearly unthinkable a year ago, has evolved from changing city policy that now stresses long-term solutions to homelessness over emergency services.

“It’s a big change,” said Rhonda Meister, who runs the St. Joseph’s Center in Venice. “It’s very, very frightening for most of us service providers in that you can’t really do case management for people who are starving.”

Though St. Joseph’s Bread and Roses Cafe has private funding to continue serving 150 hot lunches a day, the evening meal program at the Ocean Park Community Center for up to 200 people has been discontinued. A similar Salvation Army program also has been stopped.

In March, a meal program at the CLARE foundation that served 300 hot lunches a day with funding from Santa Monica will end at the city’s request.

“We won’t be feeding the masses we’ve been feeding,” said Ruth King, executive director of CLARE. The agency’s board of directors agrees with the change, King said, citing persistent problems with neighbors stemming from large gatherings of people seeking food.

“The (board’s) feeling is it’s good we get back to our primary purpose . . . working with alcoholics and families of alcoholics,” King said. Still, she said, “if you have to say no, it feels bad.”

There will still be free food for the needy to be had in town, albeit under different conditions in some cases. For instance, the Ocean Park center will continue handing out cold sack lunches at its drop-in center, where about 70,000 lunches a year are distributed, said Vivian Rothstein, the center’s executive director. And over the next 90 days or so, depending on the weather, the gap will be partially filled by meal service at temporary cold-weather shelters at Westside armories.

All of the changes in the city’s meals program are not the result of new funding priorities for homeless services.

The charitable group FAITH, which had been responsible for evening meals at the Salvation Army and Ocean Park center, has cut back the number of meals served each day from about 500 to 200. It has also redirected its efforts, at the city’s request, to SAMOSHEL, a new 100-bed city shelter.

FAITH continues to offer another 100 meals a day at Step Up on Second, an agency that serves the mentally ill homeless.

But instead of an open-door policy that allowed any person off the street to be fed, meals will now go exclusively to members of the SAMOSHEL shelter, which grants occupancy to anyone willing to make a several-months commitment to getting off the streets for good. Meals served at Step Up also go only to its members.

Less than three years ago, FAITH was responsible for feeding about 300 people a day on the City Hall lawn. The large meals program became a nationwide symbol of the city’s commitment to helping the homeless. It was also a lightning rod for criticism from those who viewed the programs as attracting homeless people from across the nation to Santa Monica.

Based on the recommendation of a city task force on homelessness, the large outdoor feeding program was split into three parts and moved indoors. Along with providing a more pleasant venue, the hope was to induce those who stopped in to eat to sign up for social services to help them in the long term.

Antoinette Bill, co-founder of FAITH, said the group can no longer handle serving more than 300 meals a day at three locations.

“We were having trouble finding funding and getting volunteers,” Bill said. “We were stretched to the gills in every way possible.”

Last February, council members Asha Greenberg and Robert T. Holbrook, critics of the city’s social service spending, proposed moving further away from emergency services, which they viewed as a Band-Aid approach to the problem.

“It’s much better to make a big difference in a few people’s lives than no difference in a lot of people’s lives,” Greenberg said.

They gained the support of others on the council, including current Mayor Paul Rosenstein, who said he has come to believe it is a disservice to homeless people to maintain them “in misery on the streets.”

As part of the change in policy, some homeless providers were given funding for only six months, said Julie Johnson, acting manager of Human Services for Santa Monica. Johnson emphasized, however, that the cutbacks of some meals programs and new rules for others do not represent a drop in the city’s level of services to homeless people. The $1.4-million annual budget for homeless services is just being spent a different way, she said.