COSTA MESA : Free Lunch Halted for Homeless

First Costa Mesa banned aggressive begging. Then it started a crackdown on abandoned shopping carts. Now, in the latest attempt to rein in the city’s homeless, a nonprofit agency will stop giving away free lunches--for 90 days, at least.

Share Our Selves (SOS) passed out its last sandwich Friday, acceding to the pressure of angry residents and business owners who feel the handouts contribute to crime and vagrancy by the homeless on the city’s west side.

The homeless have engendered increasing hostility here, where they are blamed for everything from residential burglaries to shoplifting, trespassing and urinating in public.

No one knows how many homeless there are but SOS, which has operated its free lunch program for nine years, initiated the three-month moratorium so police can monitor the situation and see if complaints diminish.

“This was very difficult for us,” said Karen McGlinn, executive director of SOS.

“We have never been in the business of refusing food to hungry people, but now’s the time that we have to be responsible to our community and sympathetic to businesses.”

But advocates say it may signal “the beginning of the end” for SOS and a few other charitable organizations that feed the needy.

Some who came Friday to the SOS parking lot on Superior Street found the logic behind the move hard to grasp.

“If they think crime is going to go down because they’re not going to feed us, I don’t think it will,” said Mick Kinney, a 29-year homeless man who has relied on the free lunches for more than a month. “It doesn’t work that way. When people get hungry and they have no where else to turn to, that’s when they start to steal--that’s when the crime starts to go up--not down.”

Mayor Joe Erickson said he’s content just to send a message to the few troublemakers who spoil it for others.

“We just want it to be known that the people who break the law are not welcome in Costa Mesa,” Erickson said.

As other cities have discovered, the homeless problem is more complex than it appears. Advocates say at least a quarter of the homeless in Costa Mesa have mental disorders and should be receiving treatment, not pushing a shopping cart on the streets.

Jack Moriarity, who manages the Someone Cares Soup Kitchen on West 19th Street, is bracing for more clients as a result of the moratorium.

“We’ve got some extra bowls ready, but I don’t know if we’re going to have enough food,” Moriarity said.

He disputes the notion that homeless are committing more crimes. “They’re not causing crime,” he said.

“There’s just a few who might forget to throw their wrappers away after they eat their sandwiches--that’s what the people don’t like.”