NATIONAL DESK
Orinda Journal; Debate Over Shelter Forces Town to Confront Its Beliefs
By CAROL POGASH (NYT)
Published: February 2, 2004
On a recent wintry night, when officials here made a hurried decision to open a vacant library building to the homeless, they inadvertently exposed the conflicted soul of a privileged city.
Faced with the prospect of playing host to 75 ''guests,'' as the homeless from several nearby communities were called, residents grew so polarized that many could not meet the eyes of friends and neighbors with whom they disagreed.
The temporary shelter never opened because of the outcry. In the end, the debate proved much bigger for Orinda than the shelter or even the broader problem of homelessness in the San Francisco Bay area.
It cut to the core of how residents feel about themselves and their fellow human beings and whether they believe that luck had anything to do with their ability to settle in this bucolic community of mostly well-to-do professionals 22 miles east of San Francisco.
What most everyone had thought was a town where people were more or less alike was shown to be one with sharply divergent values.
''It brought out the best and the worst in people,'' said Mayor Joyce Hawkins, who was among the original supporters of the shelter, which would have opened this month. ''It was a painful process.''
Many of the 17,000 residents work in cities like Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco, but they return home to a place largely sheltered from big city ills.
Crime is so low that the police chief sometimes reminds residents to remove keys from their car ignitions. The public schools rank among the top in the state.
Yet when it came to housing the homeless, Orinda discovered it was more ordinary than extraordinary.
''A temporary shelter would probably draw opposition in most communities in this nation,'' said Steven Raphael, an associate professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley who has researched the subject.
Councilwoman Amy Worth said of the debate, ''This is Anytown U.S.A.''
Contra Costa County has an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 homeless people, though none are in Orinda. The Interfaith Council of Contra Costa County had planned to send just families, the frail and the elderly to the old library building on a hill near housing for the elderly, a preschool, a church and a park. Many residents expressed fear that drug addicts and child molesters would be among the homeless. They demanded screening to weed out violent offenders, and they wanted guarantees that the homeless would not congregate in the park and at a nearby grocery store.
Some critics complained that officials had moved too quickly, giving preliminary approval for the shelter in a closed session days before the homeless were to have arrived.
Perhaps the greatest anger was directed at City Manager Bill Lindsay. At a raucous hearing, where Mr. Lindsay was introduced as ''the noble person who conceived this idea,'' the audience snickered. Someone said in a loud whisper, ''And he doesn't even live here.''
It was ''a lynch mob mentality,'' a resident, Inez Hollander Lake, said. ''I never thought I'd find that in the Bay Area.''
Ms. Lake sent an e-mail message to friends about how close she had come to poverty. After her husband lost his job, the couple were on the verge of losing their house and health insurance, she wrote.
''It happens all too easily in this country,'' Ms. Lake, a native of the Netherlands, said.
Worried that parents might not invite her children on play dates because she favored the shelter, Jennifer Tejada, a police sergeant in another town, remained quiet until she became so tormented by her inaction that she spoke up at a second hearing. After that, Sergeant Tejada said, when she picked up her child at a preschool, a number of mothers clearly avoided her.
Dwight Foster, the self-described brain trust of the resistance, collected contributions, hired a lawyer to sue the city and set up a Web site.
''It was like taking a Pennsylvania Amish quilt sitting on a line on a beautiful sunny day and tearing it right down the middle,'' Mr. Foster said of the proposal's effects on the city.
In the thick of the debate, the Rev. Thomas Trutner of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church campaigned from the pulpit, saying, ''Jesus Christ was born in a homeless shelter.''
By the middle of the month, a bruised mayor and City Council asked the interfaith group to withdraw its proposal. The council members scheduled a hearing for residents to have their final say.
More than 500 people attended, with at least 100 taking the microphone. At the hearing, the discussion was ''astoundingly respectful and polite,'' the senior pastor, the Rev. Frank Baldwin, said.
Even though civility has returned, the debate continues. A recall campaign against the City Council has started.
The mood seems to have shifted in favor of helping the homeless. A resident, Chet Martine, 67, is promising to match up to $1,000 in contributions from residents to go to homeless programs. Sergeant Tejada and friends are raising money for a voucher program for hotels. And Mr. Foster is donating leftover contributions from the legal fight, $700, to the interfaith group.
''We need to heal,'' Mayor Hawkins said.
©2004 The New York Times Company
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