Camp for Homeless Viewed as Band-Aid on Festering Problem : Temporary Home Has Become Mean, Shabby Place With Little Impact on Its Residents

The 2-year-old boy had sores all over his legs. Nurse Janice Estes, standing under a canopy at the city’s “urban campground,” was exasperated. The boy’s sores itched. Some were red and open, where he had been scratching. She could not help him.

The 31-year-old nurse had come from Fullerton to the campsite on South Santa Fe Avenue as a volunteer “from my heart.” She had meant to stay an hour one day last week, giving simple first aid. But the time had dragged to three hours, and she was overwhelmed by the number of people who came to see her, many needing much more than Band-Aids.

“I’m not a doctor. They need a doctor,” she said, her tone increasingly angry. It was her fifth visit, and she felt helpless. “They need someone here 24 hours a day. I’ve seen wheezing that might be asthma, coughing that could be pneumonia. I’ve seen infected cuts, lacerations. One guy came up to me; he says, ‘Do you have anything for AIDS? I’m pretty sure I have it. I think I’m dying.’ ”

But there is no full-time medical attention at the camp, and the campground itself is a kind of Band-Aid. The temporary encampment, as Deputy Mayor Grace Davis put it this week, “got us off the hook in terms of getting people off the street.”

Within the last several days, however, social services and employment counselors were operating part-time from trailers at the campground, dubbed by some residents the “Dust Bowl Hilton.” Most of the services are already available in the Skid Row area, the counselors said, but they agreed to go to the camp while it is there.

The city hopes to make a dent in the problems of the people registered to stay there--450 were signed up last week. “We were determined we would not have just another shelter where you warehouse them,” Davis said, “We would try to impact lives.”

That impact has yet to be seen, camp officials and its homeless residents say, although the settlement has crossed the halfway point in its life span. As of now, there are just three weeks left to find success in what has become a mean and shabby place.

The flat, dusty, 12-acre site the city leased from the Southern California Rapid Transit District and then filled with trailers, canopies, tents and cots is ugly. And one day recently it smelled. Trash piles stood uncollected, and even at a distance, several of the portable toilets reeked. Large muddy puddles paralleled the exposed water pipes.

What some call the “street mentality” has followed its way from Skid Row into the camp. Individual campers often panhandle visitors for money. There are fights, which most often break out at night, some racial problems, and thefts of camp materials.

According to the Salvation Army, which operates the camp for the city, at least 600 blankets, 300 of the cots and 150 tents have disappeared.

There are fewer families in the camp now. Para Los Ninos, a Skid Row service agency, found emergency housing for 33 families, with a total 77 children. Those left are largely single men, most of whom are black.

Many have tried to make the grim environment more bearable: stones or rocks arranged to make “pathways” outside individual tents; flowers, plants or a statue of the Virgin Mary put out front. But most don’t bother. In the section where people sleep on cots, clothing is left in unkempt piles. When the camp opened June 15, people would fold their blankets for the day. Now they leave them rumpled.

Oscar Davis, 38, said the morale has changed. “This is the pits now. People were enthused about having something to go to. Now they’re bored and tired.”

On the same day nurse Estes was there, a busload of children from St. Brigid’s Church in Los Angeles filed through the camp. “We expose them to different experiences,” Marion Fussey, the church’s summer school coordinator, said matter-of-factly, while the children gawked.

Davis and several men sitting on their cots stared back silently.

“It’s good a lot of kids will know if you don’t do what you’re supposed to, you’ll end up like this,” Davis, who attributed his homelessness to a drug problem, said later. “It went through my mind, suppose my son was in that group. I would have died.”

Under the canopy, nurse Estes spoke to Armenia Estrada, mother of the little boy with sores, telling her that he must have medical attention. She feared that the disease might be chicken pox, she said, and it “could go through the whole damn camp, and if the adults get it it’s going to be an epidemic.”

But Estrada, who had arrived from Texas two weeks ago, was hesitant to go to the administrative trailer on the campground, where the Salvation Army officials sit. She seemed afraid to go ask for their help.

Salvation Army officials said they provide transportation to medical services at the Union Rescue Mission downtown or the County-USC Medical Center. “You have to go in there and fight with them,” Estes instructed Estrada, adding: “I had a girl that was losing the use of her hand and they weren’t even going to take her.”

Reputation Not Evident

The agency’s reputation for being sensitive to people in need has not followed “Sally,” as the homeless call it, onto this campground. Estrada did not go to the trailer.

Midterm assessments of the camp have in general not been positive, although officials and homeless alike said they hope the jobs services set up in the last week will have some effect.

