On September 28th, Heidi Roberts posted the first of what would become a series of photos of a Bridge home located in San Pedro on several social media pages in Venice. The caption on the post read; “
With few exceptions, the 20+ other Bridge Home shelters are pretty darned clean. I’ve been to many of them and there are no encampments surrounding them, no open drug dealing and usage, no chop shops, and no trash floating in the gutters. Only in Venice”.
Roberts knows something about keeping a promise to a community. She and her husband, John Betz, have successfully housed nearly 200 homeless individuals in eight homes since they launched the Haaven Homes organization a few years ago. Haaven homes are shared housing facilities that provide housing and much needed services including pier support that Roberts says is essential to help get people off streets –keep them off. They have done this in neighborhoods all around Los Angeles.
Roberts is also a believer in models like A Bridge Home, “We need to address the humanitarian crisis on the streets. And to do this, we need the Bridge Home shelter model to work. For it to work, it needs to address the concerns of the host community in addition to helping homeless gain safe shelter so they can begin to address the trauma that made them homeless in the first place. There needs to be a balance. Currently, it’s destroying one community and not really helping the other.”
A Bridge too far
The promise of ABH Bridge housing is a model of temporary housing that, according to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s ABH website, offers service-enriched programs aimed at quickly bringing the homeless off the streets and helping them rebuild their lives. The promise that came with building these shelters was additional sanitation and enforcement services to ensure that the streets surrounding the shelters remain safe and clean.
Since the opening of ABH in Venice, however, residents who live in the area say they have seen a significant uptick in crime as well as an increase in residents who now live outside the
Bridge home. Meanwhile, cleanups in the area have come to an almost complete stop, leaving
deplorable conditions for both the housed and the unhoused. “It’s damaged the neighborhood and done nothing for the homeless and the community,” says Roberts.
Curious about other ABH sites, Roberts started driving to them to see for herself what they looked like. “I’ve driven to almost all of them. Venice is the anomaly. Every Bridge home except in Venice has improved its community. Venice has been a tragedy.”
[show photos
Roberts says she visited converted buildings as well as one shelter built in the middle of neighborhood that was experiencing a high concentration of homeless like in Venice. She say that even at that ABH, there was no trash outside—and neighbors told her they had not seen an increase in homeless residents.
[more photos]
Broken Promises
On every visit to Bridge homes, Roberts has taken photos, which she’s uploaded on social media. She calls the series “Broken Promises.” She notes, “There’s no editorializing in the pictures. I take the pictures the exact same way from 500 feet out—same angle. There’s no denying what you see.” I take pictures from the front door of the shelter and then just keep on heading out to about 500 feet – all angles and sidewalks are covered within that circle.”
[more photos]
Roberts didn’t limit her visits to taking photos. She also talked to neighbors and service providers at and around the other Bridge homes. “The other communities and the homeless [there] have benefited from the Bridge home,” she says. “This is how it is supposed to work.”
Roberts says she believes the reason the other ABH facilities work is leadership. “You
have to look no further than the Veterans Administration ABH and the Venice site to look to
Councilmember Mike Bonin. He hasn’t done anything to help. There’s no accountability. This
[Venice ABH] has been a magnet. This is failure.”
Roberts believes that as a result of this failure, other communities will not welcome a shelter and people will remain unhoused. “I hope to show that this model can work, but success requires our representatives to also work to improve the community for all once the shelter is open. It’s tough to uphold promises in politics these days. But we’re dealing with life or death situations here and we must expect no less of them.”
That is why she hopes that her series will serve to show other ABH programs that work—and that there needs to be changes in how the Venice ABH operates.
“Right now,” she concludes, “this isn’t benefiting either community.”
People in Venice are understandably furious about the third world conditions surrounding the Bridge Home shelter in Venice. In exchange for hosting this facility in its neighborhood, Venetians were assured that the City would take good care of the community and ensure that the surrounding area would be encampment-free, safe and clean. The City promised, “As the new shelters open their doors, City Sanitation teams will work to restore spaces that were previously encampments into open and clear public spaces.” In fact, they even established an official safe zone around the shelter and promised dedicated patrols and sanitation services.
Clearly, this hasn’t happened. BUT, people should know that these promises only haven’t happened here in Venice.
With few exceptions, the 20+ other Bridge Home shelters are pretty darned clean. I’ve been to many of them and there are no encampments surrounding them, no open drug dealing and usage, no chop shops, and no trash floating in the gutters. ONLY in Venice.
Why? AskMike Bonin why he refused to vote to clean-up the streets in Venice when the rest of the City Council voted to clean their districts. (LA Times article in comments) These are pictures I snapped yesterday at the Bridge Home shelter in San Pedro – Councilman Buscaiano’s district.
I’ll share more images of Bridge Home facilities around LA later this week…