San Pedro Merchants Keep Wary Eye on Homeless Aid

In San Pedro’s downtown business district, where revitalization is underway on 7th Street, large clay pots with newly planted flowers dot the sidewalk. New posters hang in shop windows, inviting people to get reacquainted with the area at a monthly open house.

Everyone is invited. Everyone, that is, except the new neighbors.

Half a block away, in the back of a converted auto repair shop, the clatter of brown metal folding chairs signals dinner time for a group of homeless people. They seat themselves in rows for a brief outdoor prayer service, then collect take-away meals from the mission and quickly disperse.

The Crossing, a nonprofit organization sponsored by 30 churches, feeds San Pedro’s homeless five times a week. It moved into the neighborhood three weeks ago, and the sight of these new neighbors has sparked concern among nearby business owners in this port town of 70,000.

San Pedro has suffered economic blows with the shutdown of shipyards, canneries and military installations. Local merchants, determined to pull themselves out of more than a decade of economic hardship, are protective of the area they have been struggling to improve for the last four years. Many say they fear that an influx of down-and-out types could ruin their chances for success.

In recent years, social service organizations and merchants have clashed frequently over the rights of business owners to lift their communities out of hard times, versus the rights of the poor to receive aid nearby.

The Crossing’s volunteers are accustomed to opposition from neighbors, having moved the mission to four different locations since its founding in 1986. “Some people would like to move as many of the poor out of San Pedro as they could, so it could be more of a yuppie community,” said Harlan Heyer, the Crossing’s director, who greets many of his clients by name. “Poor people feel they are part of this community too.”

The mission holds a one-year lease on the 7th Street location. At a recent community meeting, merchants volunteered to find Heyer a new building elsewhere in the city. With a recent $1-million grant as part of a surplus Navy land-swap deal, Heyer is hoping to find a space where the Crossing can expand into a full-scale job training and employment center for families. And he is open to any help he can get from the business community in finding a new location.

In the meantime, Heyer has tried to minimize the mission’s impact on the community by urging his clients to leave the area quickly after meals are handed out and to keep litter and noise levels low.

“Some people think we’re going to destroy the downtown area, but I don’t see how we can,” he said. “We’re here 45 minutes and we’re gone.”

But Jerry Fagan, who owns a children’s clothing store a block away, said he can already see the Crossing’s effects. The other day he and his wife had to shoo away a transient who was standing behind their store, he said.

“The concern of all the merchants is that these people eat and stay in the area,” he said, “and it breeds this perception that all we’ve got down here is a bunch of bums.”

“No one is against feeding the homeless,” his wife, Liz, added. “But we’ve got to protect our own businesses.”

The argument is not new. Over the last three years, a debate has raged among residents, merchants and city officials over what some perceive to be an over-concentration of special needs facilities in San Pedro. Some say the addiction recovery facilities and feeding programs in the area attract panhandlers who loiter in the streets and hamper attempts to revitalize the district.

Others, however, contend that business owners have wrongly blamed social service agencies and their clients for economic woes produced by the loss of nearly 25,000 military and maritime jobs in recent years.

Homeless advocate Alice Callaghan argues that most of the poor who use free services come from within the community and are genuinely in need of help.

“If people are out on the streets, then they have nowhere else to go,” she said. The merchants “ought to be more concerned with how to help them, than how to run them out of town.”

“Blondie” Huggs, who is living out of a friend’s camper and has been coming to the Crossing for about three months, said she can understand the merchants’ point of view but feels the mission has a right to help out.

“I don’t have an income. I depend on them totally,” she said of the mission’s volunteers. “There are a lot of us who are out looking and having trouble finding a job. . . . A lot of people wouldn’t eat if it wasn’t for them.”

Critics of the mission point out that there are two other feeding programs in the area.

“There’s a real strong support system going on here for the poor,” said Janet Gunter, a founder of CARES (Community Advocates for Responsible Environmental Safety), a group that has been active in trying to halt the number of social service organizations in San Pedro.

“If you’re going to make them comfortable, there is no incentive to change,” said Gunter, who owns an antique store in the downtown area.

But Nancy and Joe Hernandez, who have six children and have been coming to the Crossing for years, said the mission helped them to change. When they were homeless, Heyer helped the family find a place to stay permanently. Now they come for meals when money is tight. Like most of the mission’s clients, they have heard that the merchants want them out of the neighborhood.

“If they walked in our shoes,” Joe Hernandez said, “they’d see it differently.”