A House of Hope

Most of the homeless women at the Harbor Interfaith Shelter remember feeling frightened and utterly dismayed when they arrived at the agency’s converted military officers barracks in downtown San Pedro, and Milagros Romo was no exception.

“I didn’t want to come to a shelter. I had this image it would be like boot camp . . . or one big room filled with drunks or addicts, and when my mom suggested it, I started to cry,” Romo, 44, recalled recently.

But she and her two teenage children had no place else to go, so, from this past April to June, the family lived in a small but homey apartment at the 17-unit shelter that, to Romo’s relief, bore no resemblance to what she had expected. While they were there, Romo attended mandatory meetings and classes on topics ranging from parenting to personal finances, worked on goals she set for herself with help from the shelter staff, and saved enough money to set up housekeeping in her own apartment a few blocks away.

“The program really helped me. I promised myself I would never forget,” Romo, who is taking classes in computers and office management and working on her high school equivalency certificate, said during a get-together for shelter graduates and current residents. “I volunteer here whenever I can.”

For up to 90 days, the home is shelter to families--most of them headed by single mothers on welfare or in low-paying jobs. It was founded in 1983, an outgrowth of FISH, a food pantry program that had been started a decade ago by several local religious groups and is funded with a mix of government funds and private donations. From a two-story apartment building acquired in 1990, the shelter has fine-tuned a program that has helped about 700 families reverse their slide into poverty.

The shelter’s expansion plan--it has recently acquired a second apartment building in the area that will more than double its capacity--has sparked controversy from a community group of homeowners and merchants, turning a spotlight on its program.

The program’s techniques, which center on providing free rent, emotional support and help with acquiring jobs and skills in exchange for a promise to live by strict rules and requirements, reflect the latest thinking in how to combat homelessness, experts say. Harbor Interfaith is one of several shelters across the county that increasingly focus on longer-term services and solutions for residents.

In the last few years, homeless shelters have been moving away from providing the “three hots and a cot” of emergency housing and trying to help people acquire the tools they need to turn their lives around, said Madeleine Stoner, a professor of social work at USC and the author of two books on homelessness.

“It’s really impressive how shelters have changed their approach and are trying to help people get back on their feet,” said Stoner, who served on the Mayor’s Task Force in Santa Monica. The task force helped that city overhaul its once hands-off policy toward the homeless to include restrictions on panhandling and sleeping in parks and the opening of a shelter that features self-help programs for its residents.

Harbor Interfaith’s approach embodies a “tough love” stance that “is not unique anymore--thank goodness,” Stoner said, adding that the techniques work well with families, who make up about one-quarter of the homeless population and are generally more responsive than others to this type of program.

“Not all homeless people can really take advantage of these programs, but for those who are able to, they are a good opportunity. It’s an important kind of program, and it is making a difference,” Stoner said.

For those who make it through Harbor Interfaith’s rigorous screening and transitional living program, the odds are excellent, agency officials say. According to follow-up data gleaned from visits to graduates at six-month intervals, fewer than 5% of the families became homeless again within a year after leaving the shelter.

The shelter’s success has brought it recognition and the means to expand. Recent grants from the Port of Los Angeles and Mary Star of the Sea Church, totaling $1.8 million and stemming from a federal policy concerning the disposal of surplus military land, have enabled Harbor Interfaith to buy and open a 24-unit apartment building nearby. It can house shelter graduates and their families for two years while they attend school and acquire more job skills. In addition, the federal Housing and Urban Development Department has awarded the shelter $370,000 in a three-year project enabling its residents to work with local businesses and corporations for job training and placement.

But the shelter’s higher profile also has landed it in the middle of a rancorous community debate about whether San Pedro, Los Angeles’ picturesque but struggling port-side community, has an “over-concentration” of housing for the needy, the disabled or the addicted.

A group of community activists known as CARES (for Community Advocates for Responsible Environmental Safety) has been pushing for a moratorium on additional “special needs housing” beds in the community. The moratorium drive for a time threatened Harbor Interfaith’s expansion plans and contributed to a quarrel between the community’s leading social service agencies and some of its residents and businesspeople.

CARES maintains that San Pedro has more than its share of service agencies and that the community is becoming a magnet for Los Angeles’ down and out.

