Assistance Center Offers Ray of Hope : Homeless: Ventura facility is called a golden opportunity for riverbed squatters. But some wonder what will happen after it closes in March.

It is being called the opportunity of a lifetime, a great chance to help the homeless and reverse decades of community apathy that allowed the creation of a shantytown at the bottom of the Ventura River.

When floodwaters ripped out homeless encampments along the riverbed earlier this month, the city, the county and nonprofit agencies worked together like never before to establish an assistance center aimed at matching displaced squatters with housing and social services.

To many, the effort was nothing short of miraculous.

“We have been talking about this kind of concept for a long time,” said Rick Pearson, executive director of Project Understanding in Ventura, the agency most directly involved with helping river-bottom residents over the years.

“There are some people for whom this is going to be a golden opportunity,” Pearson said. “They are going to look back on the flood of 1995 and say, ‘This is the best thing that ever happened to us.’ ”

But there is also some suspicion surrounding this drive toward fostering self-sufficiency.

The assistance center, which in its first week registered more than 130 homeless people, is scheduled to close March 31. Housing, food giveaways and other flood-related services offered there also are scheduled to end on that date.

Officials hope that most former river-bottom dwellers will be well on their way to getting back on their feet by then.

Key to the creation of the center was the city’s prohibition against camping along the Ventura River. Come March 31, that will still be in force.

So what happens then? Advocates for the homeless, and some transients themselves, worry that the commitment to helping the displaced river-bottom residents will last only as long as the center stays open.

And they fear that the only thing that will have been accomplished is the city’s long-stated goal of rooting out the river-bottom dwellers and wiping out their community for good.

“I support the concept of the assistance center . . . and I think it will probably get us through the worst part of the winter,” said Clyde Reynolds, executive director of the Turning Point Foundation, which serves Ventura’s mentally ill.

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“My concern is that it’s only two months,” he added. “And I am concerned that once they’ve done this, they may feel they have done all they are legally required to do.”

Such concern extends to former residents of what was, until the flood, Ventura County’s oldest and largest homeless community.

“I hope they’re not just trying to humor us,” said longtime river-bottom resident Rick Wells. “I think if they do what they say they are going to do, they will have a good foothold on helping the people on the river bottom.

“If not, they’re going to have a mess on their hands.”

What the community has had on its hands for decades is a mess it never could figure out how to clean up, advocates and officials agree.

The river bottom had been a refuge for the homeless since at least World War II, a hobo jungle created by railroad tramps below the point where the Southern Pacific train trestle straddles the Ventura River.

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As many as 200 people scratched out their lives on the river bottom, carving out a community of plywood shacks and nylon tents that stretched more than two miles up the white sand floor.

The old squatters’ camp was thought to hold the largest collection of homeless people in Southern California outside of the inner city, homeless advocates and other authorities said.

Those who work most closely with the homeless argued for years that something should be done about the river bottom, but the money for any kind of alternative has never been forthcoming.

At the same time, pressure was mounting against the old vagabond village.

Environmentalists argued that the homeless fouled the river’s habitat, blocking efforts to transform the area into an ecological preserve. Business and civic leaders argued that the homeless were damaging efforts to spruce up downtown Ventura and improve its image.

Over the summer, city officials conceived a plan to pull the homeless out of the riverbed. But it was stalled by fears that the squatters’ civil rights would be violated.

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Then came the rains. One river-bottom resident died earlier this month when the rain-swollen Ventura River swallowed him up while he was sleeping. More than a dozen others were plucked out of the torrent by helicopters, dramatic rescue scenes played out on televisions from coast to coast.

Some people wonder privately whether community leaders were so embarrassed by the nationwide publicity that they were finally forced to deal with the river-bottom issue.

Whatever the motive, the river bottom was immediately declared off-limits to the homeless, a decree strengthened by new city laws adopted last week that allow police to jail anyone caught sleeping in the Ventura or Santa Clara river bottoms.

Already, police say they have backed off on the 24-hour patrols, initiated just after the floods, that aimed to keep the homeless from returning. Regular patrols will be eliminated altogether and police will do only occasional sweeps to keep the area clear.

In response to keeping the homeless out of the river bottom, officials came up with the idea of the one-stop assessment center.

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“I think homelessness has always been viewed as a national problem, a state problem, and localities have been very careful not to become the favored place for the homeless to congregate,” said county Supervisor Susan Lacey, whose district includes the Ventura River bottom.

