Sylmar Serves Needy but Beds Go Empty

Vans spill forth their weary passengers at the doorstep. More ragged travelers plod through a cold drizzle to the San Fernando Valley Homeless Shelter in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Dinner is a beef patty in a stale bagel and pork and beans served in a Styrofoam bowl. Between two basketball hoops, 150 taut cots are lined up, and there are always more than enough to spare.

On a rainy Friday night recently--the kind that usually brings streams of homeless people to area shelters--only 70 people showed up here at the Army National Guard Armory on Arroyo Street.

That has been the norm since the shelter moved from its former location at the National Guard Armory in Van Nuys. Shelter officials say its current remote location and unusual hours may be the reason.

The Sylmar winter shelter is among the largest in the area and the only one in the Valley jointly run by the city and county. In the wake of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which damaged the National Guard Armory in Van Nuys, that location was abandoned in favor of this one. And that is regrettable, says Ruth Schwartz, executive director of the Los Angeles Shelter Partnership, a nonprofit consulting group for shelters.

“I don’t think Sylmar is really meeting the demand in the community,” she said.

In addition to the remote location, she said the onerous schedule imposed by the National Guard has also discouraged potential residents.

The shelter is barred from opening before 7 p.m., well after dark, and is required to turn out the homeless at 4:30 a.m., well before daylight.

“I might find a place under a bridge or something before I have to get up at 4:30 a.m.,” Schwartz said.

Joe Zuniga, program coordinator, said that when the shelter was in Van Nuys, “we were maxed out every night.” Although shelter staff expected usage to increase as homeless people learned of the new location, “we haven’t seen any significant increases over the last year,” Zuniga said.

“Ultimately, we hope that is a good sign--that people are getting off the streets. But it probably means people just aren’t accessing the services.”

The city and county’s Winter Shelter Program operates between Dec. 16 and Feb. 28 at 24 shelters with a total of 2,400 beds.

At the Sylmar shelter, getting up before dawn doesn’t bother 50-year-old Louis “Luigi” Garcia. He doesn’t sleep very well here anyway.

“Have you ever slept on a cot?” he asks. “I’d rather sleep on the floor.”

Garcia, a bearded, congenial man, gave up a subsidized apartment in Long Beach two years ago after his girlfriend invited him to live with her in Studio City. But soon after he moved to the Valley, she fell in love with a woman and reneged on her offer, he said.

“This place isn’t so bad,” says Garcia. The food is tolerable and the staff is kind, he says. “I haven’t seen any fights or drugs here. But the homeless people I’ve met are the worst people I’ve ever seen. All they want to do is drink and look for cans, and I don’t do either.”

Paul Rossi, program director of Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the joint city-county agency that oversees the two dozen shelters, said the winter program attracts the most destitute of the homeless. The people taking part are the homeless who have failed every other attempt to regain their footing in the economy. They are the mentally ill, the chronic alcoholics, the habitual drug-users and the self-defeatingly independent.

“When people live outdoors, they’re sort of living by their own rules,” said Rossi. “But when they come into a shelter, they can’t drink, and they have to smoke in an outside area.”

The shelter program, Rossi said, is an annual attempt to reach out to the most elusive wanderers and sell them on a radically different lifestyle.

But Rossi said his office has no citywide figures on the number of homeless people who actually link up with long-term independent living programs after the emergency shelters close in March.

“The folks that we’re serving during the winter program are the most difficult to track,” he said.

Two years ago, Jana Vito, 43, was married with two children and a house. She is a UC Berkeley graduate, she says, and a former journalist. After she stopped working to have her second child, her husband lost his job and soon after their grip on the middle class. She blames her husband for introducing her to the hard oblivion of liquor.

“I was on top,” she says. “I had everything.”

Last year she had an apartment and was beginning to scrape her way out of poverty. After coming to the Valley shelter, she was referred to a housing placement program and eventually ended up in subsidized housing, she said. After a year, the landlord kicked her out because her roommate had turned the place into a crack den, she said.

Charles Koh, a longtime volunteer, said that in his five years of cooking meals at the Valley shelter, he has seen few signs of long-term improvement in the lives of homeless clients.

“Out of all the years I’ve been here, I’ve known four people who actually got off the street,” said Koh, a former Wall Street executive and a Los Angeles accountant when he is not cooking meals at the shelter. “In that respect, this kind of shelter fails.”

At best, the cold-weather shelters are a stopgap measure, Koh said.

Although she agrees with Koh, Schwartz said the emergency shelters fulfill a particularly pressing need in the Valley: free shelter for men, women and children who need it. With only the Sylmar shelter and another one in Glendale, the Valley remains one of the most underserved areas in the city, she said.

A new 150-bed facility in North Hollywood being built by the nonprofit Los Angeles Family Housing Corp. will be an important addition to the Valley shelters. But welfare cuts scheduled to take effect this year may force even more people into the streets, offsetting the increase in beds.

George Bolden, program director for the Glendale shelter, said he is already seeing more homeless families and said benefits rollbacks are to blame. Zuniga said he saw many people at the Valley shelter who had lost jobs to displaced aerospace workers.

Demand for shelter is likely to increase as welfare cuts are imposed, Schwartz said.