River-Bottom Homeless Feel Welcome at City Shelter : Services: Sixteen people move into a transition center, which opens on Camarillo State Hospital grounds. Officials are optimistic.

Pedro Velazquez called the Ventura River bottom his home until the raging river swept away his encampment and most of his belongings as it took the life of another homeless man.

But one month to the day later, in a grassy courtyard at Camarillo State Hospital, Velazquez and two other former river-bottom dwellers chatted Friday as they worked to assemble a barbecue under a startlingly blue sky.

Altogether, 16 men and women moved into the new homeless transition center, hoping to carve out new lives with homes, jobs and at least a modicum of security.

In a quickly organized collaborative effort, a panoply of city, county and nonprofit agencies opened the center--which will provide shelter, meals and other amenities exclusively to the homeless men and women who once lived in the river bottom.

“We don’t know exactly how this is going to take shape, but this is a very important step in building community,” said Ventura Mayor Tom Buford, who presided over opening ceremonies Friday.

Representatives from nearly a dozen local organizations, both nonprofit and governmental, were on hand for the ribbon-cutting. But it was a homeless man, identifying himself only as Larry, who snipped the red ribbon with a pair of oversized yellow scissors.

The mood was a mixture of elation, relief and even a bit of disbelief. “Definitely it’s working,” Micki Feather, a drug and alcohol counselor for the county, said of the center. “It’s working now.”

The city signed an agreement last week to lease the 13,000-square-foot complex on the edge of the hospital grounds for a move-in fee of $600 and a monthly rent of $100.

Just south of Camarillo, nestled at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains, the facility has separate dormitories for men, women and couples.

In the courtyard of the Spanish-style building with pastel green shutters, are a basketball hoop, volleyball net, the barbecue and large wire mesh kennels for dogs. Seventeen pets are expected in the coming week.

Rick Pearson, executive director for Project Understanding, said those staying at the center had to meet two important criteria in a screening process “One is that the people have a plan in mind to get back into the mainstream,” he said. The other is “a feeling for how successful they were likely to be.”

Officials said the group gathered at the transition center has a good chance for success, given that none of them suffers from severe mental illness, a problem that plagues from 25% to 33% of the homeless population, according to some studies.

“I haven’t seen as many seriously mentally ill people as I would have expected,” said Randall Feltman, the county’s director of mental health services. “All these people have stories to tell, and those stories make sense.”

Velazquez, for example, said he had worked steadily as a tractor-trailer driver until a divorce set in motion his current spiral into homelessness, which has lasted about a year.

“It’s hard to find a job when you don’t have a home,” said the 40-year-old man, who grew up in Ventura. “You walk into a place (looking for work) with all your stuff and they just look at you.”

The transition center comes quickly on the heels of an assistance center that was established almost three weeks ago to help ease the displaced river-bottom population back into the mainstream by providing an assortment of social services under one roof.

Both centers are slated to close at the end of March, by which time organizers hope that most of the former river-bottom dwellers will be gaining a foothold.

But some have privately questioned whether the recent flurry of activity would have happened without the floods.

Pearson, of Project Understanding, said the work done in the past month spoke more of “overcoming inertia rather than apathy . . . .The groundwork was laid for the collaboration to take place.”

For those to whom it mattered most--those moving into the facility--the center at Camarillo State Hospital was nothing short of a miracle.

“This is a great place. This is incredible,” said Velazquez. “The county is doing a lot for us, and we need to take advantage of that.”