Board Closes Job Center for Homeless

Born out of raging winter floods, Ventura’s Homeless Employment Resource Center will not live to see another rainy season.

Citing pressure within the west side Ventura community and uncertainty over administrative support for the acclaimed program, HERO’s board of directors voted last week to permanently close the center.

“There were people who felt that HERO had served its purpose, that it was intended to be a stopgap measure and not a permanent program,” said Terrie Andrade, chairwoman of the HERO board and head of the city Housing Authority’s Section 8 housing subsidy program.

The HERO program began after flood waters raged down the Ventura River in January 1995, uprooting a homeless encampment of 200 people who had built shanties in the normally dry riverbed.

In permanently evicting the riverbed dwellers, a coalition of city, county and nonprofit officials banded together to offer emergency housing and link people to whatever social services they might need to become self-sufficient.

The program later evolved into an effort to help the displaced find jobs, breaking its ties to the city and securing nonprofit status in 1996.

But by early this year, the HERO center closed as board members tried to tie the organization into state and national welfare reform efforts.

Meanwhile, Andrade said, representatives from the west side police storefront and others in the neighborhood opposed the center’s new employment-based mission and its inability to serve those considered unemployable.

Critics also said employment services for the homeless and others were already offered by other organizations.