NEWS FEATURE: Cities challenge private social services programs

c. 1997 Religion News Service SACRAMENTO, Calif. _ For 14 years, Loaves & Fishes seemed to exemplify George Bush’s idea that community groups should form”a thousand points of light”to combat societal ills, especially poverty and homelessness. Launched in 1983 as a modest soup kitchen, Loaves & Fishes today is an interfaith anti-poverty agency that serves […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

SACRAMENTO, Calif. _ For 14 years, Loaves & Fishes seemed to exemplify George Bush’s idea that community groups should form”a thousand points of light”to combat societal ills, especially poverty and homelessness.

Launched in 1983 as a modest soup kitchen, Loaves & Fishes today is an interfaith anti-poverty agency that serves up to 1,000 meals daily on its sprawling three-acre campus on the edge of downtown Sacramento.


With volunteer help from 55 area churches and synagogues, Loaves & Fishes also runs a shelter for women and children, a center for the mentally ill, a health clinic for the homeless and low-income rental cottages. Only Sacramento County offers more services to the area’s poor than Loaves & Fishes.

In the age of welfare reform, when neither federal nor state governments seem excited about running anti-poverty programs, an outfit like Loaves & Fishes might seem like a godsend.

But to the city of Sacramento, the growth of Loaves & Fishes has become a plague that threatens to torpedo the city’s ambitious redevelopment efforts.

Now, a lawsuit by the city to curb the agency’s operations _ operations the city has dubbed a”public nuisance”_ could test how much the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) protects religiously motivated poverty relief efforts.

Loaves & Fishes executive director LeRoy Chatfield, an alumnus of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers of America union, says his fight with the city is nothing less than a defense of the right of the poor to survive.”Local government, if they had their way … would close us down,”Chatfield says.”What is supposed to happen to all these thousands of homeless people and mentally ill people that are on our streets? … The way I hear some of the neighborhood activists talk, hear some of the developers talk, they would like to vaporize these people. And I use this word deliberately.” But Sacramento deputy city manager Jack Crist says his office is simply trying to mediate a festering row between Loaves & Fishes and its neighbors, who must suffer”people defecating in their yards, trashing their yards, dealing drugs and loitering, the kinds of things you would not want to have in your neighborhood. …”The real issue here is the size and scope of the Loaves & Fishes’ operations and its impact on the surrounding neighborhood and businesses,”Crist says.

The battle between Sacramento and Loaves & Fishes fits into a growing national pattern of tension between local governments and private anti-poverty agencies.”A lot of cities are taking steps to revise their zoning codes to make it more difficult for service agencies to operate in downtown areas,”says Catherine Bendor, a staff attorney with the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty in Washington D.C.

In a 1995 report, Bendor’s firm found 31 instances in which local governments had taken steps to block the expansion of privately run anti-poverty programs _ including many sponsored by religious organizations.


The most drastic example of the trend occurred in Hartford, Conn. Last August, Bendor says, that city’s council imposed a moratorium forbidding any more permits for new anti-poverty facilities. City officials there were acting in response to a plunge in Hartford’s population, which they correlated to the explosive growth of nonprofit anti-poverty service providers.”Cities are looking to zoning as a means of excluding social service providers, which in their view would protect economic development of the downtown areas,”Bendor says.”It’s an unfortunate trend in this era of government cutbacks because private providers become that much more important.” In the face of this backlash, religious poverty-relief organizations may possess legal protections _ based on the First Amendment and RFRA _ that secular groups don’t enjoy.

In 1994, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., reversed a decision by the city’s Board of Zoning Adjustment, which prevented a Presbyterian church from moving its longstanding meal service to its new location.

Like Loaves & Fishes’ countersuit against Sacramento, Western Presbyterian Church sued under RFRA and won an injunction against the city.”The church’s program to feed the poor is an important religious function,”U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin said in his ruling.”Having so concluded, the First Amendment and the RFRA compel the court to overturn the city’s action, which has precluded the plaintiffs from exercising their important religious rights.” With a challenge to the constitutionality of RFRA pending in the U.S. Supreme Court, however, it remains unclear whether the Loaves & Fishes case will have the same outcome.”The cooperation we received from the City of Sacramento ever since our founding in 1983 has just been remarkable,”says director Chatfield.”But it turned sour in the early part of 1995, which is coincidentally when the new master plan for the Richards Boulevard (redevelopment) area was developed and approved by the city council.” Among other things, the redevelopment effort has led to plans for four new high-rise office towers four-block from Loaves & Fishes, along with numerous new retail outlets.

While the city pressed ahead with its redevelopment, Loaves & Fishes added new services to its campus, including a school for homeless children, a”Freedom Park”to get people waiting for daytime meals off the street, a library and reading room, and a youth center.

Prompted by the growth of Loaves & Fishes and other private welfare groups, Sacramento’s redevelopment agency passed a resolution in 1994 blocking approval of any new construction for homeless food or shelter programs.

The city insists the dispute boils down to Loaves & Fishes’ refusal to hew to the letter of city zoning laws. Its lawsuit alleges the agency’s special-use permit allows meals to be served just six days a week _ not on Sundays. The suit also charges that Loaves & Fishes has converted too many of its low-income cottages into offices, changes that would also require amendments to the agency’s special-use permit.


In addition, the city charges that the proliferation of Loaves & Fishes’ programs for teens and the mentally ill were never approved and therefore violate the city’s zoning ordinance.”We need to send a clear signal that no one is above the law,”said council member Steve Cohn during the vote to sue the agency.”Everyone needs to comply with permits.” Last month, Loaves & Fishes fired back. With pro bono help from a high-powered legal team _ including the former chief lawyer for the United Farm Workers union and one of San Francisco’s most prominent law firms _ the agency filed a 75-page countersuit charging the city with violating its religious rights.

The cross-claim, which opens with a theological discussion of the Judeo-Christian tradition of aid to the poor, charges that”the city has singled out Loaves & Fishes for unequal enforcement of the zoning ordinance.””The city’s zoning ordinance is not neutral toward religion,”the cross-claim alleges,”and suppresses the religious conduct of serving food to the homeless, poor and elderly. … A substantial loss or impairment of freedom of religion has occurred and will continue to occur so long as the city’s conduct continues.” The latest meeting among Loaves & Fishes’ executives, city officials and their attorneys occurred April 16, but the talks went nowhere.

At the moment, the only point of common ground is a belief that litigation will not solve their differences to anyone’s satisfaction.”I don’t think many of the problems are insurmountable,”deputy city manager Crist says. However,”they’re a very difficult institution to have a conversation with.” Chatfield agrees that”there is nothing of issue that cannot be resolved by people of goodwill sitting down and working it out.”However, the city’s policies toward the poor are”dangerous stuff. We may not be able to change their thinking. But we’re not going to acquiesce either.”

END AQUINO

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