Bringing Hope to the Homeless

LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky writes of his night counting the homeless for the recent U.S. Census.

Hope on the Streets of Hollywood

written by Zev Yaroslavsky

My alarm went off at 3:00 a.m., rousing me from bed for a trip to Hollywood to participate in a new count of homeless people—one in a series of such surveys conducted in Skid Row and throughout my supervisorial district during the past 2 ½ years.

The purpose of this count, like the others, was to identify as many homeless people as possible and determine who among them is most likely to die on the streets unless they’re given the services and housing they desperately need. Each individual is asked a series of scripted questions about their health, mental health, substance abuse, economics or any combination of the above.

At the end of this week’s three-day Hollywood survey—conducted under the guidance of Common Ground, a New York-based non-profit that pioneered this technique—a list will be turned over to the county and its service providers. We then will begin the delicate and difficult process of convincing these vulnerable individuals to accept our offer of housing and services.

The team I joined on Monday covered an area bounded by La Brea, Highland, Franklin and Sunset. Our team leader was a highly motivated and passionate intern from People Assisting the Homeless (PATH) by the name of Alex Cornell, who is pursuing a divinity degree. We were told we needed to complete our survey before sunrise, in the hours before the homeless would begin to scatter for the day.

In the pre-dawn chill, in the shadow of boutique hotels and gentrified storefronts, we found people asleep on church steps, in parks and on bus benches. Alex gently approached each of our prospective clients and asked if they’d cooperate in answering the questionnaire. As an inducement, they were offered a $5 coupon from Subway sandwiches. While most agreed to participate, some wanted only to be left alone, despite our offer of food.

I have to confess that I had not planned to spend the whole 2 ½ hours on the streets of Hollywood in the middle of the night interviewing the homeless. But once I got started, I couldn’t stop. With each person we interviewed, I felt a sense of responsibility to them and an even greater sense of the possibilities we could offer to help avert a tragic end to their lives.

The first man we found was sleeping in a pocket park off of Franklin Avenue. He’d been homeless for 8 years, most of them in Hollywood and most of them in that park. He said he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury in an accident some years ago and had no memory of anything. His name, he said, was Frank Sinatra. I suspect he’ll end up on Common Ground’s “vulnerability index” as one of the homeless who’ll rank among the area’s most likely to die on the streets without services and housing.

As we walked down La Brea Ave. between Hollywood and Sunset, we found a man in his late 50’s sleeping on a cot in the front yard of an apartment building. He offered a different face of the problem of homelessness on our streets.

Homeless for two months, he said he has a B.A. from UCLA and was honorably discharged from the United States Navy. I asked what precipitated his life of homelessness in Hollywood. He said that he’d been living with his mother in Altadena when her failing health forced her to move into a convalescent hospital. To pay the costs, she needed to sell her house, leaving her son without a roof.

One of our other teams found a colony of homeless people living in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl—more than 20 of them led by their “mayor,” an armed forces veteran who has been homeless for more than two decades. One of the tragedies of homelessness in our country is that somewhere between 20% and 25% of the homeless are veterans of our armed forces. They answered the call of our nation, and now it’s time for us to answer their call for help.

That’s what the Hollywood homeless count is all about. We’ve already had success with this approach in Skid Row, in Venice, in Santa Monica and in other communities, where “permanent supportive housing” will be provided in the months ahead to nearly 500 of the most chronically and vulnerable homeless on our streets.

These are the individuals who’ll end up in our jails and emergency rooms multiple times during the course of a year if they’re not housed and provided with crucial health and mental health services. On the streets, they run up a fortune in health and incarceration costs. Providing them with permanent supportive housing will actually save our county and society money because these individuals will no longer end up in jail or in emergency rooms with anything approaching the same frequency.

I know that the magnitude of our homeless problem can seem intimidating and insurmountable. But this is a problem of individual lives, not statistics. Common Ground’s “vulnerability index” gives us a biography of sorts for each of these people, giving us new and deeper insights into their struggles and exactly what they need to have lives restored. Our job is to take those biographies—those life stories—and change their trajectories.

To see a video of Zev addressing homeless volunteers before heading onto the streets, click here.

Posted 4-29-10 on Zev Yaroslavsky’s Blog

Opening Our Eyes to the Homeless

Hector Tobar of the LA Times recounts his travels around Los Angeles with the organization People Assisting The Homeless in search of the homeless in this April 23rd article. Enjoy.

Opening Our Eyes to the Plight of the Homeless

It’s easy to ignore them, but they’re there if you look: struggling souls with stories to tell about their hard lives.

HECTOR TOBAR

April 23, 2010

Plywood boards cover the windows and doors of the abandoned Chinese Buffet in Inglewood. Each rectangle reads like a sign announcing “Plague!” or “Recession!”

