Serving Needs of Homeless

* Your editorial of July 20, “Finding the Will to Help Homeless,” about the Rev. Wiley Drake in Buena Park, touches on a very valid point: the need for a more comprehensive and regional strategy for dealing with homelessness.

HomewardBound: The Orange County Homeless Coalition has been dealing with their problems for many years. The issue of shelter versus city codes is fraught with difficulties: It is the mission of religious entities to care for the needy, while cities must concern themselves with the safety of everyone. You strike the perfect note when you say that there are “tensions inherent in trying to take care of the underprivileged in an environment that is insufficiently geared to meet their needs.” And, indeed, “there are too few beds to take care of too many people.”

However, you misplace the burden entirely on the county by asking the county to “summon the will to address” homelessness. The county is doing much to address these needs, not only in its funding of the cold-weather shelter program, but also in facilitating grants and loans to nonprofit shelters and service providers, and in making available [future] facilities at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

A few cities have mixed records on homelessness: Santa Ana funded our planning efforts for a comprehensive countywide approach to homelessness while promulgating an occupancy ordinance guaranteed to produce more homelessness. However, most cities would just wish the homeless would go away--regardless of the fact that they were and are residents of that city.

What is needed is a comprehensive regional strategy; what is even more necessary is the will to address homelessness on the part of the cities as well as the county.

LEE PODOLAK

President, HomewardBound

Orange

* I am so deeply disturbed by this man’s court case. What is it he is doing that has caused so much trouble? Well, he has practiced what Jesus preached, to have compassion and love, and help his fellow man.

The plight of the homeless is our problem. The Rev. Wiley S. Drake does bend the law by not adhering to zoning laws on the site of his church. But what happens to common decency when the issue is a zoning law compared to human lives?

If Jesus came back and walked among us today, preaching what he did, he would be imprisoned.

ANNE LEBRECHT

Laguna Hills