By Olin Ericksen
Staff Writer

First of two parts

January 12 -- An estimated 2,800 people sleep in the alleys, doorways, parks and beaches of Santa Monica each night. Most of them suffer from substance abuse or mental illness, many are older and more than a third are women.

Those are among the key findings of an unprecedented 169-page report presented to the City Council Tuesday night that is as dense with problems and solutions, as it is with narratives and statistics representing the harsh realities of local street life.

Tackling Santa Monica’s highly publicized homeless problem, the report by the Urban Institute cautioned, will require more than changing the City’s two-decades-old safety net, which serves hundreds of homeless each year.

In addition to the City, the whole community must meet to truly lift out of the gutters one of the most street-hardened, mentally unstable and chemically dependant homeless subgroups in the nation, consultants said. Without an on-going entity to monitor progress and challenges, the system is doomed to repeat past mistakes, they said.

The council praised the report released last week that will likely be the basis of policy change for years to come. But it held off on giving a go-ahead to any of the host of short, medium or long-term recommendations tucked in the review, not all of which are without controversy.

"It is an enormously complex issue," said Mayor Richard Bloom, a vocal advocate on homeless issues who served on the blue-ribbon panel that crafted Bring LA Home, a 10-year strategy to end homelessness in LA County. "We need to think more about it."

The next step will be for City staff to review the report, augment some findings and return in coming weeks with recommendations, perhaps the most important being the formation of a community "round-table," according to consultants who authored the study.

"The City needs a table, or forum, for everybody to meet," said Martha Burt, director of the Social Services Research Program for the Urban Institute, the private, non-partisan research group in Washington D.C. hired by the City to conduct the review.

Burt, who co-authored the study, praised the work of the City’s 1991 Homeless Task Force, which lay the groundwork for Santa Monica's current social services system, known as the "Continuum of Care."

"When we read the 1991 report, we thought, why don't we just reprint this," said Burt. "Many of the same recommendations we made were there from the task force."

Once its work was done, the task force, or round table, should not have been dismantled, she said.

"One thing that didn't happen is an ongoing process," said Burt, who described the amount of time she has worked on homeless issues as “forever."

But in order to tackle those issues effectively, Santa Monicans must first better understand the enormity of the problem they face, Burt said.

A unique population
The Urban Institute estimates there are some 2, 800 people out on the streets each night in the City known as "Skid Row by the Sea." That’s 800 more than the 2,000 projected by the County in its first-ever homeless census completed in February 2005.

Imperfect but more reliable than County figures that included some statistical extrapolations, the institute's tally may paint the most detailed picture yet of who is homeless in Santa Monica and why.

Like homelessness itself, the picture -- based on personal data for the 1,900 homeless individuals within Clientrack, the aging database used by several service providers -- isn’t pretty,

The most typical face of homelessness in Santa Monica is that of a single, white male, with a median age of 42 struggling with substance abuse, according to the report.

Fifty-three percent of Santa Monica’s homeless are white, 36 percent are black, 14 percent are "Hispanic" and 11 percent are mixed, according to the data on Clientrack, which is flawed because it sometimes counts clients twice or counts those who may never have set foot in the city.

Nearly 38 percent suffer from some form of mental illness, according to consultants. A full one-third are “chronically homeless,” a term used by the federal government for the mentally or physically disabled who have been on the streets for more than a year, or four times in the last three years.

Only 6 percent do not suffer from substance abuse or mental illness, according to the report.

Many of these statistics make Santa Monica unique among national cities, rendering the challenge that much more daunting.

According to the report, there are 18 to 23 percent more chronically homeless people living in Santa Monica than in other cities, such as San Francisco and New York, that produced one-year estimates.

And within Santa Monica, there are substantially more women (40 percent) -- who have their own needs and problems -- on the street than in other cities.

Santa Monica's homeless population is also older, contributing to health problems. Of those living on the street, 56 percent are between 35 and 54 years old, with another 15 percent 55 and older. That compares with a median age in the mid-thirties for the rest of the nation.

Santa Monica’s unique homeless population -- which is harder to reach and help -- is attracted by both the city’s geography and its demographics, consultants said.

"They come because it's a nice place, they come because they can make money,” Burt told the council. “They sleep on the beach."

"Those differences are partly a reflection of the nature of the certain (social services) system that exists in Santa Monica," said Laudan Aron-Turnham, a senior research assistant at the Urban Institute who co-authored the report.

"If you had as much short-term emergency shelter (in Santa Monica) as outside Santa Monica, those profiles might be mirroring the national profiles," she said.

As a result, Santa Monica’s homeless are not the easiest to help get back on their feet, consultants said.

"What we are not getting are the short-term crisis, people who are homeless, because they lost a job, or the death of a spouse, and they couldn't get back on their feet,” Aron-Turnham said.

In addition to putting a face on those who live on Santa Monica’s streets, the Urban Institute helped assign a cost to homelessness, not just in human life, but in bottom line dollars.

A high price
In fiscal year 2005-06 -- from July1, 2005 to June 30, 2006 -- the City spent more than $4.5 million (not including grants and contracts) on the homeless.

The largest sum – more than $2 million – was spent by police, who reportedly made 1,796 arrests of the homeless, not including citations issued.

"That's nearly five arrests a day," noted Council member Bobby Shriver, who has been an outspoken advocate for change in the City’s homeless policies.

In addition, the specially trained police outreach HLP team responded to 2,400 incidents and made 2,900 periodic checks on property and open space.

The City Attorney's office shouldered some of its own costs, processing nearly 2,249 cases involving arrests and citations of homeless individuals, including those who violated laws regulating camping, park closures, abusive solicitation or panhandling, and the possession of shopping carts.

The City’s Fire Department was also burdened with calls for service. Of the 9,000 total calls for service during the past fiscal year, some 1,500 were from people who clearly appeared homeless. Of the 1,250 calls that involved those who gave their names, 100 individuals accounted for 37 percent of the calls.

The City’s Fire Department and its paramedics spent some $472,000 assisting the homeless in fiscal year 2005-06, according to the report.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars more are accrued by the various City departments affected by, and dedicated to, homelessness.

Such a high overall costs may add weight to the arguments supporting the City’s two-and-a-half-year-old program known as "housing first," which essentially pays rent to help the mostly chronicly homeless get off, and stay off the street.

Consultants said their study did not address whether any of the City’s programs have resulted in a drop in reported arrests and calls for service. Anecdotally, police and paramedics reported that they seem to be helping the same number of individuals as before the "housing first" policy went into effect.