In the midst of affluence, the South Bay’s homeless are among the poorest of the poor. Runaway youths and desperate young adults, poverty-stricken seniors and struggling families. What they have in common is that they have . . . : NO PLACE TO LIVE

Cynthia May, 30, used to venture out from her Lawndale home every morning to walk her dog through Alondra Park. Now homeless, she sleeps behind the park’s restroom at night.

Mike Smith graduated from Aviation High School in Redondo Beach in 1979 and promptly joined the Navy. Homeless now, he says he has beaten a drug addiction that ruined his life. He hopes to go to El Camino College--if he can get enough money to put a roof over his head.

Newlyweds Vincent and Deanna Deloney, who recently spent a night at an emergency shelter, married shortly after they became homeless four months ago. They had been sliding into debt and were forced to give up their apartment when Vincent lost his janitorial job. Pooling what little money they had scraped together at temporary jobs, they hoped to move into a cheap motel so they wouldn’t have to sleep in abandoned buildings anymore.

May, Smith and the Deloneys are just four among hundreds--some would say thousands--of homeless people who eke out a minimal existence in the South Bay. They live on the streets or in cars, camping under freeways, in parks and vacant lots. In the midst of affluence, they are among the poorest of the poor, the human flotsam of a society that is largely unresponsive to their plight.

Like those in other areas, the South Bay’s homeless represent a broad cross-section of society. They are runaway youths and desperate young adults, poverty-stricken seniors and struggling families. They are veterans, retirees, the unemployed and the under-employed. Some are mentally ill or addicted to drugs; some are both.

Some start out in the South Bay, graduating--or dropping out--from local high schools with the hope of working and making a home here. Over time, hammered by the reality of the South Bay’s high rents, they end up drifting from friend to friend and, eventually, onto the street.

Others migrate here from downtown Los Angeles to escape the horrors and dangers of street life on Skid Row.

It is impossible to count them accurately, largely because a key tool for their survival is invisibility. Partial results from last month’s census of the homeless indicate that more than 250 homeless were found living on the streets between San Pedro and Los Angeles International Airport. Homeless advocates believe census takers counted no more than one-tenth of the total. A 1986 United Way study estimated that there are 2,450 homeless in the South Bay and Long Beach areas.

Living on the street is never easy, but being homeless in the South Bay presents special problems. There are only two emergency shelters, one in San Pedro and the other in Wilmington. A number of other shelters in the area serve only narrowly defined categories of the homeless, and none have enough beds to meet the need. In addition, a limited number of county vouchers sometimes are available for rooms at seedy motels.

Hot meals are served by only three agencies: soup kitchens in Lawndale and San Pedro and a mission in Wilmington. Clothes and groceries, distributed by dozens of local churches and private organizations including the Salvation Army, are somewhat easier to come by.

Official recognition of the plight of the homeless is more difficult to find.

South Bay city officials say there are few homeless here. They sometimes characterize those they see on the streets as “transients” or “winos” with no local connections, people who simply are passing through.

“I think some of the responsibility lies on the homeless,” said Lawndale Councilman Harold Hofmann. “People could have a job if they wanted to, but they choose not to. Some choose this as a way of life. I’m sure that’s not true of all of them, but for some, that’s true. . . . Some of those we see regularly, I wonder if they even want help or would accept help if it was offered.”

The homeless and their advocates say the misconception that help is not wanted stems from the notion that all homeless people are inherently different from the rest of us.

“Once people get to know who the homeless are and what a fine line we all tread, they will feel a lot differently,” said Michele May, head of the South Bay Homeless Coalition.

May’s hope has yet to be realized. Instead, many homeowners and merchants, concerned about property values and appearances, have been pressuring city officials to reject proposals to help the homeless. Officials often express fear that such programs would simply attract the needy to the South Bay.

“We might as well have Hanoi Jane and Martin Sheen just bus ‘em on in from downtown L.A.,” said Redondo Beach City Councilman Terry Ward when he heard about a proposal last year to distribute food and clothing at a city park.

Those city officials who would like to do something to help the homeless often face opposition from their colleagues.

“They have the ‘Go out and find a job’ attitude,” said Lawndale City Councilwoman Carol Norman. “The problem . . . is increasing, and the resources for helping have decreased and have been (decreasing) for several years.”

Many elected officials also argue that homelessness should not be their responsibility. Already finding it difficult to balance their city budgets, they believe the county or state should provide funding and services for what they see as a regional problem.

