One More River to Cross : After Flood Crisis, Push Is On to Make Gains for Homeless Permanent
For those who had helplessly looked on over the years and wondered what could be done, the flood that destroyed the river bottom shantytown last year was nothing short of a miracle.
More than 100 homeless people lived in the Ventura River before violent storm waters ripped out their squatters’ camp last January. Since then, city and county agencies have rallied like never before to match the riverbed settlers with shelter and social services.
More than 70 of the former river bottom residents were placed in permanent housing in the last year, and the vast majority of them are still there. About 25 were able to find jobs, most of them temporary.
And, contrary to popular belief a year ago, there is a widespread view today that the changes are lasting. The homeless have not returned to the old river camp as some expected.
“Because of the flood, I’ve seen things happen that I never thought I would see happen in my life,” said Bob Costello, executive director of the HERO Project, a homeless assistance center born out of the January flood.
“What was done was miraculous,” Costello added. “The flood was a blessing in disguise. It was divine providence, if you will. What it did was provide a flash point for a solution, and this community responded in a big way.”
Ventura City Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures, who at the time headed a city task force looking for ways to pull the homeless out of the riverbed and push them toward something better, also looks toward the heavens when describing the events of last winter.
“It proved to be a positive act of God that drove our council to a decision,” Measures said. “As the Ventura River was spilling over its banks, and our safety officers were rescuing the homeless folks who had not heeded the warnings, it was clear to almost everyone that we had to find other solutions.”
PLOTTING A STRATEGY
Reversing decades of community apathy, Ventura city and county officials moved quickly to use the money and momentum generated by the flood to plot a sweeping strategy for helping the river bottom residents get back on their feet.
Squatters who had spent years scratching out a life on the river floor suddenly found themselves in houses and apartments, with the federal government paying most of the rent as part of the emergency response.
Homeless people who had been lucky to earn a few bucks recycling aluminum cans wound up with steady jobs, also a by-product of the Jan. 10 flood.
Drunks and dope addicts, chased into the river bottom brush by their addictions, were funneled into treatment programs. The mentally ill also found help, as more than $3 million poured into the county to bankroll various flood relief programs.
Even the trampled riverbed itself, once home to Ventura County’s oldest and largest homeless community, has cycled back to life.
Today, however, homeless advocates and others see the cleanup of the Ventura River and the relocation of its homeless population as entering a crucial phase.
Now that a year has passed, homeless advocates worry that momentum has flagged. City and county agencies are no longer working side by side, and officials say there is no longer the same level of interagency communication that existed right after the flood.
And while federal money was used to find temporary jobs for more than a dozen river bottom dwellers, those funds have run out. Officials want to develop permanent jobs for the homeless, but they acknowledge they are a long way from reaching that goal.
In reality, advocates and others say, the effort to help the homeless is in its early stages. And they say that most former river bottom dwellers are a long way from fully joining the mainstream.
“I really think that it went great guns for a long time, but a few pieces of the puzzle are falling apart now,” said Evelyn Burge, a county public health nurse who regularly trooped through the riverbed thickets to deliver health care to the homeless.
“The problem is so complex, it isn’t just plopping someone into a house and saying go to it,” she said. “There’s no question that some people were helped fantastically, miraculously you could say. The real question is, can we do it when there’s not a crisis?”
FLOOD FOCUSED ATTENTION
The squatters’ camp that once stretched more than two miles up the Ventura River was an open-air ghetto, easily mistaken at a distance for a city dump, the thick mounds of garbage growing deeper and wider each year.
And as the river bottom population swelled over the years, so did associated problems of theft, drug use and drunkenness.
“I think the city had a kind of unofficial way of dealing with the river bottom,” said Ventura City Councilman Tom Buford, who was mayor at the time of the flood and who joined council members in issuing the emergency order prohibiting the homeless from returning to the riverbed.
“We all sat around and talked about how bad it was down there,” he said. “But as a practical matter, when we rousted people out of parks and off the pier, that was one of the places they knew they could end up without getting pushed on. The flood really helped focus attention, not only on the health and safety aspects of living in the river bottom, but on the homeless themselves.”
For many former river bottom dwellers, last year’s storm proved to be the opportunity of a lifetime.
Of the 110 river people who registered at the city’s homeless assistance center, 66 remain in federally subsidized housing made available to flood victims by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. City officials expect that subsidized housing program to continue indefinitely.
At the center, the homeless were enrolled in various government assistance programs, in many cases to help them pay their share of the rent in the new housing program.
The assistance center, initially known as the Homeless Emergency Relocation Operation (HERO) Project, was so successful it won a statewide award last year for excellence in community service.
“The flood was a mishap, but it was also kind of a miracle,” said Ashley Thompson, who lived with her boyfriend, Craig Fearnow, in a carpeted and furnished river bottom lean-to north of Stanley Avenue.
