Part II: The Cost of Free Meals

A decade ago, the City tied food and shelter for the homeless to an extensive network of services based on a carrot-and-stick master plan. In the second of a three-part series, The Lookout explores whether feeding programs from outside the City are undermining the plan by giving away the carrots with no strings attached.

By Oliver Lukacs

July 30, 2002 -- For the last five years, Katherine Lock, from Marina del Rey, has run a small once-a-week coffee and donuts morning feeding program from a local Santa Monica church she preferred not to identify, fearing that it might attract more homeless than she can feed.

While admitting that "we're not solving a problem, we're meeting a need," Lock said that seeing the same faces of the homeless regulars from downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Santa Monica is discouraging at times.

"There's a frustration, when you see the same people, and they're not getting any better," she said.

It was that frustration that fueled a grassroots movement eight years ago to craft and enact an ordinance that connected "emergency services," such as food and beds, to a shelter system with a carrot-and-stick approach that complemented the City's new get-tough laws.

But City officials worry that the 22 documented feeding programs -- most of them from eight other towns as far away as Downey and Ventura -- are increasingly undermining the City's plan by handing out free meals in public parks disconnected from any social services.

"Most of the organizations are not from Santa Monica," said Barbara Stinchfeild, director of the City's Department of Community and Cultural Services. "So they are not a part of the planning process that we do with our partner agencies on what our mutual goals are."

The goals of the City's services, unlike those of the feeding programs, are "intended to get people off the street not keep them on the street," she said

But there is a stack of roadblocks preventing the City and the feeding programs from coordinating their services. For one, many of the feeding programs are unaware of that the City has a plan. In addition, many of the programs fly below the radar screen because they sporadically pop-up and vanish without a trace.

Because of their elusive nature, it is suspected that there are dozens of programs in addition to the 22 documented on a list compiled by the City, which include not only out-of-town churches and organizations, but individuals as well. Even the documented programs on the list are hard to trace, providing ghost names and addresses invariably leading to dead ends.

Take the case of Pastor Bill. On the City's list, he is allegedly working with Foursquare Church in Santa Monica and is scheduled to serve sack lunches at 7:30 a.m. every morning Monday through Friday.

Using the telephone number Pastor Bill provided to call the church The Lookout was told that although there is a "Pastor Billy," the congregation does not sponsor nor has heard of any regularly scheduled feeding program.

Still another obstacle to coordinating services is that many of the programs are run by Evangelical churches that use food as bait to fish for fresh souls. In accordance with the separation of church and state, the City "cannot allow any evangelical activity on government-funded property," said Joel Schwartz, who coordinates Santa Monica's homeless services.

A veteran homeless in Santa Monica who has seen the evangelists come and go, Bill Williams said they usually "give you little 'Jesus Loves You" cards and even coerce the homeless into prayer with food.

"That's the bargain," Williams said. "You have to stand there and pray and take your hat off," something Williams said he resented but obeyed out of desperation. "I don't think I should be made to pray over anything to get something to eat."

It is this same resentment that drives 55 year-old Vietnam veteran Bobby Collins to sleep on the streets of Santa Monica when his monthly welfare checks run out, instead of seeking shelter in a church or the Salvation Army, one of the City's service affiliates.

"They want to force you to serve God. If God put us all here to be his servants, we'd all be robots," he said, prefacing that thought with the fact that he is a "very religious person. I read the Old Testament every morning and the New Testament every night."

As it stands, many of the food-providing organizations are completely unaware of the City's plan. In the seven months Silvia Schiada and her American Martyrs Church group in Manhattan Beach have been coming to feed the homeless at Palisaides Park, she never contacted the City of Santa Monica or any local church to coordinate services.

"I hope in our ignorant bliss we are not shooting ourselves in the foot," said Schiada, when asked if she knew of the City's plan.

Seeing the 300 hungry homeless' hands she puts food into every month, Schiada had concluded that the City must not have a plan. When told a system does exist, she was skeptical.

If the system is good enough, she asked, "Then why aren't people getting fed on the weekend? How effective is that program?"

Schiada affirmatively rejected the idea that her feeding program was undermining the city's plan. "They can take their system and shove it."

