Shelter in the Calm

The long and loud battle over a Buena Park pastor’s homeless shelter has ended quietly. The minister, city officials and neighbors say they’re satisfied, at least for now, with an unlovely prefabricated building that can house a few dozen people.

The Rev. Wiley Drake had set off an uproar in 1996 by taking in homeless people at his First Southern Baptist Church on Western Avenue. Neighbors complained of transients loitering and hooting at passing women, and city inspectors cited Drake for violating building codes.

But ending three years of political and legal wrestling, Drake quietly won final city approval June 1 for a shelter adjacent to his church by installing sprinklers, a fire alarm and other necessities to the 3,600-square-foot building where up to 52 homeless people sleep every night. He fixed broken windows, painted the facade and built a front porch.

And neighbors aren’t as implacable, now that the shelter is renovated and approved by the city. A shelter, they figure, is better than the chaos of transients milling around, some sleeping in truck beds and living life at the end of a trail of beer cans.

“There’s more organization to it than there was,” said Carole Peterson, 71, a homeowner who lives a few blocks from the shelter.

Drake is a former Buena Park City Council candidate who most recently gained attention for seeking a concealed-gun permit to protect himself from some of the people he tries to help. He’s a barrel of a man with an old Arkansas twang and, in his words, “a big libertarian streak in me.”

Drake is known for making a fuss to get his way with authorities, but for now, he is calm, gladdened that he has been allowed to “follow the higher law of God,” he said. “We’re pleased.”

So, it seems, are city officials, who are content that Drake also chose to follow the ordinary laws of the city.

They say they hope Drake keeps his promise to build a permanent building for the homeless, eventually tearing down the prefabricated building. They point out that Drake has made good on his promises to bring the building up to code.

“He has a safe temporary shelter for housing people,” said Buena Park Police Capt. Gary Hicken, a spokesman for the city on issues involving Drake.

Mayor Jack W. Mauller said Drake is a “nice guy,” though he also acknowledged: “I don’t have a lot of respect for the guy.

“But for the moment, I’m satisfied,” Mauller said. “He’s tried his best. We’ve tried our best.”

The peace is a long stone’s throw from the way it once was. Often the relationship between city officials and Drake seemed to be little more than “just a fight,” said Drake. The battle seemed to have more to do with which side would give in first, residents of the neighborhood say.

It all began several years after Drake had been helping the homeless in relative anonymity. City officials, responding to complaints from neighbors about loiterers and drug addicts--and out of a desire to create a safer and humane environment for homeless people--began to ask Drake to clean up his operation.

It ended up with city officials filing charges against the minister for violating building and health codes. They also filed a civil lawsuit to get him to bring his building up to code. “I was guilty,” Drake said. “I never denied it. But again, I was following a higher law.”

He returned fire by giving furious Sunday sermons and picketing various police events, such as routine driver’s license checkpoints. He also filed a countersuit, later dismissed by a judge, alleging that police violated his civil rights by arresting a sex offender at the church without a search warrant. He later told police he believed they planted the sex offender there to make him look bad, authorities said.

But now things are loud in a different way--the sound of construction on the permanent facility he promised. Using mostly donated services, Drake hopes to have the new shelter done within a year.

So far, a construction company donated landscaping work, packing down soil so the land for the foundation is flood worthy. Concrete blocks are stacked throughout the property, waiting for somebody to build them into something.

Homeless residents are grateful their quarters are finally legal, and therefore more reliable:

“This gives me a place to receive my mail. You can’t get a job without an address. [Drake] makes sure . . . you don’t get riffraff here. Makes it easier to get out of here,” said J. Lee, 24, who did not want to give his first name because he is homeless.

Area residents seem to accept the outcome of the battle. In fact, the residents seem more unhappy about Drake’s confrontational style than his opening a homeless shelter in the city.

“It seems to be more about him than it does about the homeless people,” said one neighbor.

Beyond that, homeless people were “already hanging around there” in their cars and on the street, said nearby neighbor Peterson. “[Now, it’s] much better than it was. Nobody bothers me here. I haven’t had a problem. . . . I don’t think I will.”

Another nearby resident, Henryetta Duncan, 62, said, “[Homeless people] don’t come by and bother anybody.”

Though Buena Park is considered a suburb, she thinks the neighborhood for years has been attracting a culture usually associated with an urban lifestyle.

“I consider this city living. This is what living in the city is like. There are homeless people. But they don’t bother anybody. They don’t bother me,” she said.

One of the conditions on using the building as a homeless shelter is that Drake makes sure residents register with police, providing fingerprints and other personal information.

Drake would prefer it another way; he said if a homeless person “genuinely wants to be helped, we will help them.”

“They don’t have to be a Baptist or a Christian, but they have to act like one,” he said. “If they can’t, they can just go on down the road.”