A Way Back From Bedlam

To walk through parts of downtown Los Angeles is to negotiate urine-scented, open-air bedlam. Business owners, workers and stray tourists dodge and weave through sidewalk shantytowns inhabited largely by addicts and the homeless mentally ill, some of whom shout at the air as if tormented by demons.

LAMP Village is an oasis of peace within the cacophony and home to 48 people with addictions and mental illnesses--people who once cycled pointlessly among hospitals, jails and the madness of the streets.

Step inside and the chaos is replaced by the gurgling of a fountain and the aroma of detergent wafting from a profitable laundry service, run by the residents, whose behavior has been stabilized by medication, counseling and the comfort that comes from having a clean, well-lighted place to live.

The Times is campaigning to undo the tragedy that has been allowed to unfold since the late 1960s, when budget constraints and well-meaning concern for civil liberties emptied the state’s mental hospitals onto its streets. This editorial page has urged Californians to stop averting their eyes from so conspicuous a problem and to do what it takes to help the homeless mentally ill, even if that means taking away some civil liberties from people incapable of making decisions on their own.

Past editorials have advocated the passage of a law that would make it easier for the courts to force dangerous, severely mentally ill people to take medications and receive treatment. But the majority of the state’s 50,000 homeless mentally ill are a danger only to themselves and in most cases are beyond the reach of that important measure. LAMP is an example of the sort of cost-effective program that has proven successful in getting these people to move voluntarily off the sidewalks and toward productive lives.

Since 1999, legislation by Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) has been a key source of money for this sort of innovative nonprofit program. We encourage Gov. Gray Davis to double the amount he has budgeted for the efforts supported by Steinberg’s bill, to $110 million, as recommended by an Assembly committee.

This week Senate and Assembly leaders will decide whether to push Davis on this. Faced with a plunge in revenues due mostly to rising energy costs, they have plenty of reasons to be timid about spending more money on anything. In this case, though, they should pay attention to a legislative study released this month showing that the Steinberg legislation dramatically reduced homelessness and that for every tax dollar spent on treatment, $2 in jail and hospitalization costs is saved.

To understand how LAMP and programs like it save not only lives but money, lawmakers might pay a visit to George Rivera, a friendly, energetic man whose job is trying to talk mentally ill people off the streets and into treatment.

A paranoid schizophrenic and drug addict, Rivera spent most of the 1970s and ‘80s living in the 40-block squalor of tarps and tents that is downtown L.A.’s skid row. About the only time he was off the streets was when he was in jail or a mental institution. In 1976, for example, he was sent to Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk after “giving a lickin”’ to his girlfriend. There he threw a chair at a psychiatrist, which led to four months at Atascadero State Prison.

The cycle was broken in 1994 when an outreach worker persuaded him to give LAMP a try. Rivera left his cardboard-box home, removed his clothes from the razor-wire security fence he used as a closet and moved into a bright and airy 50-unit apartment complex owned by LAMP. He decorated his room with pictures of the flower and vegetable gardens he tended at the organization’s nearby “village.” Today he works for LAMP, walking the streets not to score heroin or PCP but to encourage other mentally ill people to take advantage of the showers, food, laundry, medical attention, peer counseling and job training that LAMP offers.

Rivera’s brushes with what he calls “the system” cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars but did nothing to cure his mental illness. Today he is a taxpayer.

Even in this lean year, Gov. Davis needs to understand that budgeting $110 million for programs like the one that helped Rivera would be a smart investment.