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Well, my name is John Maceri, and I'm the
executive director of OPCC.
Do you mind if I sit?
I'm more comfortable doing this.
Is that OK?
And my colleague, Donna Miller, who's really the
brains behind the operation.
She just brings me along to carry stuff.
But seriously, we're really happy to be here today.
And tell you a little bit about OPCC and the work that
we're doing, and then Sarah asked me to talk a little bit
about homelessness, generally, and what's going on in the
city of Santa Monica.
I assume you've been here long enough, if you walk around in
the downtown area, you don't have to go very far too be
very aware that we have a lot of people living on the
streets here in Santa Monica.
And I know we get asked, as a service provider, why are
people homeless?
What's the city doing about that?
So hopefully I can answer some of your questions.
And then at the end, I'd like to talk about volunteer
opportunities that we have available at our organization,
and ways that you might be able to get involved.
So just for your own information, on the back,
there's a lot of information here.
We have volunteer opportunities.
There's one of our newsletters, and then a real
quick fact sheet about OPCC.
And then this little card actually has a really
heartwarming, true client story on it as well.
So please, feel free to take that
information on your way out.
So the story of OPCC really begins more than 43 years ago.
We've been in Santa Monica since 1963, and actually
before that.
In the late 1950s, Santa Monica was a very different
community than it is now.
The Ocean Park area, which is, for those of you who are
familiar with the city, is the south part of the city, is
where primarily working poor families lived.
There was a time, actually, that were deed restrictions,
covenant restrictions on owning
property along the beach.
And so a lot of the people who worked in the service industry
and their families lived in the south part of the city.
And the church in Ocean Park, which is a Methodist
congregation that's been there since about 1897, I believe,
had a building on its property that had been used as a church
parsonage, and had been sitting vacant for
quite a long time.
And so there were several people who lived in the
neighborhood that asked the church if they could use the
house as a community center.
And that was really the beginning of OPCC.
We were not incorporated until several years later in 1963.
But for the first few years, the community center-- and I
know, when most people think of a community center, you
think of basketball courts and swimming pools, and this was a
community center in the sense of it really being a place of
gathering for people who lived in the neighborhood.
And we started off by providing
some very basic things.
We provided groceries to families.
We provided clothing.
We provided a meeting spot for people who lived in the
community to find jobs or housing.
We provided childcare, which doesn't seem that novel now,
but 45 years ago, cooperative childcare was really
nonexistent for working families.
And we provided activities for what, today, we would identify
as at-risk youth.
In those days, it was just kids hanging around after
school, getting into trouble because they didn't have
anything to do.
And that was really the genesis of our organization.
Through the 1960s, OPCC continued to be known as the
place in the community that was the resource center.
And as the community changed, as the demographics of the
community changed, as Ocean Park changed, then our
organization morphed into this multi-faceted social service
agency that we are today.
Our first project was then called the Drop-in Center,
which was a place where people who lived in the neighborhood
basically every day came by and got whatever they needed,
whether it was information, or referrals, or if we had food,
or we had clothing, or donated items, and that was the hub of
the activity in the community.
In the mid to late 1970s, when the women's movement really
started to take hold and domestic violence became more
well-known, we actually formed Sojourn Services for battered
women and their children in 1977.
We actually have the second oldest domestic violence
crisis shelter in the state of California.
And that started because the volunteers who were working at
the Drop-in Center noticed that when they came to open up
in the morning, there were women, and often women with
children, parked in the parking lot.
These were not necessarily homeless women, but it was
clear that they didn't have anyplace to go.
And as the volunteers began to talk to them, they realized
that these were women who were fleeing their batterers.
So what would happen is, there would be an incidence of
domestic violence in the household that night.
The batterer would either fall asleep or leave, and the woman
would take her kids and she would come to OPCC, because it
was known in the community as a safe place, and she would
wait until the morning, until the batterer left, and then
she would return home.
So it didn't take very long before our volunteers figured
out that we needed to do something to create a safety
net, essentially, for these women and children.
In the 1980s, as homelessness became the social phenomenon
that we understand it to be, and unfortunately--
I'm looking around this room and your generation--
I'm older than, I think, probably everybody in here--
your generation has grown up with homelessness
as a state of being.
But when I was growing up it was not.
We did not have wide-scale homelessness.
It really started in the late 1970s and early 1980s--
and actually, the movement started here in California--
with the de-institutionalization of
people with mental illness.
We had a state mental hospital system that wasn't terrific.
Certainly there were a lot of abuses.
But the state mental health system was dismantled with the
promise that there would be community resources so that
people could live in the community with adequate
housing and supportive services.
Well, the problem is, the first part of
the equation happened.
That is, the institutions were shut down.
But the community support system and housing never
followed, and that really started a wave across the
country of massive numbers of people, many of whom are
severely and persistently mentally ill,
living on the streets.
So over the years, in the last 43 three years, OPCC has
broadened our scope of services.
And today, we serve about 8,400 unduplicated individuals
every year throughout our programs. We serve low income
and homeless youth, adults, and families, battered women
and their children, and people living with mental illness,
particularly homeless, mentally ill women.
