Plan Offered to Get Homeless Off the Street, Back to Work : Employment: President of successful San Diego Alpha Project tells area merchants they can end vagrancy at a minimum cost.

A San Diego man who says homelessness can be ended by putting transients to work espoused his work ethic in speeches around Ventura on Monday, impressing business people with the promise of wiping out vagrancy at a minimum cost.

“This country was not built by freeloaders--it was built by hard workers,” said Bob McElroy, president of San Diego’s Alpha Project for the Homeless. “We can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves.”

McElroy came to town at the invitation of Rosa Lee Measures, a Ventura council member on a crusade to rid downtown of panhandlers and vagrants. In the first day of a two-day visit, he spoke at both a breakfast and a luncheon gathering, held a press conference at City Hall and toured the Ventura River bottom, where approximately 200 homeless people have encampments.

A former teacher, McElroy describes his program with the zeal of an evangelical preacher bent on making new converts. He told an intent Ventura audience Monday of how, nine years ago, he lived for weeks among the homeless in an effort to understand them. He emerged, he said, with the conviction that most social-service programs perpetuate vagrancy by offering people something for nothing.

“We’re enabling, folks,” he said. “I went and lived in the parks, lived in the missions and realized there was a tremendous system set up” to support homelessness.

His Alpha Project has won attention across Southern California for its success in getting homeless people off the city streets by employing them in entry-level jobs. In a time when government is strapped for funds, and welfare is a dirty word in some circles, McElroy boasts of a program run largely through contracted jobs and private grants.

The city of San Diego contracts with him to run its social-services day center, and Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan is talking with Alpha Project officials about opening a similar facility downtown.

McElroy offered no concrete figures Monday and was vague on the specifics of starting a local program. He speculated, though, that if the city and the merchants could identify some project, such as sweeping city streets for low wages, and put together the money to fund it, he could help organize a work force of homeless people within a few days.

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His words were music to the merchants’ ears.

“I’m very impressed,” said Ed Warren, owner of two downtown restaurants, who heard McElroy’s speech over breakfast. “I think we need to make some kind of contributions to these people so they see that the responsible way to live is to work for a living.”

McElroy’s services, of course, do not come for free. But Measures says she hopes to persuade her colleagues to agree to a contract with him until Ventura starts running its own program.

“This is exciting because this is really giving people who have fallen on unfortunate times dignity and independence,” she said. “It’s breaking a cycle that is hard to break.”

Measures added that she does not know how much it would cost the city to implement McElroy’s program, but believes that it would be a “nominal amount.” She said the council’s housing committee, which she chairs, will discuss funding the program when it meets today.

The committee members--Measures and Councilmen Jim Monahan and Jack Tingstrom--organized a task force earlier in the year to study the feasibility of constructing a homeless campground in Ventura. But they concluded that the city cannot afford to pay for such a facility.

Instead, they have endorsed a series of proposed ordinances that would cut down on panhandling downtown. They were enthusiastic for a while about a police proposal to kick people out of the river bottom through a three-step enforcement plan. But they backed away from the idea after other council members said they could not support a proposal that might violate the civil rights of the river dwellers.

According to McElroy, though, Ventura’s homeless problem is minor--compared, at least, to the troubles he has seen in Los Angeles and San Diego.

“You don’t have a problem in Ventura here, folks,” he said. “You have a blight. You are in a unique position to deal with a solvable situation.”