Paltry progress on aiding homeless

The last time I talked to Joe McMichaels, he was heading down Main Street near skid row. It was October 2005 and McMichaels, who’d lost a leg in a truck accident a couple of years earlier, was propelling his wheelchair with one foot.

I went looking for him Friday after a call that got me thinking. Adlai Wertman of the Chrysalis job-training program wanted me to be on a UCLA panel titled “What Happens When the Media Drives Social Policy, or Be Careful What You Wish For.” He wants me to discuss a series I wrote about skid row in late 2005 and what kind of impact it had.

I found McMichaels at 6th and San Julian on Friday. “What’s new?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, except that his wheelchair was coming apart. “The back is falling off. I need a new one, or I need to get some screws.”

The Porta-Potties that were at 6th and San Julian are long gone and so are the prostitutes who used them as brothels. One of them hasn’t been seen for a while, and another was thought to be in jail, but no one could be sure with all the coming and going out here of late.

The population of skid row has thinned some. But all the forces that created it are still in place.

Since Los Angeles police cracked down on skid row last fall, some of the homeless have moved on, taking up residence in Hollywood, Echo Park, Santa Monica and beyond.

“The mischievous side of me is smiling just a little bit,” said Orlando Ward of the Midnight Mission.

Me too. One way to get everybody’s attention would be to bus skid row dwellers -- the destitute, the bomb-rattled vets, the mentally disturbed -- back to where they came from, particularly to places that have shunned them, such as Burbank, West Covina, Santa Clarita and Kagel Canyon.

You can’t blame the cops for doing what they’re told, but nearly 18 months after city and county officials flapped their gums about how they were really going to get serious this time about homelessness, it’s crystal clear that police can’t make a lasting difference if they’re in this all alone.

“The cops have chased people off ‘The Row,’ which makes real estate values go up, but other than that we haven’t removed a single person from homelessness. Not a single person, because we haven’t created new programs,” Wertman said. The city’s policy, he said, “while making the streets look better, was never really meant to deal with the issues of homelessness.”

Wertman told me the increased police presence has cleaned up a huge drug problem near his Main Street office, where two gangs controlled the trade.

“But what’s going to happen when the police leave?”

All the problems will be back, he said, propelled by the one driving force that is seldom acknowledged.

“It’s all about poverty. The tale of two cities is really real here, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.”

I wasn’t sure about being on Wertman’s panel. To the extent that I and others at the Los Angeles Times have influenced public policy, I have mixed feelings about the impact. Skid row was lawless beyond belief a year ago, and I welcomed the arrests of drug dealers who preyed on people fighting to go straight. And I can’t say I shed a tear when they carted away the Porta-Potties that were used as drug dens as well as brothels.

But with relatively few exceptions, only the simplest and least expensive steps have been undertaken. Skid row forces have been expanded by 50 police officers, but fewer than 10 county mental health outreach workers have been added. Even if there were more of the latter, however, there’d still be a critical shortage of mental health services and proven, modern drug and alcohol rehab programs.

Last April, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors announced a $100-million plan that called for five regional homeless service centers.

Today, they haven’t broken ground on any of them.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has pledged $100 million since late 2005 for housing that includes supportive services.

Not one project has been built.

Ward recalls the promise of specially staffed courts in downtown Los Angeles to offer sentencing alternatives to homeless people and those charged with minor drug offenses.

“But we don’t know if we’re going to get one.”

Andy Bales of the Union Rescue Mission said he’s happy that skid row is much safer for his clients even if other care providers claim mentally ill people are routinely handcuffed for minor offenses.

But Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich still has not endorsed Bales’ plan to rescue 200 women and children from skid row and put them in a remote former nursing facility near Sylmar, where objections have been raised by residents who live more than a mile away.

All this is bad enough. But throw into the mix the fact that city and county officials are notoriously inept at coordinating efforts on anything and the outlook is bleak. I don’t know what their problem is with each other, but Mayor Villaraigosa and L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky -- whose relationship is noticeably icy -- need to put aside their egos and work out a plan and a timetable, which means running roughshod over the likes of Antonovich.

It will all take time, Torie Osborn was telling me the other day. She’s the mayor’s advisor on homelessness, and she said that getting the money into the pipeline and building housing and other infrastructure takes about three years. She may be right, but as things stand, there isn’t enough money in that pipeline and no permanent source of funding.

New York City is spending roughly $1.7 billion a year on homeless services, Osborn concedes, roughly half of it for services and half for housing, which keeps the city on a pace to build 6,000 supportive housing units annually. The city of Los Angeles has roughly one-third as much money and roughly one-sixth as many supportive housing units in the planning stages.

USC professor Michael Dear is one of 50 local scholars who have united to condemn our shortsighted approach to ending homelessness. New York is the model to use, he said, and the initial investment could save money over the long haul. It’s inefficient and too costly to “keep on churning people through jails, prisons, hospitals and emergency shelters without putting them onto a path out of homelessness,” he said.

Until then, there will be no end to the misery.

At the Midnight Mission on Friday, James Hufft, Vietnam vet, was bent over in his wheelchair, fighting the pain.

“What hurts?” I ask him.

“Everything,” says the Texas native, whose right leg was blown off by a land mine more than 35 years ago.

He was hoping to get a cot for the night and said it’s been a long, long time since he had a place of his own.

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.