A Staff of 1 Battles Cycle of Homelessness : Community: The new coordinator for Ventura County Homeless and Housing Coalition faces task of helping displaced river bottom dwellers.
Kathy Sube figured she would have some time to settle into her new job.
She didn’t expect much, but as the first and only staff member of the Ventura County Homeless and Housing Coalition, she thought she would at least get a chance to read up on the issues.
She thought she might even be able to squeeze in a tour of a decades-old shantytown created by homeless squatters along the bottom of the Ventura River.
She was wrong. Weeks after she was hired, torrential rains washed the shantytown out to sea and sent the riverbed squatters scrambling to higher ground. Then new city laws were crafted to prevent the transients from re-establishing their village.
Now Sube, a 37-year-old Moorpark resident, finds herself at the heart of a high-profile campaign to lift the homeless out of the cycle of poverty and back into the mainstream.
She has parachuted into uncharted territory. There are more questions than answers at this time about the fate of the displaced river-bottom residents.
“I promised myself that I wasn’t going to get overwhelmed,” said Sube, who grew up in Thousand Oaks and worked for affordable-housing groups before joining the coalition on a part-time basis in late December.
“What I see now is all the different agencies coming together, and that is nothing short of wonderful,” she said. “I’ll choose to believe that’s the way it always is and is always going to be.”
For former river bottom residents, the way it is now is far different from the way it used to be. Advocates have argued for years that something should be done about the squatters’ village, once Ventura County’s oldest and largest homeless community.
But it wasn’t until floodwaters ripped out homeless encampments along the waterway last month that officials took the first step toward what could be a genuine solution.
Two weeks after the flood, the city, the county and nonprofit agencies opened an assistance center aimed at matching displaced squatters with housing and social services.
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In addition, officials found enough shelter for all of the river bottom dwellers displaced by the flood.
Now, the responsibility for sustaining and broadening the current effort falls largely on Sube and the homeless and housing coalition.
“She comes at an extremely important time,” said Brian Bolton, executive director of the American Red Cross in Ventura and a coalition member.
“One of the difficult things in dealing with public policy is getting on the agenda,” Bolton said. “She comes right as this issue is at the top of the agenda. And when you’re on the agenda, it’s time to go for the things you need.”
Since the countywide coalition incorporated more than a year ago, members have made a long list of the needs of the homeless. The coalition is made up of dozens of social service agencies, city and county representatives and community members.
Several months ago, coalition members agreed on the need for a staff person to coordinate that effort and placed an ad in the newspaper. Sube answered the call.
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The daughter of English immigrants, she lived for a time in a Buffalo housing project before moving with her family to Thousand Oaks when she was 11.
Doing for others was emphasized in her home, Sube said. In New York as a kid, she would go door-to-door collecting donations for the Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon.
And on Halloween, she would carry a bag for candy in one hand and a can for UNICEF donations in the other.
“My parents worked hard to provide for us,” Sube said. “But they never lost sight, or never let us lose sight, of where we came from.”
Sube graduated from Thousand Oaks High School in 1975 and got married a few years later.
Along with her husband, Robert, she raised three children. She was hired to keep the books at a nonprofit housing agency in Thousand Oaks called Many Mansions and worked her way up to executive director in 1992.
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She went on to do consulting work for a Los Angeles-based housing agency before landing the job with the coalition.
Part of her job will be to raise enough money to turn her part-time job into a full-time position, which will pay $23,000 a year.
But the bulk of her energy will be spent developing a one-stop facility where the homeless can receive food, shelter and a variety of social services.
The community has proved it could achieve at least part of that effort by opening the assessment center for displaced river bottom residents.
For the first time under one roof, the center offers a web of social services to homeless people in Ventura.
“One of the things I’ve been brought on board to do is to make this a reality,” Sube said. “What we’re saying is that housing alone is not an end-all. If people were to receive vouchers today, it certainly wouldn’t solve all of their problems.”
Many see this period as a golden opportunity to reverse decades of community apathy about the problems of homelessness in Ventura County.
“It’s wonderful that she has come on board now, when there is some momentum and some emphasis to do something about this problem,” said Rick Pearson, executive director of Project Understanding, the agency most directly involved with Ventura’s homeless.
“I think she is going to be a real asset to the coalition and to the community.”
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For her part, Sube said she wants people to remember that there are homeless people in every community in Ventura County. And that there are a lot of people one or two paychecks away from dropping over the edge into homelessness.
“Unfortunately, as the economy gets worse, more and more people living on the edge of poverty are becoming homeless,” Sube said. “It’s not an easy problem, it’s not a simple problem, so it’s not going to have a simple solution.
“But there are a lot of dedicated employees of the city, the county and nonprofit agencies who know this problem exists and are strongly committed to dealing with it in the long term.”