Roughly $4 million in state funding is currently available in Los Angeles County for emergency shelters and rehabilitation of low- and middle-income rental units, said Gene Boutilier, administrator of the Los Angeles Emergency Food and Shelter Program Local Board.

But there are few applications from South Bay cities or organizations.

“Of the 140-some-odd shelters in Los Angeles County, virtually none of them are in your area. It’s been designated ‘virtually unserved,’ ” Boutilier said. “To try to fix that, we’re giving (priority) to any application that comes in from the South Bay.”

The most pervasive stumbling block in persuading South Bay public officials to act, advocates say, is the invisibility of the problem.

Unlike the classic Skid Row picture of transients dozing on sidewalks, homelessness in the South Bay is difficult to see, social workers say.

With few shelters to turn to and hounded by police agencies who do not want them sleeping in public areas, the homeless of the South Bay must stay on the move--and out of sight.

Carefully selecting dark corners outside the reach of police floodlights, they sleep in the South Bay’s public parks. Others hide in the weed-choked corners of the area’s few undeveloped lots or stake out crevices between dumpsters in alleys. Some make their way to all-night Laundromats, where they stand in their underwear or wrapped in a ragged towel as their only set of clothing swirls through the wash and dry cycles.

One resourceful trio in Wilmington, hounded by a series of night police sweeps through public parks, hid benches in the upper branches of a tree and then loosely tied themselves in place on top of them for an undisturbed night’s sleep.

The social workers who struggle to feed, house and clothe the South Bay’s homeless find scores of them living beneath freeways, in public parks and on the beaches.

“There are at least half a dozen in every public park in the South Bay,” said Caroline Hill, a case manager at Crossroads, a six-bed Redondo Beach program for the mentally ill homeless.

“We have very few social service agencies in the South Bay, and we so desperately need those services,” Hill said. “There is such a significant amount of denial in the South Bay, especially the beach cities, that we have a homeless problem.”

In addition, many of the homeless do not fit the stereotypical image of disheveled, intoxicated street people.

“You can walk into Alondra Park and look at the dozens of homeless people there, and they’re not going to look any different than the people just there for the afternoon,” said coalition chairwoman May.

Noted Manhattan Beach Mayor Connie Sieber: “I’m not sure if we have very many homeless. I’m only aware of one gentleman who has been around for a long time. Usually you address something if you recognize a problem. I don’t know of anyone who has been displaced from their home.”

Even city officials who recognize that a problem exists sometimes hesitate to do anything because residents do not complain.

“It is not an issue that has been brought to our doorstep, let’s put it that way,” said Torrance Mayor Katy Geissert, who sits on the local Salvation Army board and says she has seen an increasing number of requests for emergency food and clothing. “I’m sure the need is there, but I have not had the calls” asking the city to deal with it, she said.

Part of the problem in gaining public support, homeless advocates say, is that there is no solid count--or even a solid definition--of the homeless.

Comprehensive numbers from last month’s one-night census count of the homeless will not be released for at least a year, but unofficial reports from census workers as they left individual counting sites indicated that 187 homeless people were surveyed in Torrance, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Lawndale, Lomita and Gardena. Sixty-seven more were counted at the Beacon Light Mission in Wilmington. Numbers from a score of other gathering sites and shelters from San Pedro to Inglewood will remain a secret until the census issues its official reports in April, 1991.

South Bay advocates for the homeless, who spent weeks encouraging them to cooperate with census takers, believe that for every one counted, there are at least nine more on the streets.

“We had to build such a sense of trust just to get the ones we did” to come forward for the census, said Amanda Aldrich, another Crossroads social worker. “What about the illegals? What about the ones who aren’t admitting that they’re homeless? . . . And we know that there are hundreds of mentally disabled (people) we didn’t get in. Those are truly the lost humans.”

Part of the problem with counting and categorizing the homeless is that it is difficult to define exactly who is homeless.

“I don’t know if you’d consider the people living in the cheap downtown (Torrance) hotels homeless or not. A lot of people do,” said Torrance Mayor Geissert. “It’s sort of a phantom thing out there, because we’re not a downtown Los Angeles where you have these huge areas of cheap hotels and people sleeping on the streets.”

Advocates for the homeless say there are 10 times as many “inadequately housed” people as there are homeless people in Los Angeles County, and that they should be counted as homeless.

