Communities not wanting social service centers to open in their neighborhoods are acting rationally, as the evidence—whether anecdotal or well researched—is that they degrade, rather than upgrade, neighborhoods.
An emerging trend is for services to be scattered, virtually on an individual basis and for treatment teams to deliver services throughout the community rather than in congregate sites.
This is the model pioneered by Pathways to Housing, a homeless provider in New York, which does not set congregate housing for the homeless in a neighborhood but rents existing apartments and subsidizes rent for the homeless while delivering services to the scattered sites.
This works well for the homeless, as they are less apt to have previous values reinforced through group interaction, and for the community, which then deals with the homeless as individual apartment dwellers rather than in a group home situation.
It is the model Sacramento should also use for its new homeless effort.
Homeless shelter director criticizes Antonovich
Advocates say the supervisor's office is trying to sabotage their effort to move homeless women and children to a facility near Sylmar.
By Cara Mia DiMassa and Jack Leonard
Times Staff Writers
February 17, 2007
A year and a half after it was proposed, a novel effort to move homeless children and their mothers out of skid row and into a hillside encampment area near the Angeles National Forest is in danger of falling apart, officials said Friday.
The proposed 71-acre home for women and children trying to get out of homelessness and off downtown's skid row was supposed to be an easy project because it would be built far from homes in the foothills of the San Fernando Valley.
Officials called it an important litmus test for other efforts across the county to decentralize homeless services and spread the problems of skid row to outlying areas.
But on Friday, the president of Union Rescue Mission, which proposed the Hope Gardens complex, said the project is in jeopardy of falling apart, accusing Supervisor Mike Antonovich's office of trying to sabotage the effort.
The supervisor's staffers are doing "everything they can to delay women and children from moving out to Hope Gardens. They've gotten kind of nasty about it," Andrew J. Bales said, adding that delays have already cost the mission more than $1 million in legal costs and interest payments.
Antonovich's office, however, denies the charges and said the supervisor has not decided yet whether he will support the project, a key issue because it's in his district.
The stakes on the outcome of Hope Gardens are high. Last year, the county announced a $100-million program to spread the burden of homeless services across the region in an effort to improve conditions on skid row, which has the highest concentration of homeless people in the western United States.
The plan called for establishing five centers across the county that would provide temporary shelter and social services for transients. But the ideas met with immediate opposition from residents near some of the possible locations, and no sites have been chosen.