Those arguments rankle Mary L. Gimenez, Harbor Interfaith’s executive director, who says the majority of the shelter’s residents come from San Pedro or neighboring harbor-area communities, which were hard-hit by the recession of the 1980s and the closing of military installations, shipyards and canneries.

“If our critics would visit the shelter and meet our families, our wonderful moms, a lot of this ignorance and mean-spiritedness would disappear,” said Gimenez, who oversees the shelter and the agency’s separate food pantry program.

Harbor Interfaith’s residents have much in common with those in other programs for homeless families. Most are single mothers with children under age 10. About 20% were victims of domestic violence. Few have the education or job skills they need to be self-sufficient, and most were stunned to find themselves without a home after losing a job and missing rent payments or splitting up with a spouse.

Rashawn Davis grew up in a middle-class family in Lynwood and graduated with honors from a Catholic girls high school in Compton. She was bound for college when she got pregnant and made a series of what she calls “poor choices” that eventually brought her and her five children to Harbor Interfaith.

“I had lost everything but my car, my kids and my life. I was ashamed and overwhelmed,” Davis said of the night she came to San Pedro from an emergency shelter in Long Beach.

“I can’t say enough about Harbor Interfaith,” said Davis, who lives near the Westchester section of Los Angeles and works for a county Department of Public Social Services office in Inglewood. “They encouraged me, they were always positive and never demeaning. But they made me see it was up to me to make changes in my life. They didn’t do it for me.”

The shelter demands a diligent effort from its residents. The 10 pages of paperwork each must fill out and sign for admission to the program includes stringent rules of conduct. Besides a strictly enforced ban on weapons, alcohol and illegal drugs, there are no visitors allowed, and smoking in the apartments is forbidden. Children must be supervised at all times, and each family must keep its own apartment clean and help care for the common areas, including the play yard, the recreation building and the two-story porches and walkways of the big blue building that once housed World War I military officers.

Residents must set short-term and long-term goals and meet regularly with their assigned caseworker to measure their progress. They must let the staff know in advance if they plan to be away from the shelter for more than 24 hours, and they must save 80% of their income--be it a welfare check or wages from a job--so they will have sufficient funds to rent their own place when their 90 days at the shelter are up. They also must attend sessions on parenting, employment prospects, money management and a host of other topics designed to help them become self-sufficient. After they leave the program, they are encouraged to stay in touch beyond the required follow-up visits six, 12 and 18 months after leaving the shelter.

“It’s very structured, but I found I really liked that,” said Kaki Hall, who “graduated” from the shelter last month and moved with her sons, ages 9 and 18 months, to her own apartment in San Pedro.

“All the requirements, all the classes helped me a lot,” Hall said. “When I left, [the staff] asked me what changes I would like to see them make in the program and I teased them and said, ‘Well, I’ll have to go make a list,’ but I couldn’t think of a thing.”

Like Romo, Hall said she too had been reluctant to come to the shelter, but her doubts vanished that first night:

“It was just me and my boys, in our own apartment. They took a bath in their own bathtub, and I cooked dinner in my own kitchen. We weren’t at somebody else’s house--this was ours, and that felt so good!”

The strict routine is tempered by the strong sense of warmth and caring that permeates the shelter, several other former residents said. The staff provides help in finding a permanent home, a job, child care and schooling. A family therapist makes free visits to the residents on Saturdays, and there are regular trips to doctors and dentists at no charge. The Girl Scouts formed a special troop at the shelter--boys welcome too--that provides after-school activities and help with homework on weekdays. Shelter volunteers and benefactors help with basic necessities as well. And the residents say they find a support group in the staff and in each other that goes a long way to repair their battered self-esteem.

“They offer you the opportunity to do for yourself, and there is a lot of love and warmth that comes from this place,” said Linda Tils, a single mother of girls ages 12 and 8 and 10-month-old twin boys.

During Tils’ recent stay at the shelter, one of her daughters had a birthday.

“I didn’t have much to give her, and I felt bad, but the staff and the residents made a big party with food and a cake, and she was so excited,” Tils recalled. “I came here with nothing, but I left with everything I need--and friends I will have forever.”