A wealth of warmth and kindness

On a grassy median along a busy boulevard across from a Century City mall, the Givens family has become a sort of barometer of our city’s economic divide.

For months, the family — Renzell, Kimberly and 12-year-old Kobe — has spent almost every day there, in the shadow of Bloomingdale’s, toting signs advertising their poverty.

FAMILY NEEDS HELP. NOT CONS, NOT ADDICTS, NOT FELONS.

The messages — block letters in bright colors on giant poster boards — look more like holiday art projects than the pleas of a desperate family.

Some passersby avoid looking their way; others wag fingers at them and drive off. A few shout insults, or advice: Bums, losers, lazy.... Why don’t you stop begging and go work at McDonald’s?

But enough people stop to offer help that the family has been able to afford a meal and a motel room every night for the last eight months.

So every morning they return to that patch of grass, buoyed by waves of generosity and embarrassed by what it takes to get by.

“I would never have thought in my life that I’d be standing out here with a sign, or sleeping in a car with my wife and child,” Renzell told me on Sunday afternoon, as he shoved the giant signs back into the crowded trunk of their Monte Carlo.

The family came to Los Angeles from Atlanta three years ago, when the couple worked for a national voter registration campaign.

When those jobs ended, Renzell found work in Valencia, selling credit card processing machines. They rented an apartment near his office. But he lost that job last year, when his company shuttered his department.

“We used his final check to pay the rent,” Kimberly said. “We were evicted the next month.” That was October 2010.

For a while, they patched together support — unemployment benefits, county assistance, United Way vouchers — and rented cheap motel rooms near their son’s elementary school in the San Fernando Valley.

When that ran out “we discovered that if you’re drug and alcohol free, married, employable, not mentally ill … the assistance out there for you is minimal,” Kimberly said. Most shelters, she said, don’t take families. There’s a two-year wait for subsidized housing.

The only apartments they were offered were near skid row. “We drove through there one night,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine my child down there. That frightened me more than the thought of sleeping in our car.”

They made the rounds of churches, shelters and soup kitchens; stood for hours in line with other families. Then it dawned on Kimberly:

“We ought to be in Beverly Hills. They can’t help me on Crenshaw. They’re in the same position I’m in.”

It’s not quite Beverly Hills, but close enough: where Santa Monica Boulevard meets Avenue of the Stars.

I visited the Givens family there after Kimberly responded to a column I’d written about a businesswoman whose generosity fed 5,000 people on skid row.

Kimberly wanted me to know “how ‘the rich people’ have blessed our family.”

“We are still homeless, but restored by the hearts of the 1%,” she wrote. “It’s amazing the love and support shown by the ones who we thought cared the least.”

On Sunday, she ticked off a long list of celebrities who have helped.

“Spike Lee stopped by twice, just to check on us,” she said. “Morgan Freeman ran a red light and cut across three lanes to pull over” and give them money for a motel. “Chris Brown drove up in a Lamborghini, gave us $26 and apologized because that was all the cash he had.”

And she said Jon Voight has been a guardian angel. Some people look at them with contempt, as if they sully the neighborhood. “He told us, ‘This is where you ought to be. You are testing the heart of us.’

“That makes me feel like this is bigger than ‘We just need a place to sleep.’ ”

And they have developed a kinship, they said, with others from the 99%. “Some people say, ‘That could never be me.’ But others stop and want to hear our story. Some people just pull over and pray with us.”

There’s a grandmotherly waitress who catches the bus nearby and regularly gives them a few dollars. “We try to turn it down,” Renzell said. “She looks like she needs it as much as we do.

“But she said, ‘Every time I give to you guys, my tips soar.”

Just last week, on a cold, windy day, a man stopped his car, popped open his trunk, pulled out a jacket and tossed it to their son. “He said, ‘Take this, little man’ and drove off.”

Kobe was wearing it on Sunday, a size too small, but clean and soft. It was the gesture, as well as the jacket, that warmed him.

Kimberly and Renzell understand why some people disparage them. “Mentally, they think ‘con’ first,” Renzell said. The boulevard, after all, is lined with bedraggled people holding “Homeless. Help me.” signs.

I’ve done those sort of mental gymnastics, trying to figure out who to help. The bearded guy at the freeway offramp? He ought to be looking for a job. The woman begging with kids in the Trader Joe’s lot? She might be using them to get in my pocket.

It’s easy to make those judgments; to harden our hearts and hold tight to our wallets. In today’s economy, nobody wants to be an easy mark.

“I get it,” Kimberly told me. She remembers years ago, before being homeless seemed possible, when they gave to a couple working the streets with a photo that they said was of their infant daughter. She’d been killed in a drive-by shooting; they needed money to bury her. That’s the story they told.

Then, months later, Kimberly saw that same couple, peddling that same story, at the parade celebrating the Lakers’ championship. “And I knew I’d been taken advantage of.”

Still, she said, “Every time I’d see homeless people, asking for a dollar at the gas station, I’d give them what I had. Now we’re one of ‘those people.’ And some days, behind my sign, I am just so shamed.”

That’s why they’re careful to explain their plight on their poster boards, to don neat clothes, to comb their hair. “We want people to see we’re just like them.

“We’re not blameless for our situation; we could have done better. I go back every day and replay it. But I have faith things are going to get better.”

Better, right now, is a sunny day when nobody calls them ugly names and somebody tosses their son a jacket.

sandy.banks@latimes.com