Recovery Does Little to Help L.A. Homeless

As Mayor Richard Riordan prepares to launch his second term, he proudly takes credit for a broad economic recovery that has brought thousands of new jobs to Los Angeles. But that turnaround has not reached the city’s poorest residents, those who will go to sleep tonight without a home.

Then-candidate Riordan powerfully tapped the images of homelessness in 1993, as he stumped for a first term as mayor. His campaign literature linked the homeless to crime and urban decay, especially in Hollywood, and he branded homelessness a “daily assault on our sense of safety, security and civic pride,� not to mention “a major tourist liability.�

Four years later, the streets of downtown Los Angeles still teem at night with the restless and the threadbare, the drug-addicted, the mentally ill and the working poor. The alleys of Hollywood still are home to cardboard shacks and their needy inhabitants. The long open stretches of Wilshire Boulevard still are lined with ragged men, women and children pleading for handouts.

The huge increase in federal spending for Los Angeles during Riordan’s first term has yielded few palpable results on the streets. Individual organizations have made strides on a small scale, but have yet to dent the larger problem of homelessness. And Riordan’s handling of the issue has both discouraged and troubled many advocates for the poor, some of whom worry about what the mayor’s second term will mean for Los Angeles’ most deprived residents.

“I think we’ve done a much better job, but we have to improve dramatically,� Riordan said in an interview last week. “It’s intolerable that anyone go without a roof over their head or without a meal.�

But that is the fate of thousands of Los Angeles residents every night. The Police Department, notoriously inexact with statistics, estimates that somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,500 to 4,000 people live on the city’s streets. Homeless advocates, some of whom are prone to exaggeration, suggest that as many as 43,000 people are without secure shelter on any given night.

Whichever set of numbers one accepts, most observers say the figures have not changed much in the four years since Riordan came to office. In part, that is because the city’s recent efforts have been few and sometimes ineffective.

A controversial proposal for a downtown “drop-in center� edged with razor wire was compared to a concentration camp and shelved; its modified replacement is over budget, two years behind schedule and in danger of still more delays. Meanwhile, Riordan stood by silently as the county cut general relief payments, stripping the chronically homeless of money and undermining city-sponsored low-cost housing, whose operators have been forced to slash rents to remain affordable to poor people getting smaller government checks. More recently, the mayor unveiled a proposal to punish panhandlers who intimidate others in their hustle for money.

Earlier this month, Riordan joined New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in urging federal authorities to restore some money now slated to be slashed by deep welfare cuts, and he seems determined to play a more visible role in the nation’s welfare debate. But Riordan, a compassionate man whose heart goes out to young people, has yet to persuade many engaged in helping the homeless that he genuinely cares about the issue.

“To tell you the truth, the homeless problem has just gotten worse,� said Bob Erlenbusch, director of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness and a 13-year veteran of the effort to improve the lot of homeless people in Los Angeles. “There are solutions to ending homelessness. The question is whether you have the will to do it.�

As for the mayor? “Riordan,� according to Erlenbusch, “has done nothing.�

Not all advocates are that hard on the mayor. Ruth Schwartz, executive director of Shelter Partnership, said she believes his heart is in the right place--even if the city government has not done much directly to address the problem.

“In my private conversations with the mayor, I think he’s much more sympathetic than his campaign rhetoric would indicate,� Schwartz said. “He understands the nature of the problem.�

Proximity of Skid Row

The first step toward such an understanding begins just a few minutes walk from Riordan’s office, where a tour of skid row at dusk is a walk through fear and filth.

Hundreds of people, mostly though not exclusively black and Latino, shuffle through the scruffy streets of 4th, 5th, San Pedro, Gladys. Less than 100 yards from a police station, crack is ever-present. Baggies and vials are furtively handed off on nearly every street corner. Side streets are lined with makeshift tents: Plastic tarps are anchored with bricks and braced around grimy bedrolls. The air is tangy with the smell of urine, salty with the odor of sweat, heavy with the wafting stench of vomit.

The inhabitants here are a blend of the lucid few and the addled many.

Take Clyde, 51. He came to skid row in 1988, out of work and reeling from a divorce. Except for a couple of brief breaks, he’s lived here ever since.

