Residents, Businesses Shudder at Prospect of Shelter’s Relocation : Soup Kitchen Fate Rides on Hearing

In an unusual move, the Pasadena Board of City Directors has scheduled a public hearing to decide the fate of Union Station, a soup kitchen and temporary shelter for the homeless that has become the focus of an intense controversy here.

At issue is Union Station’s proposed relocation from downtown to a largely industrial section of southwest Pasadena--a move that has already received the necessary approvals from both the Zoning Committee and the Board of Zoning Appeals. Business people and homeowners, however, have rallied against the church that administers the shelter.

The board voted last week to hold the public hearing May 21, giving both sides time to iron out their differences if possible.

Usually, decisions by city-appointed appeals panels are final. Only in unusual or highly controversial cases do the city directors step in. Directors are expected to vote on the issue after the hearing.

‘Get Together’

“We’ve said, ‘Get together and try to work something out,’ ” Mayor Bill Bogaard said. “When the board hears the matter, it will take into consideration the efforts of both sides.”

But Union Station director Bill Doulos said more is at stake than simply moving the shelter.

Union Station will close if it cannot find larger quarters, said Doulos, who runs the shelter under the auspices of All Saints Episcopal Church.

“We’ve reached a dead end,” Doulos said. “We really can’t maintain our ministry there (at the present downtown site). The situation there is not very ideal; we’re next to a restaurant, we’re next to a children’s center. It’s not the place where we can function best.”

Doulos’ Last Hope

The proposed location, at 410 S. Raymond Ave., is Doulos’ last hope, he said.

“There’s no place in the city of Pasadena where we could move if we can’t get zoning here,” Doulos said. “It’s one of the few places we can go, it’s one of the few industrially zoned areas in the city.”

Since the initial zoning hearing in January, a well-organized group calling itself the Committee of 1,000 in Support of Fairness to Businesses and Residents has been circulating petitions and thousands of mailers to block relocation of the shelter to what is now a vacant lot.

Heading the committee is Dovie Beams DeVillagran, a former actress who lives in a 30-room mansion on a five-acre estate nine blocks from the proposed site. Her home is one of the closest to the corner lot where Union Station may be moved. Several businesses, however, are much closer and some are next to the site.

“(We) don’t want a soup kitchen and a Skid Row in the middle of our neighborhood,” DeVillagran said. If the shelter is moved, she added, “I will be forced to come into contact with these people and I feel that our property and safety is at risk.”

DeVillagran said her committee is afraid that patrons of Union Station would roam the neighborhood, looking for a place to sleep when the shelter is filled. Also, she said, surrounding business owners and residents like her fear that they may be assaulted, that their property values will decline and that transients will “urinate and defecate” around their homes and businesses.

People on both sides of the issue say they are pleased that the Board of City Directors has called the matter up for review. Both sides had lobbied the board to do so.

Doulos pushed for the board to review the issue because of stringent conditions imposed on the shelter at the Zoning Appeals Board hearing last month.

The conditions, added to appease shelter opponents, include providing a security patrol in the area, a staff member to answer complaints around the clock and regular reviews of shelter operations.

Doulos called the conditions unreasonable and too expensive. A security firm that he contacted, which also provides services to the city, estimated that patrolling the area according to the guidelines would cost $20,000 a month, Doulos said.

“That’s bigger than our (monthly) operating budget,” he said.

The shelter’s opponents say they want the board to review the matter because they do not want Union Station in their area. The opponents also claim that the shelter offers only a Band-Aid solution to the larger, more immediate problem of rehabilitating the city’s estimated 200 homeless people.

“I’m an Episcopalian. I’m not against the church,” DeVillagran said. “But instead of putting one big concentration . . . of people in a soup kitchen, my idea would be to break these needs apart and provide some kind of help for the mentally ill, some kind of help for alcoholics and drug abusers--separate facilities that would really tend to the needs of these people.”

Union Station must move because its small building near City Hall can no longer accommodate the 150 or more people who come there each day for free meals, Doulos said. Union Station’s emergency shelter, called the Depot, offers lodging for up to 20 people each night in the basement of the First Congregational Church. Because it is one of only three places in the city that offers emergency shelter, Doulos said, the Depot is filled to capacity most nights.

Doulos wants to consolidate both operations at the South Raymond Avenue location, and build a two-story, 5,000- to 6,000-square-foot shelter that could offer more than 150 meals each day and house up to 40 people each night. Construction costs are estimated at $650,000.

Union Station is funded by public contributions and donations from All Saints Episcopal Church and an ecumenical group of local churches. It provides counseling, a place to sleep for up to two weeks, and referral services to screened applicants who “really are not cut out for being on Skid Row,” Doulos said. “We’re looking at the recently unemployed, the recently homeless.”

But, he added, “we take everybody and feed them, whether they’re drunk or bizarre.”

The City of Pasadena has also granted Union Station $150,000 in federal Housing and Urban Development funds toward a new shelter, although the funding contains no stipulations about where the shelter is to be built.

But DeVillagran and community activist Rosalind Makuh said that the city is misusing federal funds in allocating the money to Union Station.

In February, DeVillagran wrote a letter to the City of Pasadena and to the office of HUD’s inspector general, complaining that the funds given to Union Station were not being used according to federal guidelines.

DeVillagran said that the money is being misused because it benefits transients, not “low- and moderate-income people.” Also, she said, the city has stated that such monies were to be used for revitalizing northwest Pasadena, a high-crime, predominantly minority section of the city.

A written response to DeVillagran from Deputy Inspector General Paul A. Adams stated that HUD’s San Francisco office “anticipates starting a review of your allegations during March, 1985.”

That review is still in progress, said Steven Switzer, assistant inspector general for HUD’s audit department.

“It’s too early for us to make a call,” Switzer said this week. “We have done some preliminary work based on a packet of materials we received from Mrs. DeVillagran and from information available from our field office in San Francisco.” It could be several more weeks, Switzer added, before the review is completed.

The city, however, has completed its own review of DeVillagran’s allegations and has found no misuse of federal funds, according to a letter from Deputy City Atty. Jerome Levin, which was sent to DeVillagran last month.

Doulos said he is optimistic that the board’s review will allow the shelter to move, and will ease some of the more stringent conditions. But if the board does not, Doulos said, “that would be a step backward in terms of a city living up to its social responsibilities. We’re not asking them to do this work for us, we just want their permission to do the work.”