After 5 Years Homeless Shelter Finds a Home

By Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writer

July 11 -- After a five-year search, the homeless might have a new home in the city's industrial corridor pending a $7 million loan from the City, $2 million in donations and the community’s blessing, Santa Monica's largest homeless services agency announced Friday.

City officials are confident the location adjacent to the Freeway at Cloverfield Boulevard and Michigan Avenue is just right for 33,000 square-foot, two-story facility, which will replace the Ocean Park Community Center's temporary shelter near Seventh Street and Colorado Avenue.

Known to attract loitering homeless, the shelter -- which must be moved to make way for an expansion of the City bus yards -- will be far away enough from residences to pose no threat or inconvenience, agency officials said.

The facility, which is expected to open in Fall 2005, will add 35 beds to the current 20 and serve as the second home of OPCC's Access Center and Daybreak Shelter programs, complementing the agency's 55-bed facility on 16th Street.

“After a very, very long and difficult process we decided that this site is most appropriate for our needs,” said John Maceri, OPCC's executive director. “We’re really thrilled to be able to have more space, and I am really happy that we have more beds.”

Friday's announcement was the first step in an ambitious community outreach program designed to avoid the public outcry that erupted the last time the City tried to relocate the shelter to an old art store adjacent to a residential neighborhood.

The plan, first reported in The Lookout in August 1999, caused a backlash that spurred the creation of a new neighborhood group that pressured the City to abandon the site occupied by Mittel's Art & Frame Center at Ninth and Broadway.

OPCC, Maceri said, is "being sensitive to the fact that we know neighbors don’t want our clients lining up on the streets or the sidewalk.” A wall, he said, will be built around the front yard of the center where program recipients will gather, both “for the safety of our residents, as well as for the aesthetics of our property,” Maceri said.

The facility will offer transitional housing (a place to shower, eat, and sleep), drug rehabilitation, psychological and job counseling and case management, Maceri said.

While having no delusions that the shelter “will solve homelessness in Santa Monica,” Maceri said it is going “to help more people” by giving them “more opportunity to get off the street permanently.”

The shelter will extend day programs from 5 to 7 days a week, strengthening the City’s $2 million continuum of care, which already has a 97 percent success rate in getting homeless off the street and on their own in permanent housing, Maceri said.

Having heard “loud and clear” the public outcry of neighbors concerned about the impact a shelter might have on their neighborhood the last time around, OPCC is “going above and beyond the required” community outreach for the project.

The organization will hold discussion forums scheduled with every sector of the community -- business, residential, official.

To help fund the move, the City is exploring loaning OPCC tax money from its TORCA fund, which helped bankroll condominium conversions under a program that was discontinued after granting only 51 loans in its 17 years.

Voters freed up the funds in November, when they approved an amendment that lifted any restrictions blocking the $7 million in the TORCA fund from being used for subsidizing low-income housing.

The City also is exploring using HOME funds provided by the federal government for housing.