“General relief (welfare) pays an amount of money that will not buy a whole month of housing in even the least expensive hotel, even if you do not spend a dollar on anything else,” emergency program administrator Boutilier said. “So they have shelter for two or three weeks and then they’re on the street. . . . Are they homeless? If this is a recurring thing month after month after month, I’d say so.”

Gardena is the only South Bay city with programs specifically designed to help the homeless, and Gardena officials say their efforts have not created the problems feared by other cities.

“People are attracted to Gardena by our (programs), but I don’t think people are flocking here,” said Gail Baca, youth and family services manager for the city. Baca said the city works closely with local churches and does not restrict its help to Gardena residents because the churches do not.

The city maintains three small trailers at three local churches where homeless individuals and families can live rent-free while they complete job training or save money for an apartment.

So far, Baca said, the 4-year-old program has helped 108 people in 27 families. All have moved on successfully to permanent homes of their own.

While cities are reluctant to help the homeless, those who attempt private efforts often are hampered by official or neighborhood opposition. In 1986, the House of Yahweh in Lawndale had to fight to remain open after the city, pressured by residents and merchants, created a soup kitchen ordinance requiring the operation to undergo special review.

When Geraldene York opened His House, a food pantry in Torrance’s old downtown area, neighboring merchants circulated a petition demanding that the city shut it down.

City officials, who already had granted York permission to open the facility, allowed her to keep it open under strict limitations, including a requirement that she serve no hot meals there.

York has abided by those rules, but she worries that the nearest soup kitchen--the House of Yahweh in Lawndale--is too far away for the families she helps.

Eventually, she would like to rent more space near His House to create a job and service referral center for the South Bay’s poor and homeless.

As an interim measure, York collected enough donations during the winter to rent a $160-a-week motel room for use by homeless clients. Under her makeshift shelter program, two homeless people shared the room each night and were allowed to stay long enough to take a shower, do their laundry and get a good night’s rest.

“It gives them a break from being out every single night,” she said. “We felt that if homeless people could have a shower at least once a week and a chance at looking presentable, it might improve their outlook.”

York, who says she believes there are at least 200 homeless people in Torrance alone, said most of those she helps at His House were raised in the South Bay.

Homeless advocates say the high cost of South Bay housing contributes to the slide into homelessness, once a financial or medical crisis disrupts a precariously balanced personal budget.

“Most everyone I know lives from paycheck to paycheck,” Michele May said. “One thing--whether it be an injury or a loss of a job, an illness, a divorce--one thing is sending these people over the edge.

“It becomes this vicious cycle. . . . ‘We lost our place to stay, so we’ll stay in our car for a while,’ and then their car breaks down and gets towed away. Their furniture is in storage, but then they can’t pay the bill and it gets sold off.

“Within a year, they’ve lost a lot of their spirit.”

Although many of the homeless abuse either drugs or alcohol--and sometimes both--social workers say such problems are not necessarily the reason someone becomes homeless.

“It would be very interesting to find out what came first--the homelessness or the addiction,” May said. “I would just challenge anyone to spend a month on the streets and not show some sign of mental illness or an addiction.”

Some of the homeless suffer both mental illness and addiction, a condition social workers call “dual diagnosis.” Programs for such people are rare, leaving them few options but the street.

For those who decide they want to beat their addiction, it is tough to find help.

“A lot of them say, ‘I don’t want to do dope no more. I don’t want to drink no more.’ You hear the screams of these people all the time: ‘Man, I wish I could quit,’ ” said Mike Smith, the Aviation High School graduate who lives in Alondra Park.

“What are they going to do? Go on down to Charter Hospital? Where are they going to get that kind of money?”

Although South Bay social workers can guide homeless people with addictions to a number of detoxification programs throughout the county, sobriety often does not last long.

The root causes of the addiction are not resolved by a few clean days. Yet there are very few programs to help the homeless relearn the social skills they need to get a job, keep a home, find friends they can turn to for emotional support and generally ease back into the mainstream of society.

Without the luxury of time to learn these crucial lessons, their efforts to reform themselves often are doomed to failure.

Tracy, a homeless woman who lives under a San Diego Freeway overpass in Inglewood, has shaken her craving for alcohol three times at detoxification centers.

Each time, however, social workers were not able to find her an immediate place to live after she left the programs. Depressed and frustrated, she returned to the bottle for solace.

Crossroads social worker Gary Rivera said Tracy’s story demonstrates how difficult it is to get off the streets once there.

“They need more than just a house and a job. They need time and help to heal,” he said.

In the South Bay, none of those things are easy to come by.