HOTEL WITH A HEART : YWCA Hotel for Women Gives Not Only Shelter but Hope for the Future

At 5 feet, 11 inches and 190 pounds, she seems an unlikely target for a mugging.

But Carol Lockhart, a one-time nightclub bouncer, was sitting on the lawn in a Santa Ana park and had just gotten to her feet to check on a woman companion using the restroom when someone came up from behind and struck her on the head with a wine bottle.

Lockhart says she was hit repeatedly by two women before she fell down, her head bleeding.

“It was horrible,” she said. “I just kept getting hit.”

The two muggers wound up with $50 from Lockhart’s coin purse; Lockhart wound up with 20 stitches in her head.

Although circumstances forced Lockhart, 39, to live on the street for nearly two months this summer, she said she had never been mugged before.

Ironically, she was a resident at the YWCA Hotel for Women in downtown Santa Ana--a safe haven for homeless women--when the attack occurred recently.

But she is thankful she had a place to go.

After the mugging, she returned to the hotel where a staff member called the police and paramedics, who took her to the hospital.

“If that had happened to me while I was living on the streets, I don’t know what would have happened,” said Lockhart, seated in the quiet hotel lobby a few days later. “I probably would have fallen down and just kept bleeding. Somebody told me, ‘You’re lucky to be alive.’ ”

For the estimated 4,000 homeless women living on Orange County’s occasionally mean streets, robbings and muggings--or worse--are not uncommon.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the women, by the time they get here, have been robbed, or they have had their purses stolen,” said Dianne Russell, director of the Hotel for Women. “They tend to not have cars, are out in dangerous times of the night, and they tend not to be in a safe place. Having been assaulted is pretty much standard, many of them physically and some of them sexually.”

Since it opened in March of 1987, the 19-room, 38-bed YWCA Hotel for Women has provided temporary housing and support for about 775 women from all walks of life, who, for a variety of reasons, have found themselves homeless.

The Hotel for Women was built over the gymnasium of the existing YWCA of South Orange County on North Broadway. Designed for what the Y calls “women in transition,” the $1-million hotel was built with city, county, state and federal money--along with donations from individuals, foundations, corporations, service groups and churches.

To eliminate the need to continually seek outside funds for the hotel, the YWCA of South Orange County has launched a $5-million endowment campaign led by Virginia McDermott, former senior vice president of Allergan; Betsy Sanders, vice president and general manager of Nordstrom, and Sandi Weber of Newport Beach.

Income from the endowment would pay the hotel’s $268,000 annual operating costs and fund services such as counseling on weekends and a mentoring program with businesswomen in the community. In addition, two apartments would be made available as “second-stage housing” for women who have not been able to find a place to live within 60 days.

The hotel is a clean, well-lighted place--an oasis of security bathed in trendy pastel shades of peach and sea-foam green.

“I figured there would be cockroaches all over the place, but this place is gorgeous,” Lockhart raved.

For up to 60 days, residents receive free food and shelter in one of the hotel’s small, double-occupancy rooms. Six low-cost rental rooms--$294 a month, with breakfast and dinner included--also are available for a maximum of 30 days.

The hotel’s residents, who typically hear about the hotel from other agencies or by word of mouth, have ranged in age from 18 to 83. (The latter was a woman who was forced to leave her apartment when her Social Security check did not arrive on time.)

While there, the women receive job-finding assistance and, if necessary, referrals to financial, legal and health resources. They also meet individually once a week with a counselor to discuss whether they are progressing with their goals, such as finding employment or taking care of health or legal problems. And each Tuesday evening, they meet as a group to talk about everything from individual problems to complaints about the menu.

In exchange for room and board, the women are required to take care of their own rooms and do assigned chores such as helping set up for meals, cooking and housekeeping. They also must follow the house rules: They can’t smoke in the building and must adhere to a 10 p.m. curfew.

Only women willing to work toward supporting themselves and finding their own permanent housing are eligible to stay. Those with serious problems involving behavior or mental health--and those who are abusing drugs or alcohol--are not accepted.

“They must be willing to help themselves because they’re the only ones who can do it,” said Mary Douglas, executive director of the South Orange County YWCA, who says there has been a full house since the hotel’s doors opened 2 1/2 years ago.

In fact, she said, the number of women who must be turned away for lack of room has increased from three or four a day to seven to 10 a day.

“It’s real sad,” Douglas said. “We were hoping (the hotel) would become something that wouldn’t be needed in a few years. It’s bleak.”

Douglas said illness has been the precipitating event in the lives of many of the hotel’s residents: They get sick, lose their jobs, can’t pay their bills and don’t have any savings to fall back on. By the time they check into the hotel, many of the women have spent a night or two in their cars--if they have one.

“Their self-esteem is pretty much zero,” Russell said. “They’re upset, nervous and scared. The majority of our women have been in a downward spiral. They’ve lost their home, run out of friends or relatives (to stay with) and have no place to go.”

The primary goal of the hotel, Douglas said, is to help the women be independent again: to find jobs and be able to save enough money to find affordable housing.

Douglas said about 85% of the women have some kind of employment when they leave the hotel. One woman, who had been the director of a child-care center, found a job as an assistant director at another child-care facility. Jobs that pay $5 an hour or less, however, are more the rule.

