Aid to Homeless Finally Pushes Beyond San Diego City Limits

Until recently, the Regional Task Force on the Homeless wasn’t living up to its name.

The task force, formed at the end of 1984 to succeed the Mayor’s Task Force on the Downtown Homeless, focused its attention almost exclusively on downtown San Diego until about three months ago.

Then, in response to pressure from other homeless advocacy agencies and mounting evidence that the homeless problem is pervasive countywide, the task force started to look for ways it could help in South Bay, East County and, paradoxically, affluent North County.

“We’re just now beginning to look out of downtown,” said Frank Landerville, the project director of the task force. North County is getting a lot of that attention.

On the surface, it would seem that North County, with its booming economy, would be unlikely to attract much attention from homeless advocacy agencies. The reality, however, is that North County has a significant and largely hidden homeless population, one that has evaded attention from groups outside North County for years.

All that is slowly beginning to change.

The “regionalization” of the regional task force is one manifestation of the heightened awareness of North County’s homeless. Until three months ago, there were no representatives from North County on the task force. Now there are two.

A recent task force report recommends developing a regional plan by January to guide government funding agencies on how to distribute funds for the homeless throughout the county. The task force has worked extensively with the San Diego housing agency, Landerville said, but “We’ve done very little with all of the other housing authorities in all the incorporated cities, as well as the county housing authority. What we want to do is take what worked in San Diego and use it all over the county.”

Another group that helps the homeless, the Legal Aid Society of San Diego, set up two offices in North County just last month to help the homeless get government benefits they’re entitled to.

In downtown San Diego, homelessness is readily apparent. The homeless can be seen sitting on park benches or walking through the streets, looking for a way to get some food or a place to stay.

But in affluent North County, where most live people in comfortable suburban homes, the burgeoning numbers of the homeless are practically invisible, said Suzanne Stewart Pohlman, director of a crisis center for the homeless in Escondido and one of the North County representatives on the task force.

In fact, thousands of people in North County sleep on beaches or under bridges and rely on soup kitchens for food, and their numbers are growing.

Pohlman said North County’s rapid development has obscured the negative side of growth, as the number of poor or homeless swell alongside the number of clean green lawns and attractive homes. Few people are aware of the magnitude of the problem because the homeless in North County are dispersed over a large area.

In addition, the North County homeless seem to disguise themselves better than their counterparts downtown. Many of the homeless women, senior citizens and families, for instance, “look like they’re on their way somewhere,” Landerville said, “but in reality they’re not.”

Look Like Everyone Else

The homeless in North County frequently look no different than anyone else, defying the stereotype of homeless as disheveled-looking men. Pohlman tells of one “yuppie kind of family” who lost their home but were able to keep their cars and send a son to college.

When the son came home on vacation, he discovered his parents “living in different parking lots in the North County area and trying to keep their kids in school,” Pohlman said.

It is nearly impossible to gauge exactly how many homeless there are in North County, but Landerville estimates that close to half of San Diego County’s homeless live outside the city of San Diego, and a recent informal survey of homeless advocacy agencies in North County put the number of homeless at more than 4,000. Many of the homeless, most notably migrant workers, were left out of the survey because they don’t seek help at community agencies.

At the crisis center in Escondido, the number of homeless who come in for help has increased 300% since 1985, Pohlman wrote in a report on homelessness in North County released in March. But need has simply outstripped resources in Escondido and elsewhere, homeless advocates say.

Unfortunately, North County suffers from a lack of services for homeless families, an increasingly common phenomenon, said Marylou Sauerborn, director of the Ecumenical Service Center in Oceanside. Within the last two months, she said, the center has done its best to help 37 homeless families, many of them with young children.

But in North County, there are no shelters for families, which means residents must go to downtown San Diego for help. “And families are reluctant to do that because of the perceptions of downtown--and the reality of downtown,” Landerville said.

“The resources in North County simply have not kept up with the need over the past 10 years,” Sauerborn said. “The problem up here has accelerated very very rapidly because North County has grown so much.”