And we do that through a variety of different projects,
and I'll quickly walk through those for you.
We have our Access Center, which is used to be called the
Drop-in Center, which is really the point of entry into
the service system here.
And every day, we see about 300 people who come in in
every permutation of humanity.
We see people who are newly homeless.
We see families.
We see individuals.
We see single parents with children.
We see folks who have been on the streets for a short period
of time, folks that have been on the streets for a long
period of time, people who are facing eviction, and everybody
in between.
So we just see a wide variety of folks.
And we haven't moved very far from our core values.
OPCC operates on the first tenet of social work, which
is, you meet people where they're at, you begin there,
and help people, and support people in making the choices
they need to change their lives.
So that might be something as simple as, somebody needs
something to eat, or needs a shower, or a clean pair of
jeans or set of clothing.
They might need bus tokens for transportation.
They might need assistance in getting to see a doctor for
medical care.
They might need mental health treatment or
substance abuse treatment.
They might need help finding a job.
Really, whatever someone needs is what we do
it the Access Center.
We have our own mental health center because so many of the
people we serve, over 73% of the people that we work with,
are people who are living with mental illness.
We have our own therapist on staff.
So we have a counseling center that's available to the
clients in all the OPCC programs, as well as, we see
people living in the community who are not part of our
programs, who come in for counseling.
Particularly, because we have a specialty in family
violence, we see a lot of victims of domestic violence,
or victims of violent crime, who come to us who have
experienced trauma, because we have an
expertise in that area.
So we have our own therapist and we also have about 12
interns in training.
These are people who are getting their license and need
to get their clinical hours.
We have a program for homeless, mentally ill women
called Daybreak, which has a drop-in center, a day center.
And it's a program specifically focused on the
needs of women.
Again, one of the things that's unique about OPCC is
that, over the years, because we're so close to the work,
our staff and volunteers are very good at assessing the
changes in the needs of the people that we're serving.
And several years ago, at the Access Center, there were a
group of volunteers and staff members who noticed that there
were a lot of women who were coming to the Access Center,
but they wouldn't actually come inside.
They would stay outside.
And as we began to talk with these women, we found out
pretty quickly that these were women who were--
most of them were mentally ill.
All of them had been physically or sexually
assaulted by men and were very mistrustful of coming into an
environment where there were predominantly men, in some
cases some of the same men that they had to deal with on
the street.
So we started this program where the women had their own
space that's staffed by women, both women staff members and
volunteers, where they can feel safe.
And that was the beginning of Daybreak.
And now Daybreak has evolved into its own continuum.
We have a day center.
We have a transitional housing program.
We have permanent, supportive housing.
And we have an after care program.
Sojourn, our services for domestic violence, battered
women and their children, operates a crisis shelter, a
second-stage shelter.
We have a very extensive community outreach and
education program.
We're very interested in not just treating the symptoms,
but trying to intervene early on.
And that's true in our work with homelessness as well, is
just try to stop homelessness.
So we work on the prevention side as well was actually
working with people who are actually homeless or trying to
intervene before a situation escalates into battery.
We have a program called K9 Connection, which actually is
our newest program.
And it's--
I see Donna smiling back there.
This is one of our happy--
all of our work is happy work, but we really like this one.
It actually pairs at-risk youth with shelter dogs.
And it's an very interesting program.
Some people think of it is a dog rescue program and it's
really not.
It's a child rescue program, because what we do is, we work
with, primarily, middle school youth who have been identified
as being at-risk, or who have come from violent households,
or experienced trauma, or are having a hard time at school,
and we pair them with shelter dogs.
And the goal here is really twofold.
The dogs are really a modality to reach the kids.
So what the kids do is, they work with these dogs over an
intensive three week period and prepare
the dogs for adoption.
And through that process, they learn nonviolent conflict
resolution.
They learn goal setting.
They learn how to care for something other than
themselves.
And it's actually a fascinating process.
This project's been going a little over a year, and the
very first program we did, we'd pair eight kids with
eight dogs.
And the first day of the program, I went to the site.
They they were working in a continuation school.
And there were eight out-of-control kids paired
with eight out-of-control dogs, and I thought, this is a
recipe for disaster.
What have we done?
These dogs are going to bite these kids.
It's going to be a mess.
Three weeks later, at the graduation--
so it's every day for three weeks.
It's three hours a day, part classroom work with the kids
and part field work with the dogs--
at the end of the three weeks, it was an amazing
transformation.
You can't believe what happens, in terms of the
change in behavior and attitude in just that three
week period.
So we're actually very excited about that project and are
looking to grow that.
We have Turning Point, our transitional housing program,
which is a 55-bed facility here in Santa Monica that
serves formerly homeless adult, men and women, and Safe
Haven, which is a fairly new program for us.
We will be expanding our bed capacity this year
from 10 to 25 beds.
It works with homeless people with mental illness and
substance addiction, or often referred to as
co-occurring disorders.
So that's the technical rundown of OPCC.
