'Imperfect Paradise': When Neighbors Shout Down an Apartment Complex for Unhoused People

This week’s California Report Magazine features a conversation with KPCC reporter Jill Replogle, whose three-part series "Home Is Life" is the opening season of the new LAist podcast Imperfect Paradise. We hear excerpts from Episode 2, which explores the battle in Fullerton over an effort to build a new apartment complex to get unhoused people off the street.

How to get unhoused people into stable housing is a question cities across California are grappling with. But the problem isn’t always finding land or money to build permanent supportive housing — often, it's the neighbors.

David Gillanders runs an organization called Pathways of Hope, which works to end homelessness and hunger in Orange County. He was frustrated with the limits of services for unhoused people, which tend to go not much beyond things like church soup kitchens and clothing drives.

"Yes, handing out toys to families matters. Yes, everyone's got to eat,” Gillanders said.

“But it's literally homelessness. It's not souplessness, you know what I mean? It's not clotheslessness. It's not showerlessness. It's homelessness. Demonstrate for me how homelessness is ended with anything other than a set of keys, a lease and a place to call home."

Gillanders led an initiative to build an apartment building in Fullerton to house 60 to 80 people who are chronically unhoused and have a disability, which could include mental illness or a substance abuse disorder.

In order to get it approved, the Fullerton City Council told Gillanders he’d have to convince the neighbors. But that proved harder than he thought.

"We spent a lot of money to buy homes and to get our kids to school and, you know, just to live the American dream,” said neighbor Stephanie Bromley. “We feel like our safety and our well-being is being compromised and no one's thinking about us."

Bromley ran a Facebook group that became a forum for complaints about people experiencing homelessness in the neighborhood. Bromley said she felt compassion for unhoused people, handing out McDonald's gift cards to people she encounters around town asking for money. But she didn’t support the idea of formerly unhoused people living in an apartment building in her neighborhood.

"I'm concerned that we're going to attract people from other cities and then they're going to become our responsibility,” Bromley said.

Some Fullerton residents express more vicious takes on their unhoused neighbors.

Catherine Reese generated a local following in Fullerton by posting videos of her "interviewing" people she presumes to be unhoused. Some videos feature her asking her subjects if they want help and then berating them if they refuse or waver. Others feature her disparaging commentaries, as she films unhoused people from a distance.

The Imperfect Paradise podcast follows Reese and a group of neighbors as they tour other permanent supportive housing for chronically unhoused people in Orange County. Fullerton City Council members and proponents of the Pathways project suggested it might be illuminating for residents to see some existing developments.

But the tour seemed to backfire. Fullerton neighbors got particularly upset when the tour stopped at an apartment complex in the city of Irvine.

“We know permanent supportive housing is what experts say is the best way to keep people off the street,” said Bromley. “But it bothers me that our taxpayer dollars are paying for these people to live with amenities like a pool, stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, walk-in closets, movie night, etcetera. And they never have to work. You know, it makes me wonder why I work so hard, you know, and tell my kids they need to go to school and do well for themselves and everybody getting all these things for free. It’s frustrating."

Actually, tenants do pay rent: 30% of their income, which could come from employment or disability insurance.

But that information didn't convince the Fullerton neighbors skeptical of the Pathways project. When the tour stopped at another permanent supportive housing project, the Rockwood apartments in Anaheim, Reese jumped in.

"Can I get this kind of assistance and not have to work?" she asked.

"If you're homeless, if you go live on the street for a year, stop working, then you would qualify," responded Danielle Ball, whose job is to help tenants at Rockwood.

"If you went out and if you decided you don't want your house, you don't want your car. You don't want any single asset that you own and sell everything and go out on the street and lose it all ... [and] after being on the street, most likely you will get a mental health diagnosis because it's pretty bad out there ... then you could qualify, 100%."

Listen to the Imperfect Paradise podcast from LAist studios to learn more about the battle over permanent supportive housing in Fullerton, and read LAist's full story, going back to 2018.