Helping Homeless Help Themselves : Lancaster: The 40-bed center is designed to meet the needs of the growing homeless population in the high desert opens Saturday.

Federal and local officials said Thursday that a new Lancaster shelter will greatly improve efforts to help the growing homeless population of the high desert.

Catholic Charities will operate the 40-bed shelter opening Saturday on city-owned land near downtown Lancaster. The city spent about $100,000 on land and construction, but individuals and businesses from throughout the Antelope Valley donated the bulk of the construction funds, about $350,000 in money, labor and materials.

Pat Carlile, executive director of the federal Inter-Agency Council on the Homeless, attended a ceremony at the shelter Thursday. The council is chaired by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp and oversees federal programs for the homeless.

Carlile said the shelter embodies the kind of private-public partnerships that Kemp and President Bush see as the answer to social problems.

“The solution is at the community level,” said Carlile, who was invited by state GOP Chairman Frank Visco of Lancaster. “This is very much what the President talks about when he talks about a thousand points of light. . . . It cannot be done by the federal government alone.”

The shelter will offer short-term housing and longer-term, federally funded “transitional housing” in which residents will get help finding jobs, education and counseling in an attempt to keep them off the street, officials said. Thirty of the 40 beds will be devoted to that program.

Social workers said housing for the homeless in the Antelope Valley to date has been limited to county-issued vouchers for motels and board-and-care operations of uneven quality.

“The city is taking steps to do this before we have a major problem,” said Susan Aguilar, district director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services.

Homelessness has increased in the valley, county and city social workers said. The county department received an average of 105 applications for public aid from homeless adults in February and March of this year, compared to a monthly average of 77 during the same period in 1987, Aguilar said.

The South Antelope Valley Emergency Services program provided cold-weather housing vouchers to 1,700 homeless people in 1988, an increase of 735 over the previous year, according to June Hawker, who runs that program.

The high desert’s extreme climate shifts and abundance of open space shape the local homeless problem, officials said. During hot summer months, some homeless people find refuge in the streets of Palmdale and Lancaster, while others camp in unpopulated areas.

“They throw a mattress in a field” or live in abandoned cars, Hawker said.

As a result, the extent of the problem is “half-hidden,” said Natalie Ambrose of the local United Way chapter. But temperatures often dip below freezing on winter nights, making the need for a refuge acute, she said.

Social workers welcomed the emphasis of the new Lancaster shelter on programs to make residents self-sufficient.

Hawker said: “It doesn’t serve the community at all to give them a few days of lodging and then throw them back out on the street.”

The annual budget of about $235,000 comes out of a five-year HUD transitional housing grant of $117,000 a year, a one-time city grant of $70,361, private donations and United Way funds.