And before everybody goes to sleep, because I know it's
after lunch, I want to talk a little bit about why are
people homeless, what are we doing about it, what's the
city doing about it.
You've probably heard terms like continuum of care,
housing first, or these kinds of things.
So I want to talk a little bit about that.
And then I want to open it up for any questions that you
have.
Why are people homeless?
Well, there are lots of reasons
why people are homeless.
Not surprisingly, and as those of you that are fortunate
enough to live in Santa Monica know that the cost of housing
here is incredibly high.
The cost of housing in Los Angeles is incredibly high.
So we have a real problem with affordable housing in general,
even for people who are working.
So imagine if you're living on the streets, and general
relief, which is welfare, is about $221 a month.
If you're lucky enough to get social security income, you
might get maybe $752 a month.
So imagine trying to live on, pay your rent, pay
your bills, buy food--
forget paying for a car, because most of the people
that we work with can't even imagine having a car.
So it's incredibly difficult for people in
this housing market.
So certainly the lack of affordable housing.
As I said, about 73% of the people we work with have
severe and persistent mental illness.
That's a huge factor in people who are homeless.
And if you go out and about in Santa Monica, you'll see many
people, probably, who fit a lot of the stereotypes that
many of us have about homeless people.
They're disheveled.
They may be talking to themselves.
They may not have bathed for a long time.
They might be pushing a shopping cart or have a lot of
their belongings, or hoarding stuff.
This is the image that we have of most homeless people.
What I can tell you is that for every one of those people,
there are about 10 people who are invisibly homeless, who
come to our facilities every day, who take a shower.
We have storage facilities where they can, if their
looking for a job, or in some cases going to work-- and yes,
there are lots of homeless people that actually do work.
They'll put their duffel bag or their suitcase on wheels in
a storage locker, will come at 6:00 in the morning, take a
shower, store their stuff, go to their job, come back in the
evening, get their stuff, while they're waiting to get
into some kind of a housing arrangement.
So for every one person that you see on the street who fits
your stereotype of homelessness, there are about
10 people behind that person who are going on about their
business, and you would never know that they were homeless,
in many cases, as I said, going to work or going to
school, looking for a job, involved in some kind of
employment training.
The lack of good paying jobs is another reason for
homelessness.
Domestic violence is a huge--
because of the women that we work with have been victims of
domestic violence.
So they've been in a stable living situation at some
point, or maybe not so stable, but they were housed and
decided that it was too much and they needed
to get out of it.
So we find that there're all kinds of reasons.
Addiction is probably the other primary issue, or mental
illness and addiction.
For those of you that are not familiar with severe and
persistent mental illness, I'm talking about things like
severe depression or bipolar disorder, which used to be
called manic depressive, where people will have real highs
and real lows, a lot of people will use drugs and alcohol as
a way to self-medicate.
So if you're, for instance, a paranoid schizophrenic and you
don't have access to medication, it wouldn't be
uncommon for you, perhaps, to drink, because when you drink,
your symptoms subside.
The problem is, when you sober up, the symptoms come back
with a vengeance.
So it's a vicious cycle that you're constantly
self-medicating to control your symptoms. And you get
caught like the hamster on the wheel.
You can't get off because you're constantly
going up and down.
Also, the proliferation of highly addictive and
relatively cheap street drugs, crystal ***, crack ***.
These are things that are fairly easy to get hold of.
They're not that expensive.
They're very, very addictive.
And so people will get hooked on this stuff and it's very,
very hard to break the cycle.
And then, finally, economic reasons.
We see a fair amount of families coming to our Access
Center where through divorce, through death--
it's not uncommon to have a primary breadwinner who dies,
and then the woman is left in a situation where, maybe she
hasn't worked for a long time, or there are children to take
care, and there's no income in the family.
So they're housed.
They're living right on the edge.
They're not able to pay their rent, and pretty soon they're
evicted and find themselves on the street.
So I don't want to leave you with the impression that every
homeless person on the street is mentally
ill and drug addicted.
That sounds an awful lot like victim blaming.
But it is certainly a significant reason for what we
see in terms of chronic homeless people.
What I mean by chronically homeless people, I mean people
who have been on the streets for a year a longer, or who
are living with a disability, or who have been homeless more
than four times in the last three years.
So we're talking about people who, maybe, have been in and
out of shelter temporarily but have not been in a stable
living situation for quite a long time.
What is the city doing about this?
Well, the City of Santa Monica is probably one of the most
generous cities in terms of their support
for homeless services.
Not just OPCC, but on the west side, there's a coalition of
agencies called the West Side Shelter and Hunger Coalition,
which has about over 25 members that are a combination
of service providers and faith-based organizations that
are involved in serving homeless people.
And that includes everything from organizations like OPCC
that have a very broad range of services within our
organization to faith communities, who might be
providing meals or, in many cases, providing volunteer
support to support the agencies.
We have organizations here that serve families.
We have an organization that works specifically on
employment placement for people.
We have an organization that works with seniors.
And together, the organizations try to fill out
what's called this continuum of care, where you think of
emergency services on the front end and permanent
housing on the other end, and helping people move through
that system.
