The Proving Ground : With federal funding on the line, a new agency must show it helps--not hinders--the efforts to solve the problems of rampant homelessness.

He is another dusty man wobbling down the hill behind another rusty cart, rattling cans and bottles harvested from the streets.

He parks the cart at the bottom of the hill and limps into the swale beneath the 1st Street Bridge. The pain in his hips has gotten worse, he tells outreach worker David Bryant, the streets are wearing him down. With spring comes clemency, but with time comes weariness.

His name is Moses. He is 40 and he lives in a small camp in the warehouse district along the Los Angeles River. Tractor-trailers snake between the buildings, their monstrous roars echoing off concrete canyon, shaking walls made of cardboard and blankets. The area is kept clean, all trash stowed in garbage bags. A book titled “No Sanctuary” rests on the ground on one side of Moses’ cot. He has been reading in his spare time.

Bryant listens carefully for signs of strength or despair--a capricious spark or a desperate plea--something, anything, that will bring Moses to a fork in the road from homelessness.

Bryant knows the grip of hangdog streets, where the “dope man is the only one who leaves with fat pockets.” He was homeless 3 1/2 years before he began doing outreach work.

He knows how overwhelming it seems to start anew. Beginning the hard climb back with nothing but conviction is grueling and long. Beginning with nothing is nearly impossible. It will begin, he says, when Moses takes the first step.

They sit on the cot, and Bryant asks the question he has asked many times before: “Are you ready, man?”

Yes, Moses says, he is ready. “I just got to pull my head out my ass.”

“I’m off on Friday,” Bryant says. “Can you come in before then?”

Yes, Moses says, he will be in.

As Bryant walks away, he is hoping that by Friday, there will be one less homeless person in the world, knowing there will be many others to take his place.

Homelessness is interminable, says Bryant, outreach team leader for the newly formed Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). “We’re not going to solve homelessness,” he says. “It’s been here since the world began. . . . One by one. That’s all I can do.”

LAHSA’s primary role is administrative. Operational for less than a year, the goal of the joint city-county operation is to link hundreds of agencies by a unified network throughout the county.

LAHSA is responsible for administering $20 million in U.S. Housing and Urban Development funds over the next three years, and for holding accountable the nonprofit groups that receive the money--such as homeless shelters and job-training programs. In addition, the city and county have committed at least $2.75 million each for at least four years.

But LAHSA’s effectiveness will depend largely on its ability to eliminate the confrontational, fractured approach to dealing with homelessness that resulted in its inception.

After litigation in 1987 cleaved the city and county--each accusing the other of failing to do its part in addressing homelessness--settlement was reached through the formation of LAHSA.

The results of its first big test, administered by HUD, will be announced in June. Actually, it was more like a pop quiz, given with little notice.

If LAHSA scores high, more than $80 million could be funneled to the Los Angeles area. Much of that money would be used to build affordable, permanent housing. More important, success would boost LAHSA over its first major hurdle in assembling what could be the most comprehensive, focused assault on homelessness in county history.

If LAHSA fails, however, it will be devastating. Already, there is lack of confidence in government’s ability to address the emotionally and politically charged issue of homelessness; and some believe LAHSA is nothing more than a continuation of government’s infirmity.

*

From behind a table cluttered with notebooks and papers, a rumpled Eugene Boutilier acknowledges that his greatest fear of working for the government--that of strangulation by red tape--was a valid concern.

As LAHSA’s executive director, Boutilier, 57, brings to his job a lifetime of apposite experiences, first as a minister, advocate for farm workers and most recently as administrator of the Los Angeles Emergency Food and Shelter Program.

He has learned that there is no jete in the leap from advocate to bureaucrat, no poetry or grace--only the plowing forward in small, hopeful steps.

Boutilier is a man of conscience and of God, classical music and jazz. He enjoys playing the stand-up bass because it allows him to blend into the background, something his job as head of a new governmental agency does not allow.

He has assembled a unique staff of 18 co-workers, who earn $21,000 to just under $90,000. He is intent on limiting administrative costs to 5% to allow money to go directly to nonprofit groups.

Some staff members bring experience in working for government, some in working for nonprofits.

Others have been homeless themselves.

Outreach worker Myrna Foster, 35, was without a home for two years. A recovering alcoholic and drug user, she sees her life as evidence of what is possible--to lose everything and win it back. Every day, she sees ghosts of her past on the streets.

