Pride and Despair
By Frank Gruber
I had mixed feelings -- pride and hope,
and sadness and despair -- at the opening
of OPCC's new access center on Thursday.
(see
story)
As a Santa Monican, I am proud that our
city government supported the building
of such a needed facility. I was proud
that a homegrown organization, OPCC, built
and would operate the center, and that
a local architect, Ralph Mechur, had designed
it with an eye to both function and beauty.
(Impartiality alert: my wife is a donor
to OPCC's capital campaign.)
At a deeper level, I was proud that the
residents of Santa Monica, beset as they
are and have been over the decades with
a disproportionate number of homeless
people, never have descended as a whole
to "homeless bashing."
The City's surveys of public opinion
regularly show that a large number of
residents, but less than a majority --
from about 22 to 40 percent, depending
on the year -- cite "too many homeless"
as one of the City's more important problems.
(Strictly speaking, of course, no one
can argue with this statement, since even
one homeless person is too many, but the
point is that some people are particularly
annoyed by having homeless people here.)
Nonetheless, certainly in recent years
the candidates for City Council who have
proposed simplistic solutions to homelessness
in Santa Monica don't receive many votes.
The names Jenna Linnekens (2006), Bill
Bauer, David Cole and Kathryn Morea (2004)
come to mind. In contrast, the candidate
who has made the biggest deal about homelessness,
Bobby Shriver, has made a point of emphasizing
how much more society had to invest in
constructive solutions.
Even the downtown business community,
which a few years ago flirted with harsh
measures, seems to have come back to its
senses.
It's not necessarily true that typical
Santa Monicans are more compassionate
than others, although I'd like to think
so. Santa Monicans and their elected representatives
have tried to hold homeless people to
certain standards of conduct, but always
with the intention of encouraging them
to seek help. Certainly Santa Monicans
are too realistic to fall for demagoguery
about homelessness.
I also attended the opening with a fair
amount of hope. I mean, who can't feel
hope when you meet formerly chronic homeless
people who have turned their lives around,
or the absurdly joyful people who choose
to work in the business of turning those
lives around. I don't know what the pay
is for those jobs, but they all seem happy
with what they do.
Notwithstanding the pride and hope, however,
I cannot deny the despair and sadness.
After 25 years of the national crisis
of homelessness, every building that we
build to treat the epidemic of homelessness
is evidence that the epidemic isn't going
away.
There are no miracle drugs to treat mental
illness, or alcoholism, or drug addiction.
Nor public health solutions like what
clean water did for cholera. Our economy
is not structured in a way that produces
affordable housing any more, or that even
permits the flophouses and other cheap
digs of the past.
At a press conference earlier on the
day of the opening of the access center,
I met an OPCC client who, after more than
two decades living on the streets, and
four years of sobriety, is now living
in an affordable apartment on Sixth Street
downtown -- an apartment built, by they
way, because of City policies that promote
affordable housing.
This client's story was one of those
that gives hope, but it's also one that
is discouraging. That's because she could
recall the early days of OPCC, more than
20 years ago, when it was called the Ocean
Park Community Center and its drop-in
center was near Third and Hill. You do
the math and you realize that notwithstanding
conscientious outreach on the part of
OPCC, it took 20 years or so to bring
her inside.
I thought of this Saturday night when
I was walking on Sawtelle after seeing
a movie at the NuArt; right in the middle
of the sidewalk, next to a fire hydrant,
was a human being sleeping under a pile
of ragged blankets.
I walked by, of course. Such a scene
is commonplace. Every night if you walk
around Santa Monica or the Westside, you
see the same, and if you're like most
people, you walk by. It's our dispersed
version of Calcutta.
Homelessness of this sort -- mentally
incapacitated people living on the streets
-- is personal tragedy, but social crime.
How can we let this happen? How can we
live with ourselves?
Well, there are a lot of rationalizations,
and naturally they break down on political
lines. On the left, there's a rationalization
that we can't interfere with the civil
rights of individuals, no matter what
their condition. On the right, there's
a rationalization that homelessness is
all the fault of a permissive society
and personal failure, and thus not the
responsibility of taxpayers.
Let's reject both rationalizations.
I've said this before, including four
years ago when controversy erupted over
OPCC's and the City's plans to build the
Cloverfield Services Center (see
column), but we're not going
to solve the homeless problem within a
reasonable time frame without two things
-- some more coercion, and a lot more
money.
California's mental health laws need
to be revised, or at least reinterpreted.
They currently allow for the civil commitment
of the mentally ill only if they are a
threat to themselves or others. We need
the law to recognize that a mentally incapacitated
person (whatever the cause of the incapacity)
is per se endangered if he or
she is sleeping outdoors in an urban area.
(An unusually high percentage -- 60 to
65 percent -- of the homeless in Santa
Monica are estimated to be mentally ill.)
We can't wait 20 years for homeless people
to realize they need help when they don't
have the capacity to make that realization
on their own. We shouldn't prosecute homeless
people for their condition, but we should
bring them in for treatment often enough
that they have to rethink their status
regularly. A civil commitment for a limited
times is not a criminal incarceration.
After 72 hours of respectful care, the
mentally ill patient or the inebriate
would be free to go, but hopefully, sooner
rather than later, he or she will consider
treatment instead.
Of course, that would mean spending a
lot of money. For all of OPCC's efforts,
for all their grants from government and
donations from philanthropists, in all
these years they managed to put together
just a few hundred beds. Tens of thousands
are needed, along with the medical personnel
and therapists to go with them.
I also know that many of the most caring
professionals in the field disagree with
any coercion, even civil commitments,
as being counterproductive. Perhaps that
would be the case for many people. But
a decade or two is a shamefully long time
to wait for an alcoholic or mentally ill
person to accept help. An easier standard
for civil commitments is an arrow homeless
service providers should have in their
quivers.
Events coming up:
The Santa Monica Place remodel will be
on the City Council's agenda Tuesday night.
Read the staff
report.
Heal the Bay will be hosting its annual
Coastal Cleanup Day this Saturday, Sept.
15. There will be six check-in locations
in Santa Monica. For details, go to http://www.healthebay.org/
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