The City of Santa Monica, right now, commits--
I believe it's about two million dollars a year of
their general fund revenue to homeless services, and it's
just recently focused on creating two new programs.
One's called the Chronic Homeless Pilot, and that is a
collaboration between service providers, the police
department, paramedics, and city human services staff to
identify individuals who have been the highest utilizers of
services, these are the folks that get the most police
calls, paramedic calls, use hospital emergency room
services, and really intensifying our efforts to
work with these people and get them into housing with
supportive services.
The pilot's been going a little over a year now.
We started off with about 20 individuals
who had been targeted.
We have now 71 people enrolled in the program.
36 of them have been housed.
So it's a very labor intensive program, but it also is
extremely effective in terms of providing services to
people who have been the hardest to reach.
Finally, I just want to talk a little bit about volunteer
opportunities.
And then I want to open it up and answer any questions that
you have. For volunteering at OPCC, we love volunteers.
We have, right now, a core of about 700 volunteers
throughout our agency that work in a variety of ways, and
that can be anything from preparing the sack lunches to
helping with the grocery program to doing
administrative work.
Donna always needs help at our fund raisers.
We're always looking for folks who want to help out at
special events.
Sojourn, our domestic violence program, is always looking for
volunteers to work on our hotline, to work with the
OCEAN Team, to work in our children's program.
We have, actually, groups of folks who come and prepare and
serve meals at our various locations.
So if you're interested in doing that as an individual,
we can hook you up with another group.
Or if a group of you from Google were interested in
forming your own group, that would be a wonderful way to be
of service to us.
There are opportunities internally.
You could do things like a clothing
drive, canned food drive.
For those of you that travel or know people who travel, we
love those small bottles of shampoo and conditioners and
lotions and toothpaste that you often get in hotels,
because we give those to our clients.
So there're all kinds of ways of being involved.
And I know that time is something that's precious for
everybody, but we would really, really welcome and
encourage you to think about, if you could carve out a
little bit of time, whether it was weekly or monthly or every
couple of months, to do some volunteer work.
Not only would it help us, but frankly, I think it would be
good for you, too, because what I hear from the
volunteers, and I can tell you from my own experience,
because I'm, in addition to my vocation, my avocation is
being a volunteer, and I can tell you that it's
good for your soul.
It gets you outside of yourself, and
it makes you realize--
first of all, it helps you with your stereotypes in terms
of who homeless people are.
Because I think that we all have an image.
Sometimes we've had negative experiences with homeless
people and so we think that all homeless people are just
like that person.
But you actually might be amazed and surprised to know
that everybody has a life story, and that we don't often
know what people's stories are, that often there's
catastrophe, or trauma, or something dramatic happens in
someone's life that leads them down a path that results in
them being homeless.
So being a volunteer is a good way for you to get the other
side of the story, and also to give back a little bit.
Because I think all of us that are fortunate enough to go
home at night and lay our heads on the pillow with a
roof over our head often take that for granted.
And so I think being a volunteer also gives you an
opportunity to see that the whole world isn't as
fortunate as we are.
So that's my quick spiel.
What would you like to know?
What questions do you have about OPCC, about
homelessness, about--
what do you want to talk about?
Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: So I'm a little interested in-- you mentioned
briefly some stuff that you're doing with
other west side agencies.
I'm a little interested in that, because we're in Santa
Monica, but the people around here are from all over the Los
Angeles community.
JOHN MACERI: The homeless individuals from all over the
Los Angeles community.
AUDIENCE: And people in the office.
JOHN MACERI: Oh, people in the office.
So you're interested in what other agencies
are around, you mean?
Is that the question?
AUDIENCE: Yes, and how you work with
them and work together.
JOHN MACERI: Oh.
Well the agencies work very well together, actually.
And I'll just give you a sampling of some of the
agencies In Santa Monica we have-- there's OPCC.
Right over the border, in Venice, is
Saint Joseph's Center.
Just up the street here, we have Upward Bound House, which
is at Eleventh and Washington, which is a program they have--
two programs, one a senior housing program and one a
program for homeless families.
There's Chrysalis, which is the employment agency that I
talked about.
They have a Santa Monica office, and also
they're based downtown.
There's New Directions, which is based at the west LAVA
campus, and they serve homeless veterans,
both men and women.
We have the CLARE Foundation, which is also based here in
Santa Monica, which is a substance
abuse treatment provider.
We have the Westside Food Bank, which works, actually,
with all the agencies-- provides food to support all
the agencies' programs.
We have Step Up on Second, which is
right down here downtown.
They have permanent housing, as well as a little-- some of
you may have been in that little Fresh Start Market.
They have a catering business that employs their clients,
and they also have a little mini-market in their building,
some new housing right down on Fifth Street, at least 46
units, as well.
So that's just sort of a sampling of some of the
agencies that are around.
Then in addition to that, as I mentioned, we have several of
the faith based organizations, which are, for the most part,
not providing direct services, but are providing groups of
volunteers.
