The Rev. Andy Bales, president of the Union Rescue Mission, is frustrated - and more than a little peeved.

He fought some local residents and politicians for more than two years to open the Hope Gardens Family Center, a transitional living and permanent supportive housing facility for homeless women and children at a rustic 71-acre retreat bordering the Angeles National Forest at the northeast edge of the San Fernando Valley.

On May 23, the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission finally approved plans for the mission to start moving six mothers and their 15 children from skid row into one- or two-bedroom freshly painted apartments, with views of lush lawns and wooded hillsides. The grounds include an Alpine lodge plus a gurgling brook, koi pond and state-of-the-art playground.

Today, some 15 families have moved into the former retirement complex, with plans to accommodate about 50 families and 20 elderly women by the end of the year. "So Hope Gardens is working out really well," Rev. Bales notes.

Yet the number of desperate homeless families who come to the Union Rescue Mission at 545 S. San Pedro St. seeking help continues to climb. And the explanation, ironically, lies in the mayor's and county supervisors' so-called "zero tolerance" policy for kids on skid row.

The mission - which is the largest service provider on skid row for homeless women with children, accommodating some 40 families - even has on-site Los Angles County social workers to evaluate homeless families as part of its intake process.

"For a while, the county was quickly giving them vouchers for hotels and then putting them on a waiting list for Section 8 housing," Rev. Bales reports. "But now they've kind of run out of Section 8 housing and everything has almost stopped. So families are staying longer with us, anywhere from four weeks to over two years. In fact, we have as many women and children now as we did before we opened Hope Gardens."

He attributes this demographic crunch to families being sent to voucher hotels throughout the Southland and telling other struggling families not receiving public assistance that help is readily available downtown.

"I believe there are a lot less women and children today on skid row, but there's a never-ending stream of people coming from other areas to us in need of help," he says. "So it's never slowed down for us, even after we started sending families to Hope Gardens. I mean, every day you can go downstairs and watch moms and kids come in. I don't think we'll ever run out of women and children to serve."

Fastest growing segment
On any given night, nearly 100,000 families are homeless across the United States. That means at least 600,000 families with 1.35 million children experience homelessness every year, making up about half of the homeless population during the year, according to a January 2007 report by the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

In Los Angeles County, the 2005 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count sponsored by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) found that among the 82,291 homeless people it enumerated over three days, 19,882 were in families.

Both nationally and locally, these destitute homeless families exist in urban, suburban and rural areas, surviving by sleeping in shelters, cars, motels, abandoned buildings, alleys as well as in bus and train stations.

Lack of affordable housing has been identified by social science research and public policy commissions as the number one cause of homelessness among families.

"The threat of homelessness looms constantly over most poor families who struggle to meet their rent or mortgage payments, but there are risk factors or predictors of homelessness that suggest that some families affected by the affordable housing crisis are more likely to become homeless than others," states the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

"Families that become homeless tend to share certain characteristics: they have extremely low incomes, tend to have young children and be headed by a younger parent, lack strong social networks and often have poor housing histories or move frequently.... It seems that homeless families are a subgroup of poor families that, for either an economic or a personal crisis, have lost their housing and cannot get back into the housing market."

According to the National Center on Family Homelessness, families with children are among the "fastest growing segment" of the homeless population. The Massachusetts-based center reports that requests by families for emergency shelter have risen every year since 1985. On any given night, some 200,000 children in homeless families aren't sleeping in their own beds.

The consequences are harmful at the very least, and often severe.

Homeless kids go hungry twice as often as other kids. Moreover, they have twice as many ear infections, four times as many asthma attacks, five times as many stomach problems and six times as many speech difficulties.

Concerning traumatic stress, within a single year 97 percent of homeless children move as many as three times; 25 percent witness acts of family violence; and 22 percent are separated from their immediate family, going into foster homes or to live with relatives.

As a result, homeless children experience many more mental health problems than other children. In fact, more than 20 percent of homeless preschoolers suffer emotional difficulties that are serious enough to require professional care. And 47 percent of homeless school-age children suffer anxiety, depression and withdrawal compared to 18 percent of their non-homeless counterparts.

Concerning education, only about 77 percent of school-age homeless children attend school regularly, and many experience learning problems. Homeless students are twice as likely to have to repeat a grade and four times as likely to have developmental delays.

