Not in their backyard

FOUR WEEKS AGO, JAMIE KRONICK moved into her first home in six years. She had been sleeping on the streets of Santa Monica, often in a doorway if the building’s owners didn’t make too much of a fuss. Now Kronick, who is 50, lives in a clean, well-lighted studio apartment in Silver Lake so new it smells of fresh paint.

Kronick’s story, sadly, is as exceptional as her apartment. It’s hard enough to get homeless people the services they need so they can begin to get their lives together. The task is made all the more difficult when local residents and officials stymie attempts to provide such services simply because they don’t want them in their neighborhood. Until Los Angeles realizes that everyone has to be part of the solution, it will stay the nation’s capital of homelessness.

Run by the nonprofit Community of Friends, Kronick’s complex is permanent housing for the chronically homeless with untreated mental illness. Each resident gets a bathroom, a small kitchen and a few pieces of furniture. There’s a laundry room on each floor and a patio out back. On the first floor, staff members offer services such as mental health counseling and classes in how to balance a budget.

A consensus is building that the best way to help Los Angeles’ 34,000 chronically homeless — out of about 88,000 total — is to get them permanent supportive housing like this new building in Silver Lake. New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia are investing heavily and seeing decreases in their homeless population by as much as 15% in recent years.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa recently announced $50 million in new spending on housing, and the county followed with $100 million of its own. Thanks to the Mental Health Services Act, the state also will be providing money for supportive housing throughout the region.

But these efforts are already at risk. There have been dozens of projects — often paid with private dollars — that have been quashed in recent years, usually because politicians buckled to a small but vocal number of local residents who opposed them. Among the projects blocked have been a home in Sylmar for children living on skid row, a winter shelter for families in North Hollywood and a project in San Pedro for veterans.

The result is that both homeless services and housing remain too concentrated on skid row. There are 2.1 homeless people per shelter bed in downtown L.A., compared with 22.4 per bed in the San Gabriel Valley. Only 21 cities in the area spend more than $10,000 a year on homeless services.

Now, opposition is focused on the mayor’s first big pilot project, a 60-bed supportive housing complex in Hollywood. At a recent community meeting to discuss the plan, opponents set up billboards in the back of the room warning parents that pedophiles would be moved into the building. It’s not true, of course, but now the plan is less certain. The county’s plan to put more services on five small pilot sites across the region also appears shaky. The minute the plan was announced, several cities promised to fight.

When will this stop? Neighbors, of course, often block projects they don’t like, sometimes for good reasons. But services need to be dispersed throughout the region to lessen the burden on skid row.

One idea is to enforce or augment existing laws. There are state laws, for instance, that require all of the county’s 88 cities to have plans for low-income housing, but most ignore the law. The California Department of Housing and Community Development could investigate, but it doesn’t have enforcement powers. That should change. State Sen. Gilbert Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) has introduced legislation to require cities and counties to identify housing sites for emergency homeless shelters. The bill wouldn’t require any construction, but local governments couldn’t block proposals once available sites were identified.

Homeless services needn’t destroy the fabric of a neighborhood. And studies show that they don’t increase crime or decrease property values. What they can do is help keep the most vulnerable from becoming homeless and help others find housing quickly.

As she shows a visitor around her new apartment, Kronick happily points out her new bed, dishes from a recently cooked meal, a stack of freshly read books. “It’s a start,” she says. If only such a new beginning were available to more of Los Angeles’ homeless.