For instance, in our programs, we have several faith-based
groups that come in on the weekends and prepare and serve
the evening meals at Turning Point,
at SAMOSHEL at Daybreak.
We have folks who will do that, and many of them are
affiliated with faith-based organizations.
Does that answer your question, give
you a better idea?
So there are lots of volunteer opportunities.
So if you live outside Santa Monica, certainly in the San
Fernando Valley, there's LA Family Housing.
There're great organizations all over LA County.
So if you live in the South Bay or Long Beach or wherever,
San Gabriel Valley, there are plenty of
opportunities to be involved.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: I just wanted to ask, I know there's
homelessness [INAUDIBLE AUDIO]
concentrated in certain areas of downtown Santa Monica.
And also compared with places like Orange County, you drive
down there, at least it's not as visible.
What is it about Santa Monica, and certain other places, that
tend to attract homeless people, and is it because the
resources are here to help them?
Is it because--
I've heard a story, a while back, about police were
accused of driving homeless people to downtown Los Angeles
and dropping them off.
There's probably more than one reason, but I wondered if you
could talk about that.
JOHN MACERI: It's an excellent question.
Let's rewind a little bit, in terms--
particularly downtown Los Angeles, to
understand Skid Row.
Because the history of Los Angeles is very much
linked to Skid Row.
And if you go to other urban areas, you'll
see homeless people.
And generally there's homelessness in the urban
cores of the cities, New York, Chicago, San Francisco.
And that's usually where you find what are called single
room occupancy, SRO, hotels.
In Los Angeles, the only place that we have SRO hotels are in
downtown, in the Skid Row area.
And the reason for that is because, years ago, really
before the turn of the century, the railroad terminus
ended right near Skid Row.
And so you had a lot of these hotels, which were boarding
houses originally.
They were developed for, primarily, single men coming
to Los Angeles to work.
And so they would rent rooms in these boarding houses.
Over the years, as Los Angeles grew and we became, really, a
suburban city, the urban core, where the SRO hotels were,
remained in downtown and in Skid Row.
That was really where most of the affordable housing has
been, historically, in Los Angeles.
And so down there you have a lot of the missions and the
faith-based organizations in this urban core, because most
homeless people were living in and around-- or very low
income people were living in and around the downtown core.
So that's the history, and I'm giving an over-simplified
version, but essentially that's how Skid Row developed.
Now relative to Santa Monica, people say, well, if you go to
Manhattan or Redondo or any of the other beach communities,
you don't see as many homeless people.
Why is that?
Well, there are a couple things that are different
about Santa Monica.
Yes, those other communities have beaches.
But Santa Monica, first of all, is a world class tourist
destination.
So you have infrastructure here to support tourism that
you don't have in a lot of those other cities.
You have the volleyball tournament or the surfing
championship, but other than that, you don't have
year-round tourism.
There are a lot of European tourists that come here, a lot
of Japanese tourists that come here.
So we have the promenade.
We have beach front hotels.
We've developed the pier.
And so we have infrastructure here that you don't have,
necessarily, in other beach communities.
So that's part of it.
The weather is more temperate here.
I live in the San Fernando Valley, and for those of you
that live in the valley or been out there in summertime,
it's very, very hot.
And so if you go in the San Fernando Valley, course I'm
very aware of this because of the work that I do, there are
certainly pockets of homeless people.
I live fairly close to Cal State Northridge, and there
are a fair amount of encampments,
actually, in that area.
But most of the homeless people in the San Fernando
Valley congregate along the 405 or the 101 corridors.
Why?
Well, people are going to panhandle--
where are they asking for money?
They're generally asking for money off the freeway off-ramp
when you're making a left hand turn.
Well, here, you don't have to do that, because you can go
down along the promenade, because we have a very
bustling tourist trade and a lot of street
traffic all the time.
So we have a tourist industry that has nothing to do with
homeless people, but makes it easier for people who are
living on the streets to survive.
So that's a factor.
The fact is, we do have services in Santa Monica that
we don't have other places.
And as a service provider, one of the things we hear all the
time is, well, if you would just go away--
it's the Pied Piper Syndrome-- if you'd go away, all the
homeless people would follow you out of town.
Well, certainly, some of the homeless people would follow
us out of town.
But the vast majority of them wouldn't, because--
and we know this from our own studies that we've done, is
particularly women and families will stay here
because it's safer to be on the streets here than it is
in-- downtown Los Angeles is a very scary
and dangerous place.
So a lot of the women, particularly, will come here
and stay here because this is a city that's pretty.
The weather is reasonably temperate.
It's easy to get around on foot.
We have a very good and inexpensive public
transportation system.
A lot of our female clients actually will ride the big
blue bus at night until the route ends.
They'll actually sleep on the bus because
they feel safe there.
So you don't have that in other parts of the county.
So that's certainly a factor.
And beyond that, the other thing that we have on the west
side that you don't have in other places is, we have a
very large VA complex in west Los Angeles.
So you have a fair number of homeless veterans who go to
the VA for services or for health care services, and so
they will come and stay in or around Santa Monica, or on the
west side, because the campus is there.