“You stay down here too long, you get immune to it,� he says, sitting on the edge of a crowd watching police search four young men suspected of dealing crack. “That’s why I keep this Bible.�

Clyde motions to one observer, dropping his voice to warn that the man is a drug dealer. Then he shifts on his fire hydrant and smiles thinly through broken, decayed teeth. “If you’re down here and not using drugs or drinking alcohol,� he says, “you stay long enough, you will.�

All around Clyde lies evidence of the painfully easy tumble from security to despair.

There’s Vaughn Mitchell, 47, who came from St. Louis five years ago and wound up without a place to stay. He seeks the Lord and tries to work on some “church rap.� He lives on a side street off 5th. He has a bad back and a troubled heart. His possessions fit into a single small suitcase.

There’s Rebecca Genat, 57, who can’t remember how long she’s been without a roof over her head. She asks, “What society are you living in now?� Without waiting for an answer, Genat announces that she works in archeology. “I have the pavement and cement, gravel mostly,� she says as she drags her cracked fingers along the sidewalk. “I keep it clean.�

There’s Chip, 47, who recycles for a living. And Donald Adams, 44, who loads trucks at the nearby warehouses. And Earl Smith, 30, who does some building maintenance and warehouse work when he can get it. They are the working poor, able-bodied men who work and still cannot afford a permanent place to live. So they pitch tents, get meals at one of the local missions, sometimes bed down for a short time at one of the area’s single-room occupancy hotels.

When their money runs out, they head back to the street.

They’re all realistic about their chances of breaking out of this place. Save for a trip to jail, Chip has been homeless since 1986; Adams since 1991; Smith for “about 10 years.� He can’t remember exactly, but he’s 30 now--the father of three children he hasn’t seen in years--and he figures he was about 20 when he last had a reliable roof to shelter him.

And then there is Linda Mulvey, 37. Her hazel eyes are ringed by deep purple bruises. She is missing two teeth and has a cut across the bridge of her nose. She is fighting to stay off crack, a battle she says she has been winning for 45 days. But she too is without illusion.

“This drug is such a conniving drug,� she says. “It is Satan’s way of getting to us.�

Her story is long and rambling. She describes parents who struggled, boyfriends who hit her and one she says was killed. As she talks, she begs for help, then begins to cry.

“I guess sometimes we have to go through the hard knocks,� she says.

Not Improving With Economy

What advocates for the homeless find particularly disheartening is that the problems of people like these seem to be deepening even as the overall economy improves.

By all accounts, more people are working in Los Angeles today than a few years ago. Employment has increased steadily since bottoming out in 1993, the year after the riots. Business licenses, international trade and tourism all are on the rise. With them, in theory, should come the expanded opportunity that would lift society’s disadvantaged as well as its well-to-do.

That simply has not happened--at least not for those at the very bottom.

According to a 1994 study by Shelter Partnership, a leading homeless assistance and advocacy group, as many as 84,000 people were homeless on any given night in Los Angeles County--about half of those inside the city. Schwartz, the partnership’s director, said there does not appear to have been any significant drop since then.

Some question those estimates, which reflect the number of people who say they are homeless when applying for various programs. The actual number of people who sleep on the street or in a shelter may be far lower, though no one knows for sure.

But virtually no credible observer argues that the numbers are dropping very much, if at all. And many fear they are about to increase dramatically when the federal government cuts welfare benefits, leaving thousands of barely surviving Los Angeles residents with little or nothing to help them make ends meet.

Harreld Adams, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, attributes the intractability of homelessness to its shifting character. Once the domain of alcoholic single men, homelessness has become increasingly diverse. More and more women and children are among the destitute. Drugs, particularly heroin and crack, have deepened the crisis.

At the Union Rescue Mission near skid row, daily experience bears out Adams’ point. About 600 men come in off the street every night to sleep in dormitories or plastic chairs. Another 150 women bed down at the center. And though center officials say the male population has stayed relatively stable in recent years, the number of women is steadily growing--so much so that officials at the mission say they are under pressure to expand less than three years after they opened their mammoth, colorful facility on San Pedro Avenue.

