Helping the homeless

Need exists year-round, not just during holiday season

Helping the homeless and hungry often is the “in thing” to do during the holiday season, but the less fortunate are seldom remembered once the new year arrives.

“The need is still there (other times) but people choose to help during the holiday season, said Geraldo Rodriguez of the SCV branch of the Los Angeles County Department of Community Services. “We need to let people know it’s a year-round problem.”

The Rev. Lynn Jay, vicar of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church and administrator of the SCV Food Pantry, agreed. “People remember us during the holidays, but it sure gets dry during the summer,” she said.

Last Saturday the pantry received a donation of more than 23,000 cans of food Boy Scouts had collected from area homes. Jay called the gift the pantry’s “biggest donation ever.”

Rodriguez said the SCV’s homeless problem remains less severe than in other areas of the Southland, but it continues to be a problem, nonetheless.

“In this valley, we are not dealing with gobs of homeless because traditionally, homeless people seek an environment with a nice climate,” he said. “Here in the desert, the weather swings from very hot to very cold.”

Most of the homeless here are families down on their luck because of some calamity or miscalculation, Rodriguez said.

“We see a more transient situation, a more crisis situation,” he said. “Most of the people we see are ... en route to a different place.

“They’re moving from one place to another and get stuck here a ‘Grapes of Wrath’ situation where people come from Oklahoma to California, the land of plenty,” Rodriguez continued. “When they get here, they find they would have been better off where they were.”

The SCV Food Pantry hands out 1,000 meals every month, mostly to people who, while working and living off the streets, cannot afford to buy food, Jay said.

“We see people who are chronically below the poverty Sine, the working poor,” she said “There is a large number of people who have lost their jobs, seasonal workers, and there are people who will never be able to hold a job.”

For Jay, helping the homeless has become increasingly necessary as the number of people without a roof over their head skyrockets.

“Certainly we have an increasing number of homeless people,” she said, adding in the SCV they are, for the most part, invisibie. “Lots of people live in canyons. Lots of people live in open land, under bridges and on top of buildings and ... in trash dumpsters.

“I know a kid on the streets who got a job but he just couldn’t deal with it partly because he was very tired,” from a lack ot sleep brought on by cold weather. Jay said.

Said Rodriguez, “I’m not trying to minimize the problem, but I think you have a situation where you have a need to identify the real homeless.

“We’re not talking about bums,” service center director Larry Margolis said. ‘ They’re parasites. They have been w ith us forever. They’ve been around since primitive man.

“This group is unable to cope with the responsibility that a home, an apartment or a permanent living situation provides,” be said, adding while the com-rnuTvty service depart Tent tries to hplp p people, the snort-term homeless remain the department’s focus.

“We primarily target families and single parents with kids,” Rodriguez said “Our emphasis is not long-term food providing but crisis food providing.”

In the SCV. he added, “We don’t have any of the kinds of programs designed for people on the streets. If family is in real dare need, we usually end up traaportir4 them to places in the San Fernando Vallev.”