“But I think humanity says we must do something,” she said. “If we would have wanted to push them to other areas, we would have just kept them out of the river bottom and said goodby. We didn’t do that. We are making an honest attempt to make a difference in people’s lives.”

Added Randall Feltman, the county’s mental health director and a key player in creating the assistance center: “People do things in a disaster they wouldn’t otherwise do. This disaster has provided the opportunity to accomplish a whole lot of objectives that we couldn’t accomplish before.”

In an unfinished storefront on Ventura Avenue, city and county workers last Monday kicked off the first part of that effort.

The assistance center offers drug and alcohol counseling, job placement programs and a web of other services, available to the city’s transients for the first time under one roof.

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The Ventura City Council last week allocated $13,900 to operate the center. In addition, the council earmarked about $30,000 to help house and feed the displaced squatters for the next few weeks.

So far, officials have been able to string together more than 50 shelter beds by renting space at various facilities around town.

Federal officials have promised that Ventura will receive up to 200 emergency housing vouchers that will allow homeless people to move into apartments or motel rooms and pay subsidized rent. Those vouchers have yet to materialize.

“What you see here is an enthusiastic effort to help people without status, who don’t vote and who many people don’t care about,” Feltman said at the center last week.

“The question is, are we committed to sustaining this effort or will it go on for a month or two and then go back to business as usual?” he asked. “I think we have a chance to do something that is significant and that does have long-term benefits for these 200 people.”

But some people worry that some transients could end up worse off than before they were displaced. At least on the river bottom, they had someplace to call home.

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“My contention has always been that it’s ill-advised to remove them from the river bottom when we have nothing else to offer,” said Bob Dailey, the last county mental health worker to have regularly visited the river bottom.

“My fear is that we will dislocate these people, we will give them their short-term relief, then we will dump them with no better place to live,” he said. “And if people don’t like them when they were living on the river bottom, they’re going to like them a whole lot less when they’re sleeping in their doorways and on their sidewalks.”

Another concern is that Ventura will simply shift homeless people to other areas such as Oxnard, where many displaced river-bottom residents are spending their nights at the Red Cross warming shelter.

“I am very concerned about the direction Ventura is taking,” Supervisor John Flynn said. “They can’t simply uproot people and then send them into another city, and that seems to be what’s happening here.”

Ventura officials say they have no intention or desire to shirk their responsibility. But at the same time, they say no city by itself can solve the homeless problem.

In fact, in a report prepared by a task force studying the river-bottom issue over the summer, Ventura officials acknowledged the city’s lack of money and resources for the homeless.

“This is not a program that any one group can do by itself,” City Manager Donna Landeros said. “The bottom line is we need to find suitable housing for homeless people. And I sense a real community attitude that it’s time to deal with this issue, time to stop turning our backs on this.”

Ventura Mayor Tom Buford said he hopes to meet with city and county officials in coming weeks to begin laying the groundwork for some long-term solutions.

But at the same time, Buford said he and other elected officials are fully prepared to meet their obligation when it comes to the homeless in Ventura.

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“We have basically winked at this situation for too many years and we’re not going to do that anymore,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the city of Ventura is going to spend more money in providing care and services to the homeless in 1995 than it did in 1994. What we’re attempting to find out now is what those bottom-line costs are.”

Ultimately, advocates and officials agree, the assistance center could hold the key not only to the question of whether the river bottom settlers can rejoin the mainstream, but to the larger question of homelessness in Ventura County.

If the center works, it could provide a model for similar programs countywide. And it could provide the impetus for creating a permanent homeless shelter.

“If we can sustain the effort, this is really a solvable problem,” Feltman said. “This isn’t Los Angeles, we’re talking about 200 people. We are going to get to know these people and we are going to help them solve their problems.”

Project Understanding’s Pearson holds the same hope. But at the same time, he points out that this new effort only addresses the needs of the river-bottom homeless.

He worries about the public’s reaction to the reality that homeless people will still be around even after money and energy are poured into this effort.

“I’m not under the illusion that people will cease to see those faces of homelessness and poverty they don’t like to see,” Pearson said. “I think we need to remember that the river bottom is not the only place that people are homeless in the city of Ventura.”

At the assistance center, many of those who have come through the doors see this effort as the first stop at freeing themselves from the spiral of homelessness. They show up with their dogs and their bikes, loaded down with all of their worldly possessions.

They include people such as Rick Wells, who says he lost his dentures, eyeglasses and his pride when floodwaters overran the river floor.

“I’m not asking for much, I’m just asking for my pride back,” he said. “I just can’t keep hanging on by a thread.”