By Guest Commentary By Jennafer Yellowhorse
I want to speak to some unanswered issues that are still being raised by your paper from the homeless perspective in regards to the Brown Bag Ban by Santa Monica.
The City of Santa Monica continues to claim that organizations from outside its borders have no business serving the poor. Not one reporter has asked how many of these volunteers have lived or worked in Santa Monica. One man stood up before council claiming that a Culver City organization provided the meal on the lawn of City Hall during the Sept. 24 protest against the Brown Bag Ban. What people are failing to mention is that Agape Church did, in fact, have its congregation in Santa Monica for many years. The 3,000-member congregation recently moved its church to Culver City because of the high rents for large capacity buildings. This church still has Santa Monica residents in its membership. The Hand to Hand Feeding Project remains in Santa Monica serving the poor it has served for many years. Also, the other participating meal programs like, Children Helping Poor and Homeless People, regardless of where it is based (Venice) has volunteers from Santa Monica schools. Helping Other People Eat has volunteers from Santa Monica and its main organizer is a former resident of Santa Monica. It is still not clear why the City of Santa Monica is not recognizing these organizations as having a base, or even a former base, in Santa Monica. Perhaps they don’t want you to know, because it doesn’t serve their primary interest of bashing these programs and eliminating the poor. This, in addition to the fact that the argument itself is flawed, because in America you should be able to help another person no matter where you are from, no matter where you are.
Agencies that are funded by the City of Santa Monica claim that they feel that food should be connected to services. Primarily their services, some of which aren’t even located in Santa Monica. Rhonda Meister, the executive director of a city funded program, testified these volunteers should go to Venice and work for her program for free. These agencies have, for many years, refused to work with the outdoor meal distribution programs because they feel that they have an exclusive right to funding from Santa Monica to help the poor. We’ve tried to work with these agencies before. They take all the city money for the services, which is then ingested into their budget and their salaries, and use us as their free staff. And then one day, the city no longer provides funding for this aspect of the continuum and the meal programs close their doors to the homeless after the public attention is gone. The history speaks for itself.
Most of these agencies are a member of the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce, and also sit on the Chamber’s Homeless Task Force. The homeless and the grass roots groups cannot be a member of the task force unless they have $250 to pay for membership in the chamber. Once excluded, we have no voice in working with the business community to resolve the conflicts between businesses and the homeless. City-funded agencies have historically excluded non-city-funded programs from their list of available programs to help the poor because they don’t want you to consider donating to our programs instead of theirs. It takes away from their ability to convince you the public that they are the only service providers qualified to serve the poor. The fact is we provide the same services they do, only we do it without city funding.
It doesn’t cost you the taxpayer a dime for our projects, yet it costs you a pretty penny for theirs.
We have asked for agency reform because we believe they are mismanaging your money, and in fact their practices have contributed to ensuring the long-standing homeless problem goes unsolved. If all the homeless people could get help and housing, then you would stop donating to them to solve a problem that can be solved. They don’t want to be out of a job, otherwise, they’d have to seek the same low wage jobs they are forcing the unemployable homeless to seek. They too might have to move out of Santa Monica.
Shouldn’t someone be asking why we are still funding the same tired old agencies over and over, and are still not getting satisfactory results for the amount of money we are spending? Sounds like an old boys network who doesn’t want new, innovative and successful programs competing with their racket.
What came out of the Sept. 24 public hearing was that food was not the major problem that residents were having with the homeless. It is alcohol and drug use in public. City staff and city-funded agencies did not come up with a plan that even comes close to affecting or solving that problem. City staff can only give you biased options that violate poor people’s human rights while protecting the interests of those who have money. The city can protect the availability of alcohol and still control homeless behavior by taking away the availability of food assuming that they can ultimately penalize homeless people and poor housed people who do not have a drug or alcohol problem into services that simply do not exist for them in Santa Monica.
On Sept. 10 the Santa Monica City Council agreed upon the idea of forming a Westside Council of Governments to speak to other cities about doing more about the homeless problem. The city seems to feel that other cities should be doing more. Yet, on the other hand, the City of Santa Monica receives funding into the social services grant budget by cities like Malibu, Beverly Hills and Culver City to take care of homeless services. So if other cities should be doing more to help the homeless, should-n’t Santa Monica as a first step return their money and tell them to use that money in their own cities?
The Bayside District Corporation has another idea about solving the homeless problem in the downtown area. They feel that you the taxpayer should pay for the Santa Monica Police Department’s increased presence and prioritize their businesses for protection, above the rest of the community. Why should the Bayside District have to pay for an increase in security on the Promenade when you the taxpayer can pay for it? Bayside has convinced some council members that increased police presence is needed to ensure that Santa Monica businesses on the Promenade do not have to foot the bill for providing their own private security. These council members catering to business interests are looking to you to foot the bill for a problem that the Bayside District should be handling themselves. Bayside advertises for more people to come to the Promenade to spend money but feels the city should be responsible for clearing out those who don’t have money and wish to be a part of the downtown scene.
Why should businesses have to be there to authorize the removal of sleeping homeless bodies in their doorways that are closed and not being used? I doubt that homeless people are the only ones urinating in public. Many visitors who don’t know where to go to use the rest-room, do too. If urine, feces and garbage are truly the main issues, couldn’t city staff open more restrooms, put out more trash cans and increase funding for public maintenance, and offer more police presence for laws that may be violated after hours? I doubt that a human sleeping in a doorway is causing the problems. When you look at city staffs’ recommendations to solve these problems, just remember that people on drugs or alcohol usually don’t sleep or have an appetite for food.
I believe that the core of the issues outlined in this public debate are resolvable through a mediated community-based process. Legislation should be the last alternative when all other methods of solving the problem have been addressed. Don’t let one or two council people who are giving you half-truths, these city staff people who make biased recommendations or these business people parading their self interests fool you into believing that they care about you the resident. They only care about you the resident if you have a pocket full of money. If you find your self with no money to spend in Santa Monica, you will be subject to the same punishments levied on the homeless.
Jennafer Yellowhorse writes for “Making Change,” a community human rights newspaper.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 30, 2002. Read the original PDF.