When one thinks of the hospitality industry, luxurious, beach-front hotels come to mind.
But there’s another hospitality industry here: the homeless services industry. And, like the big hotels, the non-profit, homeless services industry is aggressively marketed.
Case in point is the new Homeless Youth Drop-in Center, which recently opened at 2012 Lincoln Blvd. near Bay Street. It’s a joint venture with Common Ground, an AIDS service organization and the Ocean Park Community Center, the city’s largest homeless services provider.
Many of OPCC’s operations provide valuable services to the community. OPCC management knows that the best way to maintain market share or to expand is by offering new services and securing funding to support them.
OPCC’s Night Light Youth Outreach Program has tried to establish a youth drop-in center for years even though there’s virtually no real need for the service.
The homeless services industry defines “youth” as anyone under 25 years old. If you eliminate those over 18 or even 21, the actual number of youth in Santa Monica is very low. In 1999/2000, Night Light counted 40 youth between 12 and 17 years old in the whole westside. According to my sources, “higher numbers are still not there.”
The best estimates show that there are not more than two or three truly homeless kids under 18 years old in Santa Monica during an average week. While there seems to be a lot more than a couple of them hanging out on the Third Street Promenade, most of these street kids are adults. Some of them are in their late 20s.
Many are from good homes in tony neighborhoods such as West Los Angeles, Calabasas and the valley. They’re called “couch hoppers” — a term derived from the fact they don’t want to hang around their own homes, so they sleep on friends’couches and inevitably move to the streets where there’s no supervision whatsoever and they can drink, do drugs and act antisocially.
My concern is that a youth drop-in center, with its never-ending handouts, will enable Santa Monica’s homeless youth to sustain their existence on the street just as OPCC’s traditional drop-in center currently does for adults. It is inevitable that this youth center will exacerbate the city’s homeless problems — especially as it expands.
Even though it currently operates only Tuesday and Friday evenings, OPCC and Common Ground have opened the door. As the old saying goes, “If it’s here, they’ll come.”
As if those living in the Pico and Lincoln area don’t have enough problems with homeless youth, the CLARE Foundation is promoting establishment of a Sobering Center at 911 Pico Blvd.
CLARE has the backing of the fire department and St. John’s Hospital. The proposed center would be a facility where police and fire paramedics could drop off “chronic public inebriates” to sleep it off. Culver City and the Los Angeles Police Department already bring alcoholics to CLARE for long term treatment.
There are some advantages with the proposal. Drunks would be taken to CLARE instead of a hospital emergency room. This could enable a substantial cost savings for local hospitals and the fire department.
Clients of the center could avail themselves of services no more than five or six visits before they’re “termed out.”
Critics point out that the facility would put six to 10 chronic drunks into the neighborhood every day. The program has all the earmarks of becoming another revolving door — with no set goal in mind except for getting a chronic drunk off the street for one night.
With CLARE bound to protect clients’ privacy, how will the public or police know when a chronic inebriate has used up his five or six visits, or whether the program is successful at sobering up even a nominal number of inebriates?
Did I mention that CLARE estimates costs in setting up the center at $189,000 and that similar centers in other cities have budgets of $150,000 to $200,000 annually?
Once again, more social services bring even more negative impacts to the community. After all we’ve done in the last two decades and the hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the problems get worse, not better.
The number of vagrants, transients and social misfits continues to grow as do the number of services. And, for the rest of us, Santa Monica is an increasingly unfriendly place to live, work and do business. (Bill Bauer is a longtime Santa Monica resident and a freelance writer.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 11, 2003. Read the original PDF.