Homeless Lack Options as O.C. Plays Catch-Up : Poverty: County lags behind other metropolitan regions in dealing with the problem. But gains are being made.

In the dusky chill of a November evening, two Vietnam veterans--Bill Robinson, weary and stoic; Richard Douglas Grisham, tense and watchful--chat before settling down for the evening on bus stop benches, each on his own side of Harbor Boulevard.

For the rest of the night, the pair will keep an eye on each other, sleep occasionally and watch for the police. It is a routine they have adopted after countless nights of being turned away from the county’s overburdened homeless shelters.

“It’s simple: You got more homeless people than you got room for,” said Grisham, 51, who said he did three tours as a Marine in Vietnam. “Everywhere you call, they’re full or they don’t take single men like me and Bill. So I don’t even try that route anymore. I’ll just stay out here, save my money and then try to find a place to live.

“What we need is a place that’s open 24 hours, where you can come and go when you have to go to work, so you can take a shower when you want to and be treated with a little dignity.”

With just 945 beds available for the estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people who are without shelter at some time each month, Orange County’s homeless are much more likely to spend time on the street than their counterparts in areas where the homeless are better treated.

To make matters worse, the homeless and their advocates say, beds are designated for specific populations--including 217 for families, 170 for single men and 200 for abused women and their children. Despite the pressing need, some beds remain empty in shelters where workers cannot bend the rules, because the population on the street does not fit the criteria of the open spots in the shelters.

The county’s facilities are stunningly inadequate when compared, for example, with San Diego County, where 3,263 beds are available for an estimated 7,275 urban homeless.

And while Los Angeles County has developed more than 4,000 beds of “transitional housing”--first-rung residences that shelter people for as long as two years while they work their way off the streets--Orange County has just 93.

“There is no getting around that government in Orange County has had a philosophical hostility to homeless people,” said Tim Shaw, executive director of Orange County’s Homeless Issues Task Force. “It’s not that they just were slow to do enough. I think that’s whitewashing it. They just haven’t wanted to do anything.”

So homeless people hustle, telephoning shelters throughout the county as each stay under a different roof ends, moving from place to place, always one step from the street.

Andrea Elvidge, 29, and her children Christle, 9, and Skylar, 6, have been homeless for six months.

“First we lived with friends, then with my sister, then my father paid for a motel for a couple of weeks,” she said. “And then finally I came to the Salvation Army. That was about a month ago.”

By a quirk of fate, Elvidge’s former Huntington Beach neighbors, Eva Ronci, 51, and her daughter, Valentina Ronci, 23, are with her at the shelter this night.

After Eva Ronci lost her job as manager of a store in Huntington Beach, she and her daughter, who is eight months pregnant, moved out of their $750-a-month apartment and into their car. The registration expired last month, however, and the car was impounded. So they go back and forth between the Salvation Army and the Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter, staying until their time runs out, then moving back to the other facility.

The county has few resources for women and children, even fewer for women with pregnant adult daughters.

“Everywhere we go they tell us we’re not a family,” Eva Ronci said bitterly. “Some places for pregnant women will take her but not me. But we can’t separate. We’re all we’ve got. She’s my baby.”

Advocates for the homeless say that in the mid-1980s, as U.S. cities raced to address the problem of urban homelessness, Orange County ambled out of the starting gate. It has yet to catch up.

When other governments opened shelters and devised transitional housing programs, taught the homeless how to find new jobs and helped them seek more training, Orange County was woefully slow to join the effort.

But some state and local officials contend that Orange County’s response to its homeless population is typical of affluent places where homelessness does not burst upon the community, but rather blooms slowly.

“Clearly what happens is that the suburban areas are really the last to get on board--and that’s true throughout the state,” said Ruth Schwartz, a member of the state Homeless and Housing Commission and executive director of the Shelter Network in Los Angeles. “Even today in Los Angeles, we have outlying cities [that] just now are coming to us and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem.’ ”

Orange County’s approach to helping homeless people may not be cutting-edge, some local officials say, but it is sincere.

