Shelter Closure Opens Door on Homeless Controversy
Gently nudging his daughters from their sleep shortly past dawn Monday morning, Robert Mrasak struggles to seem upbeat.
But after slipping in and out of homelessness for nearly a year, he and his wife, Susie, are running out of good cheer.
Left jobless after suffering an injury, Mrasak has struggled for months to keep his girls in school and put a roof over their head. The family of six has lived in a condemned house, an old trailer and outstayed their welcome in the tiny apartments of more than one relative. A debt to the public housing authority has kept the family out of low-income housing.
And now, their home of last resort--the Conejo Valley winter homeless shelter--has just shuttered its doors until winter.
Their next home will most likely be a tent at a Simi Valley campground.
“I don’t know what we are going to do,” said Mrasak as he disassembles a makeshift nest of sleeping bags and worn blankets from around his four girls, ages 2 to 8.
Despite the commotion of strangers collecting their belongings and stepping outside for a smoke, the girls are sleeping soundly on the floor of a multipurpose room in a local temple--one of seven churches and synagogues that each night from December to March shelter the Conejo Valley’s homeless population.
While the Mrasaks slip socks and shoes on their sleeping girls, another couple contemplates their last night of guaranteed shelter and Monday night’s forecast for rain.
“Between the stench of the people who don’t take baths and change their socks, it wasn’t a real pleasant night,” said Steve, an oil field worker temporarily out of work. “But it was a roof over our heads.”
Like many in the shelter, he asks that his last name not be published.
Another man prepares to begin his spring life: sleeping on a park bench by day and nursing cup after cup of coffee in a 24-hour doughnut shop by night.
*
Still others are headed for their cars, where they will hunker down for as long as they can evade police enforcing the city’s ban on sleeping in automobiles.
One thing is certain. With the closing for the warmer months of the city’s only shelter, life just got a lot more difficult for the homeless men and women in the Conejo Valley, and it won’t be getting much easier any time soon.
Advocates for the homeless say that despite their good intentions and a steadily growing population of homeless, there are no plans to create a permanent shelter in Thousand Oaks. Other Ventura County towns, such as Ventura and Oxnard, have already built permanent shelters. The nearest shelter outside of the county is in Van Nuys, a 40-minute drive away.
Activists are beleaguered by the nagging sense that no permanent homeless shelter will ever meet the approval of residents of the affluent community, who are fearful that greater services will draw transients from Los Angeles.
Although Many Mansions, a nonprofit group that provides housing for the poor, recently won a $1-million federal grant to build apartments where the homeless can temporarily live until they get back on their feet, the 11 new units will hardly make a dent.
In last year’s rainy winter, the Conejo Valley shelter served 122 individuals, up from 101 the previous season. Although statistics are not yet available, Director Karen Ingram said the tally will be even higher this year.
Hundreds more live on the verge of homelessness, said Dan Hardy, executive director of Many Mansions.
As minimum-wage earners, they struggle to make rent in a town where a two-bedroom apartment costs an average of $900 a month, Hardy said. Thus a simple rent increase or illness can put them out on the streets.
*
Waiting lists for low-income housing units offered by Many Mansions and the public housing authority run from two to seven years. “[A year-round shelter] is needed, but nobody wants it in their neighborhood,” said Phyllis Kischuk, as she handed out sack lunches of oranges, juice boxes, rolls and store-bought Danish pastries wrapped in cellophane to the shelter’s last guests this season.
Kischuk is one of many volunteers from more than 23 congregations who help provide hot evening meals to the homeless year-round and a place for them to sleep during the winter.
Many others, from attorneys to local business owners, banded together about five years ago raising $63,000--$50,000 of it promised by the city--to create a drop-in center where the homeless could take showers, wash their clothes, type resumes and receive phone calls.
But despite a cadre of willing volunteers and fund-raisers, the plans for the project are all but dead. In the early 1990s, furious neighbors twice forced the City Council to reject sites for the center with their cries of “not in my backyard.”
“It’s been tough,” said Roger Toft, president of the Conejo Homeless Assistance Program. “It wasn’t in our charter to fight the city and fight residents. . . . We have exhausted ourselves brainstorming and trying to find a way around the [not-in-my-backyard syndrome.]”
After months of inactivity, Toft and his colleagues decided to donate $13,000 raised for the drop-in center to support the Many Mansions transitional housing facility.
Their dashed hopes have convinced some that the only way to get anything done on behalf of the homeless is to avoid ugly public hearings.
For instance, Many Mansions hopes to bypass a hearing before the city Planning Commission on its latest project by using blueprints already approved for a private apartment complex. The private developer has since abandoned the plans, which would work well for the transitional living quarters the nonprofit group hopes to provide.
If approved by the city staff, the new center could open in the spring of 1997 on Hampshire Road near the Ventura Freeway.
*
City officials--often lambasted for ignoring the homeless problem--say they are unwilling to approve projects so vehemently opposed by the community.
“I think the city is trying,” Councilwoman Judy Lazar said. “But you can’t change the way people feel. They see threats. Some are justified, some aren’t, but if they feel they are there, you have to deal with them.”
Advocates cite some progress. For instance, last week, the City Council agreed for the first time to allow Many Mansions to advise its staff on updating the housing section of the General Plan.
Although he acknowledged that the city needs to help the homeless who live there, Mayor Andy Fox said the city’s critics are too quick to dismiss residents’ fears as senseless.
“I have to be honest with you. I would not want [a shelter] in my neighborhood,” said Fox, who works as a Los Angeles firefighter. “There is nothing nice about homelessness. People are living in the street and urinating and eating food and leaving it in the street. Those are not good for any community, and it’s certainly no good for Thousand Oaks. That’s why people moved here, to get away from that type of thing in the city.”
But a visit to the Conejo Valley shelter quickly debunks a number of myths associated with the homeless.
They are not transients from Los Angeles: Most have lived and worked in Thousand Oaks for years. Although some have cars, they choose to stay in Thousand Oaks--rather than move to Ventura or Oxnard where shelters are open year-round--because they consider it their home. Most say they do not panhandle. Although some said they couldn’t hold down a job because of drinking problems, many work but can’t save enough money for an apartment. Because landlords often demand first and last month’s rent plus a security deposit, moving to Thousand Oaks can cost as much as $3,000, including utility hookups.
*
They do not, for the most part, appear dirty. Many find ways of keeping clean, by taking showers at the local YMCA, which allows them to use its restroom facilities, or by cleaning up at a friend’s home.
Hoping to make exactly these points to City Council members, Mrasak is trying to organize a group of other homeless people from the shelter to attend next week’s council meeting.
“We would just like the city to look at us,” he said. “They will see that it is just not the winos and the derelicts.”
Statistics support his point.
Of 286 households helped by Many Mansions in the past five months, 65% had been Conejo Valley residents for an average of 10 years and 66% held jobs in the Conejo Valley.
Those statistics don’t surprise anyone leaving the shelter for the last time this season. “We don’t hang around Sav-ons, and we don’t put on signs [asking] for work,” said Ed Vossen, a 54-year-old factory worker who hasn’t been able to save enough money for an apartment. “They just don’t even want to know we are here. But no matter how much they want to ignore us, we are still here--no matter what.”
