Shelters

A team of 16 young Chinese acrobats began its U.S. tour with two nights at a homeless shelter. A circus promoter from Wisconsin failed to meet the performers when they arrived Monday at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Instead, he called Bill Thompson of the Union Gospel Mission shelter. The promoter, who gave only the name Gary, said he had run out of money and needed someone to pick up the acrobats, ages 13 to 20.

Dwight Smith considers housing the homeless his mission in life. So when the local building industry offered to donate time and materials to renovate Isaiah House, the Catholic Worker-sponsored shelter he directs in Santa Ana, Smith jumped at the chance. Ten months later, however, the volunteer contractors -- hit hard by a mortgage meltdown and industry lull that have left many unemployed -- had to abandon the job.

Karisa Vaughn, a college student who hasn't had a permanent home in months, hoisted a tattered wooden pallet over her shoulder Tuesday while several other homeless men and women lifted heavy cinder blocks, pounded fence posts and hauled in their personal belongings in garbage bags.

With her 5-week-old baby asleep face-down across her lap, Erica Richardson settled into a chair at the Union Rescue Mission and reviewed her strategies for staying sane while living with an infant in a homeless shelter. The key is to get away from the shelter during the day, the tired-looking 33-year-old said. Head to the park, to a friend's house, to any place where she can pretend, for a while anyway, that she is just another mom on an outing.

EVERY night after dusk, yellow school buses begin to arrive in the town of Chester, driving past silos and onion fields to a fenced-in complex at the top of a hill. They have come from New York, an hour-and-a-half drive south of here, and they are carrying homeless men. The men will sign in and scatter to their beds, in military-style dormitories or, if they are sick or frail, whitewashed cells that once held prisoners.

The Los Angeles city attorney's office is investigating whether a Hollywood hospital violated multiple laws when it attempted to leave a paraplegic man on a gurney at the Midnight Mission -- hours before he was left in a skid row gutter, officials said Monday. A video, filmed by security cameras at the Midnight Mission early Thursday, shows two workers from Hollywood Presbyterian arriving by ambulance and trying to wheel the man, who is strapped down to the gurney, into the mission courtyard.

A year and a half after it was proposed, a novel effort to move homeless children and their mothers out of skid row and into a hillside encampment area near the Angeles National Forest is in danger of falling apart, officials said Friday. The proposed 71-acre home for women and children trying to get out of homelessness and off downtown's skid row was supposed to be an easy project because it would be built far from homes in the foothills of the San Fernando Valley.

Despite the public outrage over the dumping of homeless patients on Los Angeles' skid row, there is growing debate about whether criminalizing the practice would solve the problem. As the number of suspected dumping cases reached 55 last week, a state senator announced legislation that would make it a misdemeanor for hospitals to transport patients and leave them on the streets against their will.

Federal officials have moved everyone out of a Texas shelter for children caught crossing the U.S. border on their own amid allegations that youngsters were being sexually abused. The decision to transfer 72 children from the Texas Sheltered Care facility this week came after an investigation launched last month by the FBI and local authorities into allegations that the staff had abused numerous children.

In a blow to attempts to shift homeless services away from downtown Los Angeles, Pomona Mayor Norma Torres said Tuesday that she will oppose any effort to put a homeless shelter in her city. Los Angeles County officials proposed Pomona as the site for one of five regional centers, but Torres described the plan as "short-sighted." "The Board of Supervisors can't dump their homeless problem on Pomona," she said.