Most drivers on Manchester Boulevard simply speed past. But Rodolfo Salinas and his colleagues slowed down one morning this week to look. They saw a few vehicles, including an RV, parked in the restaurant’s lot.

Pulling in to look more closely, they spotted a mattress and bits of clothing hidden behind the restaurant. And inside the RV, they saw a dog. No, two dogs.

“Hello!” Salinas called out. “Anyone need a lunch? Some socks?”

A moment later, the small community of hidden souls stirred to life. A man stuck his head out from behind the fence and took a sandwich. Then the door to the RV opened, and another man emerged. He said his name was Gary and that he’d been living in the RV with his wife and two dogs for about a year.

“Used to live over by Crenshaw,” he told Salinas, an outreach worker with the Hollywood-based nonprofit People Assisting the Homeless, or PATH. “Had a job detailing cars at a carwash.”

I spent a day with Salinas and his team this week, driving through Inglewood and Westchester in search of homeless people underneath the flight path of jets roaring into LAX.

We found men and women living in many kinds of places — huddled in the alley behind a real estate office, encamped in the narrow spaces between industrial buildings, under a bridge on Lincoln Boulevard overlooking the yellow wildflowers of the Ballona Creek wetlands.

It’s a tragedy that’s taking place every day, in nearly every L.A. neighborhood, seemingly just outside our field of vision.

Salinas and his co-workers taught me to see what has always been there in front of me.

Like most Angelenos, I’ve learned to avert my eyes from the signs of transience and suffering. But at an auto parts store on Hawthorne Boulevard, Salinas and his partners told me to look up and study a corner of the parking lot.

Against a gray retaining wall, I saw a little mountain of nylon, wool and plastic. Salinas called out a greeting and the mountain stirred. A balding, caramel-colored head poked out.

“I just got out of the hospital,” Lafayette, 64, told us. He’d been treated for a bladder infection, he said, and his wrist was covered with the plastic bracelets of many a hospital admission. “I only stayed one day and got kicked out.”

Lafayette, who gave just the one name, was sleeping in a padded chair salvaged from a car or van, next to the aluminum walker he uses on his daily wanderings. “We’ve watched him deteriorate,” said Stephanie Pashby, a PATH outreach worker who’s been coming to Inglewood for two years.

Lafayette is dying in public. He’s one of the frailer members of a population that today includes not just the addicted and the mentally ill but also an increasing number of people driven from their jobs and homes by the economic crisis.

We can’t even say, with certainty, how big this population is.

Earlier this month, census workers fanned out across the city in a three-day effort to count the homeless. When the final tally comes in, it will include Lafayette and many other “chronically homeless” people known to outreach workers who made sure they filled out census forms.

But the residents of Manchester Boulevard’s Chinese Buffet probably weren’t counted, because homeless outreach workers discovered their encampment only this week.

Salinas estimates that the census reached fewer than half of those actually living on Inglewood’s streets. “It hurts me to say that, because I was part of the effort to count people,” he said.

Despite a well-funded census campaign, reaching everyone in such a fluid community is nearly impossible, Salinas said. “People are working very hard to hide themselves.”

The homeless quickly learn to find neglected, forgotten and unpleasant places, little patches of real estate where they’ll be left alone. Thanks to the economic crisis, the city has more of these places than ever before.

“We won’t go in there,” Salinas told me as we stood outside a cluster of condemned properties off Prairie Avenue, a menacing landscape of crumbling apartments and bungalows that he said is home to about 20 people.

But there were also signs of life in more open and well-traveled spots, including the back of a busy restaurant parking lot on Century Boulevard. “Over there, by the trees,” said outreach worker Herman Osorio, pointing.

After a while, it seemed I was seeing people living everywhere.

“I’ve lived a hard life,” Helen, 63, told us as she stood in an alley with her husband, Larry. As we left in search of others, she said: “I hate to imagine anyone worse off than we are.”

We found encampments nestled against the concrete walls of the 405 Freeway, where people put up mirrors to help them spot intruders.

In a shallow muddy culvert beneath an overpass, we encountered a woman with a wild mop of blond hair. “She’s tweaking on crystal,” Pashby said of the mother of three.

Hidden in every encampment is a family story.

Outreach worker Osorio, 27, told me how many years ago he met his homeless father for the first time. He was a boy of about 8 then, being raised by a single mom in Hollywood. “Where’s my dad?” Osorio asked her. She took him to see an alcoholic panhandling on a Santa Monica Boulevard sidewalk just a few blocks away.

Osorio discovered that his father, like many homeless people, stayed close to the place where he had once lived with his family. After his father got himself sober and off the streets, they talked. “He’d go to the park and watch me play baseball, and I never knew it,” Osorio said.

I’m going to start thinking of the homeless that way, as members of my family — often unseen but always present, waiting to be found and maybe even helped, if I just take the time to see them.

hector.tobar@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

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