Homeless People

He stood at the gate to his United Airlines flight, ready to head home to Chicago after two years on the streets of Costa Mesa. Officer Julian Trevino, a Costa Mesa cop, had helped Jose Zamora get an identification card and contact his sister so she could buy her brother a ticket home. Trevino stood by as the 50-year-old homeless man prepared to board a last-minute, $485 flight out of John Wayne Airport on a recent Friday. Zamora was leaving Costa Mesa to rejoin his family and see his granddaughter for the first time.

COSTA MESA - Solving the city's homeless problem requires the cooperation of other Orange County cities and a mixture of short- and long-term solutions, the Costa Mesa Homeless Task force concluded in its final report. The challenge is for the city to determine which homeless people are from Costa Mesa and which ones were drawn here by social-service programs and parks, committee members concluded. City Council members have said they want to help Costa Mesans who have fallen on hard times but do not have the resources to help those from other cities.

Costa Mesa is home to more than 100 chronically homeless people, according to preliminary results of a citywide count done during the past two days by Vanguard University and the nonprofit group Mercy House. About 75 volunteers, mostly students from Vanguard, including the university’s baseball team, headed out in cars, on foot and on bicycle to search for homeless people living in riverbeds and under freeway overpasses. “I hope we can use some of the information we collect to benefit them,” said Vanguard baseball player Eric Krzysiak.

Calling Laguna Beach worthy of “the Scrooge award” and alleging that the city “has declared war on the homeless,” the ACLU of Southern California has launched what representatives say is a historic legal challenge to city enforcement of anti-sleeping laws and other measures against homeless disabled people. The ACLU — joined by Constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky of the new UCI School of Law — filed the lawsuit Tuesday morning in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana on behalf of five homeless disabled people who allege mistreatment from Laguna Beach police: Mark Sipprelle, Helen Ayres, Felipe Ruiz, Robert Carmichael and Paul Ishak — all of whom are identified as disabled homeless residents of Laguna Beach.

The Daughters of the American Revolution organization has recognized five students at Our Lady Queen of Angels School in Newport Beach. Eighth-graders Jonathan Walsh and Samantha Luehrs, and seventh-graders Scott Matthews and Alexis Meruelo received citizenship awards; fifth-grader Will Van Dalsem received an award for outstanding history knowledge. Twenty-seven girls and five moms from the National Charity League's ninth-grade Ticktockers Class participated in a weekend fundraiser at Bob's Old Fashioned Ice Cream at the Orange County Marketplace in Costa Mesa.

Laws should serve those in need. It is shameful that the homeless must be protected from the shameless who cowardly victimize the vulnerable. While many of us sometimes say we “are just one paycheck from homelessness ourselves,” these days that seems profoundly possible. Aware of ever-changing conditions in life, I find myself singing Phil Ochs’ 1963 song “There but for fortune may go you or I ...you or I.” Ochs took to heart wisdom from the Rev’d John Bradford, an English Reformer and martyr best remembered for saying when he saw less fortunate souls, “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford.

COSTA MESA — The Planning Commission on Tuesday approved the creation of a task force that will attempt to address homelessness in the city. The task force, adopted after a unanimous vote, will have two commissioners and various community members. The commissioners chosen for the task force will be decided at the next meeting. "I think the task force is a way for the community to vet the current challenges and come up with a potential solution to an issue, which appears to be a major challenge for a lot of people on the Westside and the community at large," Planning Commissioner Steve Mensinger said.

Elise Gee TALBERT PARK -- The estimated 50 homeless people living here are just a small fraction of the homeless in all of Orange County, homeless whose needs are not being met by shelters and other alternatives. Estimates have the number of homeless at some 14,080 in the county, according to data from regional homeless service providers and public assistance programs. Of those, only 3,247 are having their needs met through various shelters in the county.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This is a saying often used by business gurus Peter Drucker and W. Edward Deming. Last week I heard it from Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House, a nonprofit organization committed to ending homelessness in Orange County. “If my goal is to end homelessness in Costa Mesa, I need to know how many there are. It is that simple,” Haynes told me, while discussing Mercy House’s point-in-time count of the number of homeless people in Costa Mesa.

