Officials Tell of Homeless ‘Crisis’ : Social services: Representatives from five cities plead for more state and federal money to deal with the problem.

Officials from five major cities went panhandling Thursday for more help for the homeless during a state Assembly committee hearing at Santa Monica City Hall.

The mayors were unanimous in calling for more state and federal assistance for housing and mental health care. Cities are being asked to assume too much of the responsibility for caring for the homeless, they argued.

“The buck is stopping at the doorstep of City Hall, but the bucks aren’t there to solve the problem,” Santa Monica Mayor Dennis Zane said.

Besides Zane, mayors Loni Hancock of Berkeley and Ernest Kell of Long Beach testified Thursday. Santa Cruz Vice Mayor Jane Yokayama and Los Angeles City Councilman Robert Farrell also spoke.

The politicians were joined at the hearing by a handful of the homeless and formerly homeless. And outside City Hall, about a dozen Santa Monica residents and merchants held a brief news conference, arguing that the homeless problem will persist as long as handouts and shelter are provided to the indigent.

The hearing before the Assembly Committee on Human Services was the outgrowth of a lobbying effort by a group of businesses and elected officials. Mayors from 14 cities recently sent a letter to state legislators pressing them to hold hearings and join local governments to solve the homeless problem.

During the hearing, Berkeley’s Hancock said the state and federal governments appear to “be looking the other way” when it comes to the homeless. Echoing the statements of other mayors who spoke, Hancock said the homeless problem has been aggravated by deep cuts in housing and state mental health budgets.

“It’s a crisis situation and must be recognized as such,” Hancock said.

Farrell told the legislators that no one knows exactly how many homeless there are in Los Angeles, adding that the best estimates are somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000. He said that many people, such as aerospace workers facing layoffs, are precariously close to falling into the homeless category and are only “two or three paychecks from being on the streets.”

“The economics of the city of Los Angeles these days is a lot of people doing very well, and a lot of people not doing so well with very little in the middle,” Farrell said.

Assemblyman Tom Bates (D-Oakland), who chairs the Human Services Committee, applauded the efforts of cities such as Santa Monica for their efforts to provide programs for the homeless.

But Bates argued that other municipalities are not doing their fair share, and some are ignoring state-mandated housing goals for low-income people.

“I feel we have to go after those other people,” Bates said.

The committee members heard testimony from several formerly homeless people. One, Jo Anne Vandegriff, who said she was homeless for six months after she quit her job and then ran into financial difficulties, said she spent nights in terminals at Los Angeles International Airport and days on Santa Monica’s streets.

“The whole country has to be educated that we’re all vulnerable to becoming homeless,” the 36-year-old part-time secretary said.

Jasen Marsh, 17, told the committee that he had been homeless for more than three years.

The teen-ager said that after he was “thrown out” of his Whittier home, he came to Hollywood, where he now lives in a shelter.

Marsh said he has lived under bridges, along freeways and in abandoned buildings during the time he has been homeless.

“There need to be more shelters. There are maybe four or five shelters out there that I know of,” he said.