The couple now share a rented apartment in a Victorian-style home off Ventura Avenue, filled with keepsakes dredged from the river floor and newer items bought with money earned at jobs generated by the flood.
“For a lot of us, it was a good thing,” Thompson said. “We prospered. We still are prospering.”
Not only are many of the homeless better off today, but the river bottom itself is a safer place for visitors.
Homeless advocates estimate that 20% to 30% of the residents were mentally ill, and that maybe half were alcoholics and drug addicts. And increasingly, there were people using the river bottom brush to break the law or duck from it.
“It was becoming a crime problem, one where we had to go down there armed to the teeth,” said Ventura Police Lt. Carl Handy, who led regular river bottom patrols to flush out the homeless after the place was declared off-limits.
“It’s kind of tough love stuff, forcing people to do things they don’t want to do but for the right reasons,” he said. “But it seems to have paid off. It’s a fun area that people should be exposed to. It wasn’t fun a year ago, it was dangerous.”
In addition, environmentalists say the river bed is much cleaner and healthier now that the people are gone. Places that had been trampled for years are now thick with vegetation and flush with wildlife.
Key to the effort at pulling the homeless out of the river bottom was a get-tough policy aimed at driving the homeless into the new city and county programs.
But merchants and residents worried that posting the river bottom off-limits would push the homeless onto Ventura’s downtown streets, damaging efforts to spruce up the area and attract tourists.
Since the flood, however, the City Council has adopted laws prohibiting panhandling and forbidding camping at public parks and beaches. And merchants say there has been no noticeable increase in downtown homelessness.
“I think we all had this fear that closing the river bottom would cause this big influx of homeless people on the streets of downtown,” said Tim O’Neil, president of the Downtown Ventura Assn. “That in fact has not happened.”
Nevertheless, the city’s crackdown on homelessness has drawn some fire, including howls of protest from some former river bottom residents.
“The flood was perfect, it got us all up here where they could get a hold of us,” said Dennis Ogden, a 43-year-old Santa Paula native who lived a year ago in a shanty below the Main Street bridge.
Ogden is one of nine people cited in the months after the flood for trying to reclaim his former river bottom home. Making his way in this world by scouring back-street dumpsters, he now sleeps wherever he can, stashing himself in the uncharted nooks of the cityscape.
“They want to lock us all up or they want us to leave town,” Ogden declares. “The flood was perfect for them. They didn’t know how they were going to clean that mess up.”
SUSTAINING THE EFFORT
The drive to self-sufficiency has not been without its roadblocks, namely the problems inherent in plucking people out of the wilderness and depositing them back into the real world.
Many of the river bottom dwellers couldn’t meet their basic needs, housing officials said. Some didn’t know how to work toasters or fire up their heaters. Others didn’t know how to pay bills or buy groceries.
“The thing that was hardest for me was having to remember to buy toilet paper,” said Emilio Montanez, 41, who now lives in subsidized housing. “I’ve been three years on the run and it was hard to get right back in.”
Officials say the homeless are likely to encounter fewer problems as they approach their first year in subsidized housing. They see this month’s anniversary as a benchmark showing the considerable success the homeless have made.
But it is also a turning point of sorts.
In coming months, the Ventura County Homeless and Housing Coalition is expected to release its regional plan to battle homelessness, which will include recommendations for building on the successes that came out last year’s flood.
Already, officials and advocates say, the assistance center established in response to the disaster can serve as a model for similar programs countywide. But ultimately, they say, it comes down to whether that kind of effort can be sustained.
“I think the crisis is every bit as real today, it’s just not as visible,” said Rick Pearson, president of the homeless coalition and executive director of Project Understanding, a Ventura-based social service agency.
“We don’t have helicopters pulling people out of raging waters, so it’s a little harder to galvanize support,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Ultimately, I believe that once people understand the need, they will respond.”
Count Bob Costello among the believers. Before signing on with the HERO Project, he was a case worker for Project Understanding.
“If somebody had asked me a year ago could we make a dent in the homeless population, I would have said no way,” Costello said. “At one time, if you factored out the environmental stuff, I would have said it was the perfect place for people who had no other place to live. But it got to the point where it no longer was tolerable. I feel good about what I used to do. I did the best I could. But now I’ve found a better way.”
At his west end office, within sight of the old riverbed shantytown, he works the phones in a tireless effort to stir up support for HERO, which has now evolved into a full-fledged jobs program.
It hasn’t been easy. Recently, federal money being used to temporarily employ more than a dozen former river bottom residents ran out. Undaunted, Costello last week reactivated a crew that had been sprucing up Dennison Park near Ojai, dipping into the HERO Project’s own operating budget to do so.
Costello said the push now is to find the homeless real jobs that won’t go away.
“I believe I’ve been led here,” he said. “Because of the flood, I’ve seen miraculous things happen. I just wanted to be a part of keeping that going.”