COSTA MESA - Solving the city's homeless problem requires the cooperation of other Orange County cities and a mixture of short- and long-term solutions, the Costa Mesa Homeless Task force concluded in its final report. The challenge is for the city to determine which homeless people are from Costa Mesa and which ones were drawn here by social-service programs and parks, committee members concluded. City Council members have said they want to help Costa Mesans who have fallen on hard times but do not have the resources to help those from other cities.

Every year at this time, I revisit one of my favorite Christmas stories, Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol. " One scene never fails to stir my conscience. In it, two men soliciting donations for the poor approach the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, telling him, "We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when want is keenly felt, and abundance rejoices. " That line came to mind while I was on a recent visit to the Costa Mesa Motor Inn, where an initiative to help the homeless is giving sorely needed aid to families caught in dire circumstances.

COSTA MESA — The city's Homeless Task Force has tentatively decided that only those with strong ties to the community be allowed to qualify for homeless services. The qualifications are largely based on those used by the city's Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program. The HPRP outlines that a person must have lived in Costa Mesa within the past 24 months, for at least 90 days, with proof of residency, including a previous lease, proof of utility service, written proof of residency from a landlord or school records.

COSTA MESA — A ordinance that would ban smoking at city parks could be up for public discussion at an upcoming City Council meeting, the city attorney's office said Friday. The ordinance would bar smoking within 50 feet of the city's 29 parks, said Elena Gerli of the Jones & Mayer law firm, which acts as the city attorney's office. The proposal comes on the heels of a similar ban that's working its way through Newport Beach's City Council. Newport Beach began considering the ban in April.

He stood at the gate to his United Airlines flight, ready to head home to Chicago after two years on the streets of Costa Mesa. Officer Julian Trevino, a Costa Mesa cop, had helped Jose Zamora get an identification card and contact his sister so she could buy her brother a ticket home. Trevino stood by as the 50-year-old homeless man prepared to board a last-minute, $485 flight out of John Wayne Airport on a recent Friday. Zamora was leaving Costa Mesa to rejoin his family and see his granddaughter for the first time.

COSTA MESA - He cycled around town with an empty child trailer hitched to the back of his bike. It was around dusk near Lions Park on a recent Tuesday. Other than messy salt-and-pepper hair and ruddy skin from six years of living on the streets, there were few signs that Joseph Deutsch was homeless. His second-hand shirt and pants were largely well-kept. His solid frame didn't look like it had missed a meal. He spoke confidently, clearly and evenly, not betraying the bipolar disorder he says he suffers from.

COSTA MESA — Area churches and church coalitions have agreed to move their "food sharing activities" away from Lions Park to appease residents who said they felt uncomfortable and unsafe because of the homeless population that frequents the park. Saddleback Church has also agreed to put a halt to Sunday morning services for the homeless, according to information released by the Homeless Task Force, a group of volunteers established by the City Council in January to address the issue of homelessness in Costa Mesa.

On Wednesday, I attended the second meeting of the Costa Mesa Homeless Task Force at the Neighborhood Community Center right by the epicenter of homelessness — Lions Park. The meeting lasted three hours and, in addition to the presentations by the Homeless Task Force members themselves, it included several poignant testimonials by homeless and formerly homeless individuals who recounted their journey to and from homelessness. Chairman of the Task Force, Daily Pilot real estate columnist Steve Smith, and the facilitator of the group, Vanguard University's Larry Haynes, did a good job of keeping the agenda on track.

COSTA MESA — The Planning Commission on Tuesday approved the creation of a task force that will attempt to address homelessness in the city. The task force, adopted after a unanimous vote, will have two commissioners and various community members. The commissioners chosen for the task force will be decided at the next meeting. "I think the task force is a way for the community to vet the current challenges and come up with a potential solution to an issue, which appears to be a major challenge for a lot of people on the Westside and the community at large," Planning Commissioner Steve Mensinger said.

COSTA MESA — They're a long way from the Hawaiian beaches of Oahu, where, they said, their addiction to meth eventually made them homeless, forcing them to live out of a tent in a place called Barbers Point. They used to stay up all night "tweaking" with other meth addicts who'd gather there. They had tiki torches outside. Their tent was pretty big. Visitors came and went. They had lots of fellow methhead friends, but something in life was missing. Meth always seemed to have the edge.