Homeless in Valley Have Few Havens

Some of them are “moles,” hiding secretly in the underbellies of deserted buildings. Others stand out starkly in the midst of middle-class locals pushing baby carriages through neighborhood parks.

They are the suburban homeless. And as winter descends on the San Gabriel Valley, advocates for the homeless take little comfort in the fact that many residents are not ignoring the problem but are simply unaware that it exists.

“There are homeless in the San Gabriel Valley. There are. I have them coming to me asking for shelter. I have them asking for food. I have them asking for warm clothes,” said Josephine Anderson, director of the Monrovia Unity Center, a food and clothing bank for the poor. “You drive down Huntington (Drive), you drive through Arcadia, and you drive through Duarte, and they’re not visible in our communities like in others, but they’re there.

“When I opened up this morning, I was loaded with food,” Anderson said recently. “We’re down to bare shelves now, again.”

She estimates that during the upcoming winter months, the center will serve more than 200 people a day, offering food, clothing and legal services to the needy.

“I will get more and more homeless people now that it’s cold, because they’re looking for blankets and shelters and things,” said Anderson, who has worked with the poor for nine years.

And Anderson believes that her clients represent just a small share of the homeless population in her town. Some are easily spotted, but others, those she calls “moles,” hide away in abandoned buildings and cellars.

For organized, year-round shelter, the homeless must congregate in the urban hubs of a suburban valley. Continuously operating homeless shelters in the San Gabriel Valley are located only in Pomona and Pasadena.

Activists say there is a crying need for more shelters, more evenly distributed through the area.

A spokesman for INFO LINE, a county-operated social services hot line, said the service received 1,995 calls in the first nine months of the year from people requesting referrals to homeless shelters in the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys. The spokesman, Burt Wallrich, said 671 of the callers could not be placed.

Shelter Partnership, a nonprofit resource center for homeless shelters founded by the United Way in 1985, lists no year-round homeless shelters in the San Gabriel Valley outside of Pasadena and Pomona. Neither do other major referral centers for the homeless: INFO LINE, Lutheran Social Services of Southern California and the Pomona Valley Council of Churches.

There are nine shelters in Pasadena capable of housing 300 people in times of cold weather, said Joe Colletti, a Pasadena homeless activist. Eight of the nine are year-round shelters. The ninth, the Pasadena Bad Weather Shelter, is open only in times of dangerously cold and wet weather between Nov. 1 and March 31.

Part of the difficulty in opening homeless shelters in the San Gabriel Valley lies in dealing with local bureaucracies, said Bobby Jimenez, director of residential shelter services at Lutheran Social Services in Pasadena.

His organization recently opened a shelter in Pasadena, but only after wrangling with the city over zoning laws and alternate-use permits. And that was with the city supporting the organization’s bid.

Jimenez said the Lutheran group has pushed for the creation of a county-operated cold-weather shelter in Montebello, but Montebello has so far blocked the plan.

“There are so many constraints on where you can set up a shelter, where you can’t,” Jimenez said. “The bureaucracy and the fear that people have, a fear among community members that influences the city officials, are real problems.”

A cold-weather-only shelter has been opened at the Covina United Methodist Church instead.

The only other county-operated cold weather shelter in the San Gabriel Valley is in Pomona. It opened Nov. 28 for the first time this year. Cold weather shelters open when the temperature is expected to fall to 40 degrees or lower, or when the temperature is 50 degrees and there is a 50% or better chance of rain, said Alan Wilkins, the county’s homeless coordinator.

Each of the county cold-weather shelters expect to temporarily house 125 people per night, but the facilities could accommodate more if needed, Wilkins said.

And the county still hopes to open a shelter in Montebello. Negotiations with the City Council are continuing, Wilkins said.

“Most communities have concerns about the homeless, people that don’t ordinarily reside in the community, coming in,” Wilkins said. “These are all very real and very legitimate concerns. People are naturally concerned about things that have not occurred before.”

Jimenez, however, says some suburbanites have a “not-in-my-backyard” attitude and care more about their area’s image than about the plight of the homeless.

A spokesman for Montebello said officials are concerned because the site of the planned shelter is near a school and a park. He said city officials also fear that if homeless people are bused into Montebello for temporary shelter, they will return to the community after being bused out the next day.

The spokesman, Alex Esquival, Montebello’s community service manager, said the city has few homeless residents.

“I think we only have one,” Esquival said.

The United Way estimates that there are between 35,000 and 50,000 homeless people in Los Angeles County. Barbara Fish, emergency food coordinator for Lutheran Social Services, estimates that the number in the San Gabriel Valley is “at least in the thousands.”

The U.S. Census Bureau in March will attempt to get a better handle on the homeless population as part of the 1990 Census. Even though census takers plan to work with local officials, social service agencies and homeless people themselves, they concede that their count of the homeless will be “very conservative,” given the difficulties involved. Some homeless activists already are warning there will be a “severe undercount” since census takers will not enter condemned buildings and other locations deemed to be dangerous.

In the San Gabriel Valley, activists look ahead to the census controversy, but can’t forget the scenes of deprivation they see on local boulevards.

Fish describes homeless people congregating along Valley Boulevard as it runs through La Puente, El Monte and Walnut. Others, she said, flock to Colima Road in Rowland Heights. There are no shelters in those cities, she said, so homeless people there sleep wherever they can, in tool sheds and on dirt floors.

“I get at least five to six calls a day from schools and different places for homeless shelters,” Fish said, predicting that the situation will worsen as temperatures go down.

Anderson, of the food and clothing bank in Monrovia, agreed, saying, “There’s a tremendous, tremendous need out there.”