“I don’t think it’s fair to say we don’t do as good a job with the homeless,” said Dhongchai Pusavat, director of the county’s Housing and Redevelopment Agency. “Yes, we’re behind places like San Diego, but they had a problem way before we did.”

In the past two years, the agency has developed 1,800 apartments that rent for about $450 a month, Pusavat said, an accomplishment the county is proud of.

That is important because Orange County suffers the nation’s worst affordable-housing crisis. Eighty-six percent of the poor spend at least half their income on rent, and currently, 6,500 families have federal housing subsidies. Since 1991, housing officials have refused to add families to the five-year waiting list for new subsidies.

Advocates for the homeless maintain, however, that the rent is still too high for people on the street.

Despite the advances made by county housing officials, Orange County’s most visible response to homelessness has been to crack down when the sheer numbers of people on the street finally become impossible to ignore.

Santa Ana is the home of a landmark ordinance--upheld in April by the California Supreme Court--that makes it a crime, punishable by as much as six months in jail, to use a sleeping bag or blanket or to store personal effects on public property. The anti-camping ordinance has been approved by four other Orange County cities and is being considered by three more.

The ordinance has earned the city the contempt of housing advocates across the country. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty has dubbed Santa Ana “one of the meanest cities in America.”

But others who work with the homeless say the restrictions against sleeping outdoors may force homeless people to turn to shelters and nonprofit agencies for help.

Grisham and Robinson, however, say they are not helped by the laws.

To avoid violating Costa Mesa’s anti-camping law, which prohibits using blankets and bedding in public, Grisham wraps newspaper inside his clothes for warmth and puts his boots under his head for a pillow.

It is bad enough that police see them as potential criminals, Robinson said, but public hostility is even worse.

“People drive by and throw eggs at me, throw beer at me and squirt water,” Robinson said. Recently, he said, someone pelted him with tomatoes. “You know, we’re not bad people; we’re nice guys. But the war took the wind out of our sails.”

Despite stereotypes of the homeless as drug or alcohol addicts, there is no single reason why people are on Orange County’s streets.

Loss of a job and lack of affordable housing were most often mentioned by respondents to a 1993 survey by the county’s Homeless Issues Task Force, the most recent comprehensive review of homelessness here.

An estimated one-fourth to two-fifths of the homeless population is mentally ill, the survey showed. Drugs and alcohol contributed to the homelessness of 30% to 40% of the adult homeless population; 15.4% of homeless men are veterans, and 5% are HIV-positive or have AIDS, the survey showed.

For most of the three months they have been homeless, Linda and Brian Henderly and their four children have lived in Costa Mesa. They typically spend the day at Lions Park.

Brian Henderly lost his job after developing a lung disease. The family bounced between Orange and San Bernardino counties before ending up on welfare at the Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter in Costa Mesa, one of only two county emergency shelters that routinely accepts families on little or no notice.

In the park one September afternoon, the two were visibly anxious. They had lived a full seven days at the shelter and were waiting to learn if their stay would be extended.

The hardest part of homelessness, they said, is shielding their children from the scorn of the well-fed and housed.

“You know, one day we were walking down the street with all our stuff and our bags, and four kids just start laughing at us,” Brian Henderly said. “Do you know how small you can feel?”

If the Henderlys and other large families like them are at one end of the spectrum, the other is occupied by homeless people whose lives are complicated by addiction and mental illness. But last month, the county halted its outreach program to mentally ill homeless people and cut the number of shelter beds it funds for them from 40 to 18. Both moves were the result of the county’s financial crisis.

The shortage of treatment programs also reaches substance abusers, whose presence on the streets only fuels public impatience with homelessness.

They are people such as Robert Grieb, 35, tattooed, unemployed, often high in public and a denizen of a park where addicts and alcoholics meet.

Grieb, who grew up in Anaheim, says he spiraled out of control after his mother was killed by a drunk driver when he was a teen-ager. Sent to prison at 18 for armed robbery, he developed a heroin habit he cannot kick.

“If I could get some really long-term program, then I would do it,” Grieb said. But his chances of getting the help he needs are slim.

