By Ken McCrae Santa Monica
What we have in the Friday, Dec. 10, edition of the Santa Monica Daily Press is a serendipitous confluence of ideas.
On page one, the second headline down proclaims that a two-year moratorium on new development in Santa Monica may be in the works.
On page four, Ted Winterer, in his “Our Town” opinion piece suggests using the empty RAND building as a homeless shelter.
How about a two-year (or longer) moratorium of the demolition of the RAND building? Mr. Winterer is right — use of this structure could quickly and easily reduce the number of homeless sleeping in our city streets by a substantial amount. Since the city already owns the land, it could save millions of dollars buying property to convert into homeless shelters, as it did in its recent acquisition of the Cloverfield Boulevard property.
Two years may not seem to be a long enough time to consider, but it’s nearly forever to most of our homeless who now live day-to-day with no future hope in sight. Certainly, it’s more than enough time to train and return to the workplace and productive society those who just need a helping hand up.
It would allow Santa Monica’s service providers space for counseling offices and could become the answer for the City Council’s often-stated desire to feed the homeless indoors. There must be at least one big room which can be used as a cafeteria. Smaller offices lend themselves to dorm-style living accommodations. Conference rooms can be turned into classrooms, teaching both interpersonal social skills and work skills. Even as it stands now, RAND is probably still wired very adequately for teaching computer skills, a requirement of today’s job market. Other unused dooms, closets, etc., could provide safe, secure storage while allowing the homeless an opportunity to move about and look for work during the day without needing to drag all their possessions along with them.
Councilman Shriver has suggested the use of federal government land to shelter the homeless. Instead of swimming upstream in molasses though government red tape, I suggest that he instead commit himself to establishing a moratorium on RAND’s destruction and its immediate conversion to a safe haven for Santa Monica’s most needy.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 13, 2004. Read the original PDF.