Michael Gasparovic had been homeless on and off for 13 years when, last winter, he stumbled into The Courtyard shelter.
At the time he was fresh off a surgery in which doctors split open his chest to reinflate his collapsed lung. Exhausted, his wound searing, Gasparovic decided he was done sleeping on the street or in cars. So he made his way to a shelter that hospital staff had told him opened a few months earlier in Santa Ana.
“I could barely walk,” Gasparovic said recently, sitting on his cot in the shelter, ready to head out to his part-time job installing garage doors.
“If it wasn’t for this place, I don’t know where I’d be; what I’d be doing,” he added. “I’ve come a long way.”
A year after The Courtyard opened, on Oct. 5, 2016, the county’s first year-round shelter is bustling.
About 425 people sleep there each night, significantly reducing the number who sleep in the landscape of the adjacent Santa Ana Civic Center. It’s also a step in a new direction, politically and culturally, for a county that once was viewed as slow to respond to homelessness.
Rewind to last fall, when county officials were facing mounting problems related to homelessnes. An estimated 461 people were encamped in tents and sleeping bags and blankets in the landscape and courtyards of the Civic Center.
Crime had spiked — homeless women reported being raped and the ground was littered with syringes and feces. County employees said they had been attacked and harassed leaving work, leading the sheriff’s department to advise them on how to fight the homeless, if necessary. And outbreaks of Shigella and antibiotic-resistant MRSA were reported in the encampment.
But in September 2016, as homelessness became the focal point of 1st District Supervisor Andrew Do’s re-election campaign against challenger Santa Ana Councilwoman Michelle Martinez, the previously disparate political wills of the city and county aligned, allowing Do to successfully push through a plan to open a temporary homeless shelter at the long-vacant bus terminal across the street from the board’s offices.
“The Courtyard was a response to a crisis,” said Susan Price, the county’s homeless-care coordinator. “It was opened quickly and was imperfect at its beginning by design, because … we wanted to adapt to the population.”
One early challenge was building trust with a population not used to receiving services. While the shelter didn’t allow drug use inside, it didn’t turn away drug addicts or people who were obviously intoxicated. Instead, aid workers tried to link people in need with mental health or addiction treatment.
When local hospitals began discharging seriously ill and disabled patients to The Courtyard, the shelter swapped out its floor mats for cots, first for the impaired, then for everybody. When people began using drugs in the shelter’s semi-private cubicles, the section was replaced with beds for the shelter residents who had found employment, which total 260 over the past year. Soon, mobile shower units were acquired. Washers and dryers were installed. Local nonprofits served regular hot meals to residents.
As of Wednesday, Oct. 4, shelter and county staff had helped 153 former Courtyard residents find permanent housing. And more than 700 people now come to the facility daily to receive services.
But concerns and challenges remain.
A few current and former Courtyard residents have spoken at county board meetings, telling supervisors that shelter staff verbally abuse homeless people and that residents suffer from the shelter’s unsanitary conditions. A scabies outbreak was reported early this year, where mites burrowed into shelter residents’ skin. Homeless advocate Mohammed Aly and the OC Food Access Coalition have complained that meals donated by nonprofits at the shelter are nutritionally deficient and called on the county to provide additional, healthier food.
Other shelter residents said the only homeless people who gripe about poor treatment are those who don’t follow rules.
As the Civic Center’s homeless population has dropped sharply — reclaiming part of the previously neglected county seat — a concentrated encampment outside Superior Court has become home to a challenging population of about 150 holdouts, including some who don’t want to be in The Courtyard or were kicked out, and others who are heavily drug addicted.
Jennifer Muir, general manager of the Orange County Employees Association, the county’s largest public employees’ union, said the entrenched encampment still creates “unsafe volatile situations” for Civic Center workers who are part of her union and members of the public.
Many homeless advocates also view The Courtyard as a bandage on a larger problem: a good first step but not a replacement for the permanent housing needed to address homelessness.
But county officials see The Courtyard as a successful model that can be replicated. County supervisors and Anaheim city council members recently began looking for a location to put a 500-bed emergency shelter that could help move hundreds of homeless now living along the Santa Ana River.
Amy Fuentes, 29, who has been homeless for much of her adult life, said she had lost custody of her kids and was living in her car in November when she decided to come to The Courtyard. Now, she has her own apartment, works at a nonprofit, pays her own rent, and is looking to go back to school.
“I had lost everything when I came to The Courtyard,” Fuentes said. “I couldn’t do it on my own, but I got the support I needed here.”