For the estimated 5,000 homeless substance abusers, the county has just 208 spots in treatment programs of more than six months’ duration. Only Gerry House in Santa Ana, which has room for 12 adults, will accept people on methadone, usually the first step for heroin addicts.

“While the programs give a priority to homeless people, they put HIV-positive people first,” said Mary Hale, program supervisor of the county Health Care Agency’s AIDS Outreach program, which distributes condoms and bleach for cleaning syringes to people on the street.

By contrast, Los Angeles County, which has five times the homeless population of Orange County, has about 2,000 long-term beds for drug-addicted homeless people.

The efforts of a variety of agencies help provide the services that are available here. The Neighbor to Neighbor program and Share Our Selves, both in Costa Mesa, and Serving People In Need in Newport Beach try to keep the working poor from landing on the streets. Santa Ana officials are praised for their leadership in initiating a countywide effort to coordinate and streamline services for the homeless. HomeAID, a nonprofit agency affiliated with the Building Industry Assn., renovates shelters, adding space for beds, and each winter the county opens two National Guard armories, adding 250 beds to the county’s total.

Also, a coalition of nonprofit agencies teamed up with the county last week to sponsor a variety of events aimed at boosting awareness of homelessness and developing solutions.

Some are fortunate enough to get the help they need.

Brian and Linda Henderly and their children, for example, were recently placed in transitional housing at the Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter, where they will receive job counseling, personal counseling and parenting classes.

Brian Henderly, who has volunteered his construction skills to help refurbish some rooms, says the chance to work and the assurance of housing have made him a new man.

“That’s all I need to be happy,” he said. “This is so much better than the way we were living. Now if we can just keep it going, I think we’ll be OK.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

By the Numbers

SHORT ON HOUSING

Of the nation’s 44 major metropolitan areas, Orange County has the most acute shortage of affordable housing for the poor. There are more than five times as many low-income renters here as there are apartments they can afford.

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Low-income Renters per renters available units 1. Orange County 44,900 5.3 2. San Diego 87,100 4.0 3. San Jose 33,200 4.0 4. Riverside-San Bernardino 83,400 3.5 5. Phoenix 68,500 3.1 6. Rochester, N.Y. 38,900 3.1 7. Los Angeles 327,900 3.0

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Percentage of poor renters (incomes less than $12,000, 1993) spending 50% or more of income on housing in the nation’s 44 largest metropolitan areas:

1. San Jose: 80%

2. Buffalo: 77%

3. Los Angeles: 77%

4. Orange County: 76%

5. Rochester, N.Y.: 76%

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THE HOMELESS DEFINED

Sex

Male: 62%

Female: 38%

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Age

17 and younger: 3%

18-29: 31%

30-49: 57%

50 and older: 9%

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Race

White: 57%

Latino: 24%

Black: 13%

Other: 6%

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Marital status

Single: 56%

Married: 15%

Separated: 11%

Divorced: 15%

Widowed/other: 3%

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Employment status

Unemployed, looking for work: 66%

Disabled: 9%

Unemployed, not looking: 8%

Working part time: 6%

Working full time: 2%

Other: 9%

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POLL RESULTS

Do you favor or oppose your city passing laws that would make it more difficult for homeless people to camp out in parks and public places?

Favor: 56%

Oppose: 36%

Don’t know: 8%

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Do You Know?

1. How many county residents 60 and older live below the federal poverty line?

2. What percentage of the county’s Cambodian population receives welfare?

3. What proportion of county residents say they have done work in the last year for a charity or other group that takes care of the poor?

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Answers on Tuesday

Answers to Sunday’s questions

Q: What is the main reason homeless people in Orange County say they are homeless?

A: Lack of affordable housing or the loss of a job

Q. How many emergency shelters in the county accept women and children without prior notice?

A. Two

Q. The county has 945 shelter beds for 12,000 to 15,000 homeless, and 93 units of transitional housing. What are the comparable figures for Seattle and King County, Wash., considered to have some of the best homeless services in the United States?

A. 2,300 shelter beds; there will be 1,250 transitional housing units by the end of 1996

Sources: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, California Department of Housing and Community Development, Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force, Times Orange County Poll