Money Short for Motels

Occasionally, the Oceanside crisis center, which is privately funded, will give a family money to stay in a motel for one night. Normally, the center doesn’t have enough money to do even that.

In Escondido, families are sometimes put up at campsites but Pohlman is loath to accommodate families with small children in tents. Many end up having to go into San Diego for help.

Sauerborn and Pohlman said there is also a shortage of shelters for homeless single men and women. “It’s all inadequate. It’s all sorely inadequate. We’re able to shelter only about one-third of the need,” said Pohlman.

“We tend to be overlooked up here,” Sauerborn said, in part because of the North County’s image as a suburban paradise, she said.

“This is a misperception that we’re fighting against all the time,” Sauerborn said. “The affluent areas--of course they’re there, but the people living in the streets are not in the areas where other people would normally go.”

Authorities in North County give several reasons for the increase in the number of homeless.

Pohlman’s report points out that in downtown San Diego, homelessness has been spotlighted because the city’s growth squeezed out single-room occupancy hotels, usually the last home for the poor before they go out on the streets. Some of those forced out migrated northward.

What they found was that in North County, too, there is a severe lack of “affordable” rental housing--that is, units that cost 25% or less of a household’s income.

Five Factors Listed

Besides the shortage of affordable housing, Pohlman’s report lists five factors contributing to the rise in North County homelessness:

- The effect of unemployment. Although unemployment was only 4.2% countywide in April, “unemployment is believed to be a major cause of homelessness, particularly among the more recent homeless,” the report says.

- The breakdown of traditional social structures, relationships and responsibilities. With the divorce rate running quite high and spousal abuse a major problem, the number of single-parent families--which are especially vulnerable to catastrophic changes like the loss of a job--continues to grow.

- Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Between a third and one-half of the homeless nationwide are believed to be mentally ill, one of a mixed bag of effects wrought by releasing many mentally ill people from hospitals.

- Inflation. Although the inflation rate has been quite low in recent years, it still has a significant effect on those living on fixed incomes.

- Cutbacks in human care funding. The Reagan Administration’s cuts in human service outlays “spell disaster for anyone already at the bottom of the ladder and hard times for all those who are being forced inexorably down, rung by rung, by those at the economic peak,” the report says.

This last reason is exacerbated when the homeless don’t know where to go to get government aid, or have trouble filling out complicated forms to get the aid.

Unable to Fill Out Forms

“Many of our clients, for a number of reasons, are unable to fill out the forms for SSI, AFDC, whatever it is,” said Sauerborn. The reasons include illiteracy, mental illness or the difficulty of working effectively on an empty stomach.

To combat that problem, the Legal Aid Society of San Diego recently expanded its Homeless Advocacy Project to include North County.

Three days a week in the crisis center in Escondido and two days a week at the center in Oceanside, Legal Aid Society volunteers and professionals help the poor and homeless wade through the bureaucratic maze of government aid programs.

A similar project was started in downtown San Diego about two months ago and the effects so far have been positive, said Daniel Melcher, who set up the North County program.

Project workers help the homeless fill out applications for government aid, gather evidence to prove eligibility for aid and file appeals when requests are turned down.

In some cases, the way a form is filled out can mean the difference between being getting a few hundred dollars a month and getting nothing at all. For instance, Melcher said, someone who quits his job normally wouldn’t be eligible for aid for 90 days. If he had a good reason to quit, however, he would still be able to get help.

“But they wouldn’t know to put that down,” Melcher said, and without help with the forms they would be left out on the street.

About half the people who come for help in the San Diego office are mentally ill, unable to cope with the stress of waiting half a day in a welfare office and filling out complicated forms. In those cases, volunteers go down to the welfare office with them to guide them through the bureaucratic maze.

The Legal Aid Society decided to expand the project to North County after it realized that the homeless normally have no transportation to its downtown office. “Homeless people can’t get to us, so we have to go to them,” Melcher said.

Nobody expects the society’s program to be a panacea for homelessness in North County. At the same time, Sauerborn said, “It should end the cycle for many of these people.”