Random lifestyle
Professor Debra Linesch, chair of the graduate department of marital and family therapy at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester, couldn't agree more. The clinical program she directs has been working with formerly homeless children from Dolores Mission, a poor parish in East L.A. that's often a first stop for Hispanic immigrants.

"Their capacity to express themselves is not formulated," says Linesch. "There's not a sense of self deep down in them established from which they feel they can launch themselves - to grow and to reach out and to take risks and to encounter new things. Kids need a stable internal world in order to reach out and move forward. It felt to me like there's just none of that.

"In psychological language we talk about 'attachment theory', and there has to be secure attachment created early on in one's life in order to have healthy relationships. Those attachments are formed in family and in safety, and in a sense that life has some predictability and dependability. When you smile at somebody, they smile back at you.

"I think life must feel really unpredictable and random for these homeless kids," she observes. "And it's hard to form attachments and develop relationships in that kind of randomness and unpredictability."

The number of homeless families is increasing, and often one of their way stations is skid row, Linesch reports. This puts impressionable young children in proximity to prostitution, drug dealing and abuse, alcoholism, acts of violence, mentally deranged people, excrement-stained and urine-soaked sidewalks, and other unimaginable horrors.

"But for me the biggest issue is being homeless, whether or not they're on skid row," she says. "The bigger question is a child not having a place that they can experience some sense of stable family. The lack of a psychological anchor of having a sense of family and home, and the internalized emptiness that being homeless establishes in a child's psychological makeup, can be devastating."

All the things social scientists and educators know that are good for a child don't happen in the daily lives of kids who are homeless, according to Dr. Sande Harte, who chairs the department of sociology, social work and gerontology at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles.

She runs through a laundry list of long-term negative effects: developmental problems, insecurity, lack of self-esteem and anxiety issues along with health and safety problems.

"It's interesting that homeless mothers often experienced homelessness in their own lives," Harte notes. "So it's one of those things that reappears in people's lives again. It keeps popping back up.

"When you have kids who don't know where they're going to sleep at night, or if mom or dad or anybody is going to be there, it's terrible. And then not knowing what sort of trauma or crisis is going to occur in the next ten minutes, that's devastating."

One of the most damaging and enduring impacts homelessness has on children, Harte says, concerns their education. Moving from place to place means attending one school after another, resulting in lower performance and never really catching up with classmates.

Additionally, Harte reports, homeless kids have more discipline problems, twice as many learning disabilities like dyslexia and four times the rate of developmental delays as children growing up in stable households.

To date, she stresses, school systems have a dismal record of meeting these greater needs of homeless children.

"We think that little kids who are two or three years old won't remember or that they don't pay attention to what's going on around them," the educator says. "But we know that by the time these kids are 18 months old they already have major developmental delays and chronic health conditions. And if those aren't addressed really quickly in their early years, they do affect the rest of their lives."

'Crisis on the Streets'
In the early part of this decade, the Union Rescue Mission asked USC's Center for Religion and Civic Culture to do a feasibility study to enhance the mission's strategic planning. The result was a 70-plus-page report entitled, "Crisis on the Streets: Homeless Women and Children in Los Angeles."

"The traditional view that the homeless are men with substance abuse issues is no longer a predominant reality," the report concluded. "Perhaps the most alarming trend in the homeless population is the increase of women and children. Factors such as rising poverty levels, lack of affordable housing, increased health care costs, and welfare benefit time limits have contributed to this change. In Los Angeles, the breakdown of social networks and the concentration of homeless services in the skid row area are altering the face of the homeless population."

When the report was released in 2003, service providers estimated that the number of children living on skid row was about 700. Today, Rev. Bales of the Union Rescue Mission is thankful that the number is closer to 400 kids, who mostly live in apartments, shelters and cars as well as on the street.

"But there's still a never-ending population of homeless families coming to our door because there's just not enough affordable housing," the administrator, who personally delivers bottles of water to skid row inhabitants on hot days, muses. "People will go where the help is.

"And they have a multitude of problems, mostly caused by the harm that they've experienced while being homeless," he explains. "So if we could keep families from ever experiencing homelessness, that would be the absolute best thing."

Editor's note: This is the first installment of a three-part series on homeless women with children. Future segments will profile homeless families and the help they're receiving from local Catholic social service agencies.