So it's the flip side of their services available there.
What we've seen happening in the last two years, with the
redevelopment of downtown Los Angeles, is the loft
conversions began to-- a lot of those SRO hotels are being
converted to market rate housing.
So I started off by saying that one of the reasons that
we have such problem with homelessness is that
affordable housing is drying up, and as more and more of
that housing stock is converted, it's going to be
harder and harder for people to find places where they can
afford to live.
So we're not really solving anything, we're
just pushing it out.
And so if you go now to areas, south Los Angeles, San Gabriel
Valley, as I said, the San Fernando Valley, it's becoming
more dispersed in terms of the county, because people are
getting pushed out of the downtown area.
And a natural place to gravitate is to Santa Monica.
The other thing, too, that is important and unique about
Santa Monica that you don't have in any other beach
communities, if you look at the master transportation grid
for the MTA, the bus system, we have four main east/west
bus routes that literally end at the
beach and go to downtown.
You have Wilshire, Santa Monica, Olympic, and Pico.
You can get on a bus and ride, literally, from the beach to
downtown Los Angeles.
That's not true in any other beach community.
There's not direct access to downtown.
So that also, in terms of transportation patterns, makes
it easier for people to get back and forth.
So for all those reasons.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned [INAUDIBLE AUDIO]
that somehow, in my brain, I was thinking that downtown and
Skid Row seem so more dangerous than Santa Monica,
and yet they both have these chronic homeless
problems. Why is that?
Are there some reasons that downtown is more dangerous
than Santa Monica?
And also, as we are new to the neighborhood here, we've
noticed, obviously, lots of homeless, folks that we come
in contact with when we're walking to our cars at night
in remote parking situations, and just would love to
understand, if you have any statistics or any information
on how safe it is, or not safe it is, or what the--
JOHN MACERI: Well, to answer the first part of the
question, why is downtown more dangerous than Santa Monica, a
couple of reasons.
[INAUDIBLE AUDIO]
A lot of people concentrated in a very small area.
And if you've been to downtown recently, it's get--
Skid Row is becoming more and more and more compressed.
For a long time, there was this attitude of containment.
And it was contained within about, at one time, probably
about a 30 block radius.
And that's down to about 10 square blocks now.
So you're just compressing people more and more.
That's one issue.
The second issue is that, a lot of the criminal activity
that happens occasionally happens between homeless
people, but it's often drug dealers, or people who are not
homeless who prey on homeless people.
Because the trade of the street,
often, is drug dealing.
That's how people--
some cases survive.
But there's a lot of predatory behavior for people who, as I
said, are not homeless.
Drug dealers will come and sell crack or crystal *** or
a combination of all that stuff to homeless people, and
so that creates this perpetual cycle of criminal activity.
So you have a lot of people living in a dense area.
You have a lot of people who are really addicted, who are
living with severe and persistent mental illness.
Then you put on top of that this illegal drug activity,
and it's really just a breeding ground for problems.
So we don't have that in Santa Monica.
Yes, there are pockets.
I'm not saying that there's no criminal activity that goes on
with homeless people here, there's no drug dealing.
Certainly there is.
But the police department here is much more focused on
enforcement, not punishing people.
It's not illegal to be homeless, or not to have a
place to live.
So if you're sitting, or walking, or standing with your
belongings, and you're not panhandling, you're not
sleeping in a doorway, you're not bothering anybody, the
police are not going to arrest you.
Because it's not a crime not to have a place to live.
But in Santa Monica, the police are much more active.
And actually we have been involved in helping them near
our Access Center.
Because we have so many people every day coming into a very
small space that we have found that some of the outside
influences that I described, who are not even people who
live in Santa Monica, but come from downtown or come from
other areas, will come to engage in criminal activity.
And we don't want that.
It's not good for our clients.
It's not good for the community.
It's not good for us.
So here we have a police force that's much more involved in
stopping that kind of activity before it
becomes out of control.
So that's a major difference.
In terms of violent crimes, homeless people are no more
apt to be violent than the general population.
I think what's often scary to people is when you see someone
who is clearly not--
doesn't have all their faculties, who may be talking
to themselves.
There's a perception of feeling threatened.
And I'm not talking about somebody getting up in your
face and actually being threatening, and that does
happen occasionally.
But by and large, as a percentage of the population,
there's no more violent activity created or
perpetrated by homeless people than there is in the general
population, in fact, probably less.
And most criminal activity that occurs among homeless
people is either individual homeless people, one-on-one,
or as I said, drug dealers or other folks coming in and
preying on homeless folks.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: So, [INAUDIBLE AUDIO]
about Santa Monica that makes a lot of sense, tourism and
all the other-- the buses and everything.
I understand now why Santa Monica is--
if you're homeless, it's a great place, maybe one of the
best places to be homeless.
What I don't really understand is, how do you overcome the
challenges of finding affordable housing and jobs
for the people without having them move to places that are
more affordable?
Maybe some of that happens, I don't know.
JOHN MACERI: Well, the fact is, the vast majority of the
people that we serve don't end up living in Santa Monica.