And while those jobs are easy to come by, Douglas said, they don’t provide enough income for the women to support themselves independently. Many end up sharing an apartment, often with someone they have met at the hotel.

In a county where the median price of a home is $255,897 and the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $668 a month, “housing is a critical factor,” Douglas said. “They need at least $8 (an hour) minimum to have at least a small place by themselves. I think that’s the real dilemma in Orange County.”

Although they do not have the staffing to do follow-ups, Douglas said that some of the women who leave the hotel without jobs are able to re-establish relationships with family and friends; that others simply end up on the street again. (She said only 26 of the approximately 750 women who have stayed at the hotel have returned. Because of the great demand for rooms, the women are not allowed to return for a year.)

The creation of the Hotel for Women was prompted by the several dozen homeless women who slept on the Y’s porch each night in the early ‘80s. Douglas, however, does not like the term bag lady .

“They are out there, but the most difficult thing for Orange County to accept is that (the homeless women) are really their neighbors,” she said, adding that 72% of the women who have stayed in the hotel since it opened have been from Orange County.

“They’re people who grew up (in Orange County) and know people in the community,” Russell said. “But people think they’re all from New Jersey or some place like that. It’s mind-boggling who comes in.”

“It can be anybody,” Douglas said. “We’ve had a number of women who lived in Newport Beach and thought their lifetime job was to raise their kids, and their husband wants to be with someone else and the woman is left with absolutely nothing and no job skills. They’re totally amazed their lives turned out like this.”

The residents of the hotel are women like Charlene Jackson, who was injured on her job at a Santa Ana department store and was unable to go back to work stocking shelves. Her state disability payments ran out, and she has been living at the Hotel for Women since late July while she awaits a Worker’s Compensation Appeals Board hearing.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be living at the Y,” said Jackson, 40. “I had nowhere to go, no income.”

Jackson receives $326 a month in general relief benefits from the county but, as she says, “In Orange County you’re not going to find a place on $326 a month.”

Without the hotel, she said, “I’d be on the street because I’d have to spend my entire general relief (check) on eating.”

Mary LaMaster, 41, had separated from her husband of 23 years and, with no alimony, was living in an Anaheim motel, “trying to make it on my own.” But then she lost her temporary job working for a tax service, her money ran out, and she was unable to find another job.

She said she wasn’t sure what she was getting into when she applied to be a resident at the Hotel for Women.

“I’ve never been in this situation before, so it was very scary for me,” she said. “I kind of stayed to myself when I first got here. But I’m a people person, and I started mingling real fast.”

She became a regular at the “patio parties”--informal gatherings on the hotel’s second-floor patio where residents meet in the evening to smoke and talk: “I’ve met a lot of people I’ve become friendly with in a short time--more so than other people I’ve met out there. Everyone is in the same shoes here.

“Sometimes I’m glad this happened because I’ve seen the other side. Boy, I thought homeless was dirty people on the street because I never knew what homeless meant. But now I see these wonderful people and they’re from everywhere.”

LaMaster is one of the hotel’s success stories, having been hired by the hotel to cook and do housekeeping.

“It’s a start,” said LaMaster, who was getting ready to move into a nearby one-bedroom apartment that she will share with a woman she met at the hotel.

“I’m very, very thankful for this place,” she said. “I came here not knowing what to do. Now I’ve got a job, a place, and I’m back on my own.”

Carol Lockhart’s future is less certain.

Unable to work because of epileptic seizures, she receives a $475-a-month Supplemental Security Income (SSI) check. But, she said, that is not enough to rent an apartment on her own. (“You can get a $140-a-week motel. That’s OK, but then you don’t eat.”) She had been sharing an apartment with a couple, but when the couple got married she had to move out. Unable to find a new roommate, she spent nearly two months on the street.

“That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re living in an irrigation ditch or on a beach, it is,” she said.

Lockhart said she often slept in the bushes near a gas station. In the morning, she would go to a park and wait for the grass to dry and then go to sleep there. “It was crazy because I was going from nowhere to nowhere.”

Like many residents of the Hotel for Women, Lockhart considered it a last resort.

“I had too much pride to come here,” she said. “I will always give to somebody else. I don’t like them to give to me. . . . I was raised in a middle-class family. We always had food and clothes and everything we needed.”

Once she moved into the hotel, it was nothing like she pictured.

“It’s just really nice,” she said, wearing a Disneyland ’89 Grad night T-shirt, turquoise stretch pants and huarache sandals--free items that had been donated to the hotel’s “clothes closet.”

“I feel safe since I’ve been here, and my attitude has changed because all my time isn’t spent just thinking about where I’m going to get my next meal,” Lockhart said.

Distrustful at first, she said it took her a couple of days to get to know some of the other residents. As she sees it, “everybody’s looking for love, someone who cares. Everyone’s alone and, here, a lot of my loneliness has gone away. Even though I’m big, I’m shy. I look hard on the outside, but inside I’m soft.”

Lockhart said she is hoping to share a small apartment with a roommate. “I’ve found some nice girls here,” she added.

Looking back on the recent evening when she was beaten and robbed in a Santa Ana park, Lockhart shook her head.

“That was one of the worst things that ever happened to me, but I’d say even worse is having to stay on the street night after night.