Deputy Mayor Davis said the city is studying various options for alternative housing once the campground closes--including the recently announced purchase of 67 mobile homes for homeless families. But one thing is certain, she said: “We really don’t want to do any more camps.”

Thus far, the results don’t show the effort and money expended, she explained.

“It took us an incredible amount of people to provide water, electricity, all of these things, and it’s very expensive.” She projected that the city’s costs will end up “just under $200,000.” Mayor Tom Bradley said last month that the city hoped to raise the money for camp expenses from outside sources. But only $30,000 has been donated so far, by the nonprofit Building a Better Los Angeles and Beverly Hills developer Nathan Shapell.

‘Most Difficult Place’

Salvation Army officials are not pleased with the camp, which Col. David Riley, the agency’s Southern California Division commander, called a “most difficult place to operate.” The army has incurred costs of its own, mostly for staff and food, of about $2,200 a day, and plans to mount a special appeal to cover the expense.

“We do not brag on the camp,” Riley said. “We can brag about what we are trying to do, against a lot of odds, which include some of the people themselves.”

Army personnel said that they are in the middle between the city, which contracted with them to operate the camp, and vocal homeless groups on the site, such as Ted Hayes’ Justiceville and the former street commune, Love Camp. They too have followed residents onto the campground, and their leaders say now, as they always have, that homeless people must have decision-making power in programs aimed at solving their problems.

These homeless group leaders also say that the city promised them more power in camp operations than they actually have been given. But it is Salvation Army personnel who bear the brunt of their anger.

The leaders accuse the Salvation Army of being too rigid, and at the same time too lenient. Salvation Army personnel halted all outside donations of food, for example--which were the highlight of the early campground days--after county health officials requested that the agency keep track of where the food came from. The county did not want to halt donations, a spokesman said, but just wanted to be able to identify the source if any food was contaminated.

‘We’re Responsible’

But Riley said: “If we take donated food and we pass it out, then we’re responsible for it. So we can’t receive it. We cannot guarantee it’s all right.”

Campground residents were devastated by the decision, because the Salvation Army itself only serves one meal a day, at dinner time.

At the same time, the Salvation Army has more or less looked the other way about the thefts of blankets, cots and tents at the campground. The army and the city just quietly replaced the blankets and cots, but not the tents.

Love Camp leader David Bryant said he believes that the homeless should be “accountable” for the blanket, tent or cot they were given to use, and not allowed back on the campground if they steal. Riley said that to avoid charges that the camp had become a “Soweto” or concentration camp, the rules were kept to a minimum--no weapons, drugs or alcohol. So, accountability is virtually impossible.

They don’t make “any difference in the overall operation anyway,” Riley said. “There’s no end to cots, blankets, food. We know we can get these things. If people need cots, we’ll find them.” That is not the way the Salvation Army operates elsewhere, he added. At its own facilities, “They can’t go in and out with equipment. It (the campground) is not our facility. We’re only operating it in the city’s behalf. A lot of things we do is because that’s the way the city wants to run it.”

Organize Camp ‘Council’

The city organized a camp “council” through which five representatives of the homeless regularly meet with city and Salvation Army officials. While that has led to a “consensus” on some camp problems, Davis said, the organized factions remain a problem.

“This has really detracted from the straightforward operation of just the homeless camp,” Davis said.

“Left to their own, there would be an absolute civil war,” Riley said.

‘They’re Just Afraid’

“They’re just afraid of letting the homeless govern themselves,” said Darrell Heard, leader of another group, the United Homeless League.

Other leader reactions have varied. Ted Hayes, as he has in the past, has charted his own course. He put up a geodesic dome made of corrugated cardboard in his camp “neighborhood.” He furnished it with a donated rug, two chairs, a small bed and a television and put a stone bird bath outside. He calls it “a model” of low-cost--$400--alternative housing that homeless people could both live in and be trained to build.

Hayes still hopes to “convince the city to understand what we’re trying to do,” he said, but he has been concentrating on finding outside investors.

Looking for Jobs

Love Camp leaders made up a flyer, which their members hand-deliver on foot to businessmen around the city, asking for those with employment to offer to call the campground’s job telephone number, 237-1665. The city-provided telephone is staffed by homeless residents, Bryant said.

Bryant has also been going around the campground, moving among the unmade cots and dust-covered tents, encouraging distrustful people to take advantage of the city’s offer to help them find work. It is not an easy task.

“People here,” Oscar Davis said, “when they hear that services have come to help them, they don’t believe it.”

But the jobs services at the camp are “the only thing here that makes sense,” Bryant countered. “The rest is just talk, talk, talk.”