Riordan’s administration notes that federal spending on Los Angeles’ homeless did increase during Riordan’s first term, though mostly in response to programs initiated by his predecessor, Tom Bradley. Today, in fact, Washington spends $81 million annually on Los Angeles homeless programs, up from $22 million a year at the beginning of Riordan’s tenure.

The Rev. Eugene Boutilier, a minister and longtime advocate for the poor who was Adams’ predecessor at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, agrees that the administration’s “figures are accurate, and it is true that the mayor’s office has cooperated in landing those dollars. But in no way have they initiated them.�

If anything, Boutilier added, Riordan and his aides sometimes have complicated the process by resisting federal efforts to get local authorities to match Washington’s contributions. Under Riordan, the city has cut money for housing and decreased its contributions to programs that help the homeless.

About the nicest thing that Boutilier can say about Riordan: “He’s done much less damage than I thought he would do.�

Proposal for ‘Drop-In Center’

If there is a glaring failure in the Riordan administration’s efforts to combat homelessness--one that Riordan himself stews over--it is the inability to build a “drop-in center� that would be open 24 hours a day and provide a central downtown location for homeless people to seek help, get referrals, wash and sleep--though the facility is not intended as a shelter.

That center debuted in controversy. Downtown business interests had helped to spearhead the proposal, and had coupled their support for it with demands that the city strictly enforce vagrancy and panhandling laws. Opponents reviewed plans for the center and noted with alarm design elements such as surrounding walls topped with razor wire. Some critics went so far as to compare it to a concentration camp.

Backpedaling, the Homeless Services Authority located another building, this one not far from skid row. After a series of delays, the agency entered into a lease, then discovered that the building was a structural mess. The latest plan: to go ahead and buy the building, then demolish it to build a new one.

Even assuming that all that goes quickly, there is almost no chance that the center will be operating in time for the first cold weather this fall.

Adams, the Homeless Services Authority director, acknowledged that the effort has taken far longer than he would have liked.

“It’s very late,� he said. “And it’s kind of a cornerstone of our approach.�

Riordan, for whom few things are more irritating than the bumblings of the bureaucracy, can barely contain his annoyance at the problems that have beset the proposed center. He dismisses critics of the early plan as shrill, but he admits that the subsequent mishaps have angered him.

“Obviously . . . they sort of stubbed their toe on it,� he said of the Homeless Services Authority, half of whose directors are appointed by the mayor. “I’m not the type of person who tends to blame because I think that takes away from the solution. The solution is to look ahead and do the right thing.�

Problem of Panhandling

As Riordan enters his second term, he is in the process of fulfilling a promise from the first campaign, the pledge to enact an ordinance that would make it illegal to beg aggressively for money. That will fulfill the wishes of downtown business owners, but it has produced some backlash as well.

Some homeless advocates and the homeless themselves view the proposal as punitive and unhelpful. What good will it do to lock up homeless people and give them police records, they ask, if the goal is to reduce their numbers and return them to more productive lives?

Riordan said that criticism is unfair.

“It doesn’t help the homeless to have abusive panhandlers roaming the streets, many of them committing crimes,� the mayor said. “That doesn’t mean that we . . . don’t have to have shelter and food available. But don’t let them run our city.�

Councilwoman Laura Chick, who chairs the Public Safety Committee studying Riordan’s proposed ordinance, counters with concerns about its ultimate impact, both in terms of its real effect on the city’s homeless and what it communicates about how Los Angeles regards its poorest citizens.

“There are a lot of poor people in this city,� she said. “Is this the message that the city wants to be sending?�

Nathan--who lives in a ramshackle tent on the periphery of skid row--doesn’t think so. He does odd jobs, asks for money now and again, tries to stay off welfare. He’s gruff but not aggressive when he asks for cash, and doesn’t think much of new laws that might make it even harder for him to scrape together a few bucks.

All he wants, he says, is steady work.

“The government wants to do something for me, they could open up some jobs,� he says, squatting in front of his tent across the street from one of skid row’s missions. “If I got a job, I’ll find my own place to live. And it won’t be here.