Because it's just [INAUDIBLE AUDIO]
and it's getting difficult to find affordable housing
anywhere in Los Angeles County.
So one of the first things--
when we begin to work with somebody, one of the first
things that we put out there, right up front, is the
likelihood of you living in Santa Monica, or anywhere on
the west side, is not very likely given the high housing
cost, and just the lack of housing generally.
Jobs are a little easier, but there are
more low paying jobs.
So even though somebody can go to work, they're not going to
be able to sustain themselves for over a long period of
time, just because of the high cost of living, not just
housing generally.
But in some ways it's counterproductive to what
we're trying to do, which is to stabilize people, and build
a support system, and build a sense of community.
Because when people put down roots, and I think most of you
would experience this as well, you want to be near either
where you work, where your family, where your friends,
where your recreational or social activities are, where
you worship, if you participate in those
activities.
So in some ways, we're encouraging
people to build a life.
In another way, we're saying to them from the beginning,
don't put down roots that are too deep here, because the
reality is, you're probably not going to be able to afford
to stay here.
So it's a challenge for us, and it's something that we
struggle with all the time.
We have more and more people who are moving farther and
farther away because they have to, and that's just the
reality of it.
But most people are willing to do that in order to have
housing and to be able to work, or if they're not able
to work, if they're physically disabled, just to be able to
have a roof over their head.
They're willing to do that.
Some people are not.
Some people are very stubborn about they like it here and
want to stay here, and that presents its own challenges.
AUDIENCE: Some people, given the choice of affordable
housing somewhere, East Los Angeles or I don't know where,
versus staying homeless here, will choose to
stay homeless here?
JOHN MACERI: Some people will.
It's a very, very small percentage.
The majority of people, given the opportunity and the right
amount of support, will choose the housing.
But there are some people who will say, if you want me to go
live in Pomona or Antelope Valley, I
would rather stay here.
Because I'm more comf-- this is where my community is.
But that's really a very small percentage of people.
Yes, there.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned mental illness [INAUDIBLE AUDIO]
fairly important component to homelessness.
What is access like to medication for mental illness?
JOHN MACERI: Well, for people-- there's actually
[INAUDIBLE AUDIO]
that anything is easy, but the Department of Mental Health
has the Edelman Westside Mental Health Center, which is
over at Olympic and Sepulveda.
And so we have a county mental health facility on the west
side that's been very proactive.
It's been very involved with a lot of organizations in
getting people access to psychiatric treatment as well
as medications.
So it's not that difficult.
We actually have psychiatrists that come on site at our
facilities a couple times a week and will often have the
ability to write prescriptions.
We have pharmacies locally that we'll work with
that will fill them.
So between Medi-Cal, between county resources, between
private resources, that really isn't a barrier, an
impediment, for someone.
They can get hooked up.
Now it's very hard for somebody who's homeless, who's
not in treatment to navigate the system on their own.
But once they're connected to services, it's not that
difficult to actually get the medications.
It's not a primary impediment.
AUDIENCE: How do you keep them on the medications?
JOHN MACERI: Well, that's another issue.
A lot of our work is really encouraging people, and
educating people about--
this is your life when you're not on medication.
This is your life when you are on medication.
That said, we're not the police.
We don't force people to take their medications.
But again, I think, given the right amount of support and
education, most people will understand that if they take
their medications, if they have a stable living
environment-- that's the other thing that's really difficult.
It's easy for us to talk about, well, you should take
your medication.
But if you don't have a place to live and you can't even
remember what day it is or what time it is, it's very
hard to stick to any kind of a medication regimen.
For any of you that take medication, or who even take
vitamins regularly, sometimes you think, did I take my pill
this morning?
It's hard to remember.
So imagine somebody who's living on the streets, and
their biggest challenge is worrying about where their
next meal's coming from, staying safe, or getting from
point A to point B, or--
last night anybody living on the street when it's pouring
rain, just trying to figure out a place to
get out of the rain.
So what we have experienced, and we work with a lot of
people with mental illnesses, once people understand how the
medication can help them and what the treatment can do in
terms of helping them manage their life, and they have a
stable environment, then it's much easier to get people.
Then it just becomes routine.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: So--
[INAUDIBLE AUDIO]
this process, and I'm probably oversimplifying this,
admittedly, but in this process that you've described,
this transition for folks from the emergency care all the way
into getting them placed in a home, in a stable situation.
How defined is that process?
And I'm sure that different groups may define it
differently.
And then, my next question is, is it identifiable in that
process where the big bottlenecks--
where do people get stuck along that transition?
And that's probably where I'm probably simplifying.
It may not be as easy to be able to define that.
JOHN MACERI: Well, yes.
The there are a couple ways to answer that question.
I would say the continuum is very fluid for us, because we
recognize that people come in at different points, and at
different levels of functioning, with different
levels of need.
So we try to make it as easy as possible for people to get
into the system.
One of the reasons why we operate so many different
programs targeting so many different individual groups
is, we recognize that one size fits all doesn't work.
