Forbidding Contact and Balancing Needs

August 18 2003

Dear Editor,

Our Planning Commission is seriously considering adopting a policy that would forbid an applicant to discuss their project with a commissioner prior to a Planning Commission hearing.

Apparently our Planning Commissioners have deluded themselves into believing they are impartial judges. Apparently inconsistencies -- like commissioners are selected for their politics rather than their planning skills, and the time given to a project applicant can often be 1/10th the time that is given to a project’s opponents -- are beneath consideration.

But perhaps that is why more and more applicants, including city staff, consider rejection by the Planning Commission to be merely a formality before the real hearing takes place before City Council.

Sincerely,

Jeff Segal
Santa Monica

August 18, 2003

Dear Editor,

The homeless who live in Santa Monica have been described for some time now as a “problem” for which we need to find a solution. The people who live on Santa Monica’s streets and in its parks come from all over the country hoping to find some food and free housing that Santa Monica supposedly offers. But there aren’t enough resources for this abundant group of people, some of whom can’t find the right housing, others who don’t want it.

Santa Monica’s legendary hospitality towards the homeless seems to be dwindling. In the past year an ordinance has been passed at City Council to “manage” the feeding programs, and the Turning Point shelter is now having problems trying to find a new home. Santa Monica is having trouble maintaining the delicate balance between the two main groups that populate the city: the ones with homes and the ones without.

The decision to manage the feeding programs was controversial from the beginning. Large groups from all over the Los Angeles area have been coming to Santa Monica for years to feed the homeless population. As a result of the new ordinance, large groups have to be affiliated with social services organizations in order for them to continue handing out food to the homeless.

This idea came about when merchants in Santa Monica’s business district started complaining about the homeless invading their businesses and driving away customers when business started dropping following September 11th, 2001. The homeless were not the main cause of the dropping business, but the country’s economy; however the homeless were an easy target for the merchants.

That is not to say that homeless people do not pose a threat to Santa Monica’s businesses. Even if they did not drive off customers, it’s frightening for someone to come to their store to open up in the morning and find a drunken person sleeping in their doorstep. There are so many homeless people in Santa Monica that finding a way to keep them from businesses is not an easy task to achieve.

One idea that came about was to find a way to manage the feeding programs. These programs not only attract people from all over Los Angles to feed the homeless but also hungry people from all over to eat the food. One of the issues with these feeding programs is that it seems to distract people from their own neighborhoods.

Kathleen Rawson, who is the executive director of the Bayside District, said that the feeding programs don’t really give the homeless people enough of what they need. She said that if the feeding programs had social service people working with them, then people who came to the feeding programs for food could also have medical needs taken care of at the same place.

To run a large feeding program in Santa Monica now you have to go through a lot of paper work. When asked whether this ordinance had worked she said, “No, because the law is not being followed.” The feeding programs are still occurring illegally.

Turning Point, a shelter run by the Ocean Park Community Center, is having to move locations because of the bus expansion. No neighborhood wanted to take the shelter. Turning Point finally found a new location next to the landfill in the Pico neighborhood, but is still receiving resistance from the residents in the area.

Very few residents seem to want to see homeless people on their streets but they don’t want them sheltered in their neighborhood either. Interesting alternative solutions have been proposed. Randy C. Walburger suggests what he calls “Modular Shelters.” These are small box-like shelters made with plastic that are large enough to fit a grown person inside.

His idea is for the shelters to be placed in parking lots at night that homeless people can sleep in. One homeless person could be paid to supervise each parking lot. There are two main problem with this idea: not many people want homeless people in their parking lots and there are a lot of homeless people who are afraid of closed in spaces.

A few months ago I went to a protest against the management of the feeding programs. It was there that I was able to talk to a lot of homeless people affected by this decision. One man’s words stand out above all the rest.

“We were just like you once,” he said. “Most of us had the American dream. A nice house, a car, a wife, children. We just fell into despair.”

These chilly words have represented my thoughts on the homeless community for some time now. We need to stop thinking of them as a problem and start thinking of this struggling homeless population as a group of people who have the same needs and desires as everyone else.