“It’s a lonely, very empty feeling. You feel lost. I think what kept me sane was drinking. I don’t know. It’s hard to say. You have to be in that place to understand it. . . . It’s sad to see people who are where I’ve been and they don’t want help. They’re still not ready to get into recovery or take responsibility.”

Edward Nuno, 22, grew up in a gang that started out as a youth football team. He has been shot and stabbed, and has attended funerals of a dozen friends killed violently. “I’m talking about people I grew up with,” he says, “people I played marbles with.”

As an outreach worker, he has been able to direct some of his friends to training programs, jobs and housing.

On the Policy Advisory Committee is Len Doucette, editor and publisher of Hard Times, a newspaper about homelessness. As a journalist, a committee member and a homeless person, he says, his mission is to give voice to those without homes.

On the LAHSA Commission--the agency’s governing body--is Robert Alvarado, formerly homeless, now among five members of the clergy appointed independently to the commission by city- and county-elected officials. They make up half of the membership. It was not their roles in the church that led to their appointments, says Boutilier. Instead, it was their experience in addressing homelessness, an area where religious organizations historically have played a major role.

“It may be good to have myself and other ministers involved because one sub-population of the homeless is characterized by lack of hope,” says Boutilier. “I’m looking for a combination of public declarations and funding policies and bureaucratic procedures that take the opposite point of view: There is hope; there is a second chance or a third or fourth or 27th or 98th.

“This isn’t a sectarian message but it is a religious message, and in this case, it’s the legitimate role of government to preach to its citizens: We understand that you are in a hell of a fix, but there is hope.”

LAHSA’s role is to connect service providers into a cooperative partnership, allowing the homeless to enter and proceed through a continuum offering full menus of assistance. It also tries to increase efficiency in local government’s role within the network and bring in new players from business and foundation sectors.

“It’s coordination, not centralization,” say Boutilier.

The result, it is hoped, will be fewer people falling through cracks.

*

Ideally, there should have been a time of adolescence so newborn LAHSA could stretch and test its young legs, find firm footing then carefully lift itself into its new role. On March 20, a telephone call propelled it into adulthood.

Mayor Richard Riordan’s office received a call from Andrew Cuomo, a HUD assistant secretary who warned that applications from homeless agencies in the Los Angeles area were in danger of losing out in a $900 million national competition.

Rather than consider individual applications from hundreds of nonprofit groups, HUD wanted these agencies to work together in identifying their most urgent needs as part of a comprehensive plan to address homelessness.

On March 23, the LAHSA Commission met at the agency’s Downtown offices, where Boutilier explained that word from the mayor’s office was that it was time for LAHSA to “step up to the plate.”

“Not that we’re quite ready to do it yet,” Boutilier told the commissioners, “but the pressure to do it is right now. It’s what we were created to accomplish and now is the moment, in the next two weeks, to accomplish it.”

The commissioners voted unanimously in agreement.

Not all representatives of homeless agencies were comfortable with LAHSA suddenly taking a lead role. Martha Brown-Hicks, president of the Skid Row Development Corp., stood before the commissioners: “I am concerned with the fact that you are practically a new organization and it scares me that I’m going to have to come running to you to see if I can get $40,000 or $50,000 (for beds). . . . You’re much too new to be controlling the lives of people I try to feed and shelter in my territory.”

Ted Hayes, president of Justiceville/Homeless, USA, says LAHSA offers nothing new.

“I thought when LAHSA came into existence last year, that at last this city and county and the federal government were going to address those people on the streets, but as the process went forward, I saw money being given to the same people, for the non-visible, at-risk homeless population, people already in programs. They have never addressed those people on the streets other than through law enforcement, and that has been my concern all along.”

Racing against an April 7 deadline, LAHSA, working with city and county staff along with representatives of local homeless agencies, compiled a massive data base, conducted public meetings and sent to Washington a 1,200-page, 21-pound application for $50.7 million to fund 52 projects. In a separate portion of the competition, LAHSA also endorsed local housing authority applications for another $37.5 million.

Awards will be announced in June. If the LAHSA application is successful, the agency will have passed its first major test.

“If we fail,” says Commission Chairman Jim Conn, former mayor of Santa Monica, “our credibility as an agency will be decimated.”

Either way, LAHSA faces the uphill task of proving that government can consistently do more than create mountains of paperwork and miles of rules and regulations. It must prove that in the end it can effectively help up to 85,000 people in L.A. County find jobs and affordable homes.

One at a time.