Oasis to hundreds closes doors Sunday

A tall man leaned against the fence outside, taking a long drag from his cigarette. Inside, a group of older men huddled around a big screen, while others pulled crisp white sheets from a large plastic bag and folded them over collapsible, Army-style cots.

“Come Monday, they won’t know what hit them,” said Zip Pearson, a homeless man who calls himself the winter shelter’s only “super volunteer.” “These people don’t spell the word ‘homeless’ the same way you do. A lot of them don’t associate it with drugs and alcohol. You know how they spell homeless? They spell it F-O-R-E-C-L-O-S-U-R-E.”

The winter shelter, a 150-person-capacity refuge in the 3800 block of Valhalla Drive, will close Sunday after more than three months of service.

Pearson, who said he originally went there for a free meal and wound up staying for the hot showers, worries about what will happen to the 473 men and women who have filed in since Dec. 1, when the shelter opened for the second consecutive year at the National Guard Armory in Burbank.

“They were given a taste of the good life,” Pearson, 52, said. “They tasted the honey. You think they want to go back to downtown Los Angeles, to Skid Row? Instead of talking about closing the shelter, we should be talking about keeping it open all year.”

But the chances of that happening are slim, said the Rev. Andy Bales, chief executive of the Los Angeles Union Rescue Mission, the shelter’s operator.

“Not only do we have to contend with the shrinking economy and growing unemployment, which I believe is actually closer to 20%, but now we’re in the process of listening to complaints from neighbors and doing our best to address them,” Bales said. “It’s something that needs to be done to keep us up and running.”

Bales said he met Friday with Councilman David Gordon, who shared with him some of the community’s concerns. Among them are problems with loitering, public urination and homeless people arriving at the shelter at all hours of the evening.

Another complaint lodged against the Union Rescue Mission and EIMAGO Inc., the nonprofit that takes care of day-to-day duties, is that volunteers have failed to keep criminals away, specifically sex offenders.