Even some who are aware of the City's system have failed to plug in. Moira LaMountain, one of the original volunteers who tried to integrate a feeding program into the City's services system, harbors distrust from past experience.

The program she runs, HOPE, resulted from a City plan in 1991 to break down one large feeding program on the City Hall lawn into three separate service-connected indoor programs, a plan LaMountain's associate at the time felt was "a divide and conquer technique to diminish the power of volunteers."

LaMountain broke away from the program, resenting the "food caps" that forced her to decide "who is not going to get food today" and the apparent absence of the City's promised services.

"Two years I worked there," said LaMountain, who has run a meal program in Palisades Park for a decade. "I never saw an outreach worker come to the program. If they couldn't even get one there, how can they handle three sites."

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Eleven years in the making, Santa Monica's system evolved from the traditional "three hots and a cot" program into an award-winning model that is the most progressive in the nation, Stinchfield said.

Unlike Los Angeles -- whose Homeless Services Authority gets all of its roughly $40 million a year to grapple with the county's 86,000 homeless from the federal government -- Santa Monica supplements its $500,000 in federal funds with $2 million.

As a result, Santa Monica's system provides a wide and deep social safety net custom tailored to span across the spectrum of homeless needs "to lead people from the street to permanent housing at the end of the road."

"If anyone wants to get off the street, we have the services to help them do that," Schwartz said.

The system offers 455 beds provided by nearly two dozen non-profit organizations each targeting different problems, from substance abuse to metal illness to spousal abuse, among other social ills. Most the beds are dedicated to transitional housing and only a handful are reserved for emergency one-night drop ins. Last year, the system served 3,254 homeless people.

But with approximately 4,000 homeless people circulating through the City every year, there are hundreds that fall through the safety net, primarily because there is a lack of affordable housing in Santa Monica.

There is an increasing backlog of people slated to move into permanent housing from their transitional shelters, Schwartz said. But they have no place to move and consequently flood the system, leaving service-seeking homeless left out in the cold.

"We have an 87 percent occupancy rate, but we're only serving 43 percent of the homeless population," said Schwartz.

Schwartz added that the 43 percent refers to the 1999 one-night census that counted 1,200 homeless and that there is a vacancy rate because people either get kicked out for breaking the rules or get a helping hand from a different source.

Ralph Washington, 50, a Chicagoan who has been homeless in Santa Monica for 22 years, noted that a lack of affordable housing makes the homeless more visible. "Then they say, 'Why are they sleeping everywhere?' Because there's no facilities for nobody to sleep."

With no bed to sleep in, the homeless are not guaranteed a meal from the City sponsored services. As a result, many turn to people like LaMountain, who act as a safety net to catch "people while they wait for the system."

In addition, homeless advocates complain that the overtaxed system is full of hoops that are dehumanizing to jump through. The homeless, LaMountain said, "complain they're treated as second class citizens without second class citizen rights. Everything is a struggle, from getting mail to something as simple as getting a sock from a box."

"They're told, 'We give out socks on Thursday,' but they're barefoot now and it's Monday. Where is the humanity in that?" In addition, LaMountain said, the homeless feel trapped in a pinball-machine-like network that bounces them back and forth from organization to organization until "the person basically gives up."

This alleged treatment alienates people, who are then labeled as "service resisters," LaMountain said.

Schwartz, who has been dealing with the homeless for more than 30 years, knows there are those who duck services because they are repelled by the strings attached.

"Not everybody wants to deal with curfews, sobriety and rules. No sex, no violence, no threats, no weapons, and no drugs," said Schwartz, noting that those are the rules across the board.

Williams, a former drug-addict, said drugs play a big part in keeping people on the street; the feeding programs just enable them to stay high and homeless.

"You give me lunch and save me ten dollars, and now I can take my ten dollars, go to the liquor store and buy a half gallon of vodka," Williams said. "You just helped me abuse."

If the feeding programs were stopped cold turkey, Williams predicted, "I think these suckers would move somewhere else. [But] fifty percent of them wouldn't go into shelters, because they'd be too busy copping dope."

While resenting the label of "service-resisters," LaMountain concedes that even among her recipients there are those who simply like being homeless.

"We have hobos who have ridden rails since turn of the century," she said. "There are just antisocial people who are not going to integrate."