If you're a pretty highly functioning person, not living
with mental illness, that found yourself homeless as a
result of a job loss, for instance, that's a very
different situation.
And your road to being housed, and probably employed again,
is much shorter, and probably easier, than somebody who's
been living on the streets for 15 years with untreated mental
illness and/or addiction.
So you can't say that everybody is the same.
In terms of the continuum of care, I really described it as
a very linear process.
I think the downside of the continuum is that it doesn't
work well for people who can't move through a system in a
pretty linear fashion, because it pre-supposes that you have
emergency housing.
People get in off the streets, have a place, temporarily, to
be stabilized, move to transitional housing, and
that's where the bulk of the work begins.
People save money, look for a job, really get their life
together, and then on to permanent housing where
they're able to function and live independently.
So for people who are able to do that, it works really well.
The problem is that there isn't enough capacity in the
system at any level.
So we see 300 people a day coming
through our Access Center.
On a good day, there might be 25 beds available for people.
So if you're the 26th sixth person today, you're out of
luck until a bed opens up.
So there's a huge system scar-- and
that's not our fault.
It's just that there just aren't enough beds for people.
We have 2,000 homeless people on the
streets of Santa Monica.
The bed capacity in this city is less than 400.
So that's not a really great ratio on any given night.
So that's just a systemic problem.
The other thing is, there are sometimes, because of program
requirements, people are not able to meet the program
requirements.
People may not be willing to commit to being clean and
sober upon entry, or may be willing to commit to do that,
but if any of you have ever struggle with addiction, you
know that relapse is part of recovery, that people don't
always get there, again, in a linear fashion.
Sometimes it takes a while till people are ready.
And that creates its own barriers, because a lot of
programs will say, well, if you're not willing to be clean
and sober, then you can't be here.
So I think I think it's both a systems capacity issue, and I
also think that there are barriers within the system
that make it difficult for people.
Does that answer your question?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
I wasn't expecting one single answer.
That doesn't surprise me.
JOHN MACERI: One size fits all doesn't work.
No.
We work with humans, and everybody's different.
AUDIENCE: What do you see [INAUDIBLE AUDIO].
I know that you guys are building the new facility in
Cloverfield, and you're going to need a lot
of volunteers, right?
If you guys had a wish list of your greatest needs from
volunteers, is there any sort of things that you would want
people to give to your organization that you're not
getting at this point?
JOHN MACERI: Sure.
Well, time is certainly organized [INAUDIBLE AUDIO].
Individuals or groups organized around preparing and
serving food and meals is a huge need that we have in our
organization now.
SAMOSHEL, which is an acronym for Santa Monica Shelters, one
of our programs, is a 150 bed facility down
on Olympic and Fifth.
We are in desperate need of volunteers to come in.
And we have a kitchen there, but we need the volunteers.
And what we ask the groups to do is to actually bring the
food in and prepare it.
We have the kitchen there.
We'll set up and we'll even do the dishes, but we really need
help in that particular area.
The other thing, too, is volunteers who might be able
to teach any kind of classes.
I talked about Daybreak, which is our program for women.
They have a program called Women in New Directions, which
is an arts and crafts business that the women actually
created and run as a micro-enterprise.
So we're always looking for volunteer instructors.
So if you have any artistic ability, that's helpful.
I'm in a room full of techies.
So technology is always--
we're limping into the 19th century, so people who are
available to teach basic computer skills
is always very helpful.
Because we have a lot of people who are not that
familiar with technology.
You have to be fairly patient, because these are not folks
who are going to be advanced in computer literacy.
But if you had an inclination to do that, that would be very
helpful for us.
Then beyond that, internally, always organizing food drives,
we always need food, canned food, non-perishable foods are
a big thing for us.
And personal hygiene items, we blow through that stuff--
it's enormous in how much we go through.
So we're always grateful for that.
So I would say those are the--
and money.
That's the other thing, if people are so inclined, that's
something that we can always use, as well, to run our
programs.
Other questions?
No?
You said thank God he's going to stop talking.
OK, well if you have any other questions, Donna and I are
here, and we're more than happy to talk to you.
And I really do, first of all, welcome you to Santa Monica.
I know you've been here for a while, but it's nice to have
you as neighbors.
And I also hope that you'll use OPCC as a resource.
So one thing that you should know is that we do have two
mobile outreach teams that work out of our Access Center.
So if you would ever encounter a homeless person who needed
help, you can call us.
And we actually-- we're not the police.
We don't go out and arrest people.
But we have very skilled--
the other thing that's important for you know is,
about a third of our staff at OPCC are people who have been
formerly homeless, who are living with mental illness, or
who are in recovery, or some combination thereof.
So we have a lot of our staff members who are not only
sympathetic, but tremendously empathetic.
Because they've been there.
They know what it's like.
As one of our staff members said last week, he said, when
you're laying in the gutter and looking up in the curb, it
looks awfully high sometimes.
But I hope that you'll use us as a community resource, that
we do have the ability to come out and talk to people and
encourage them to come in for services.
And so we're here as a resource for you as well.
So thank you very much for having us.