A Hobo Jungle with Class

To the well-to-do residents of the oceanside resort city of Santa Barbara, Calif., they are known as tree people, after Fig Tree Park, a place many of them call home. Palms outstretched, the scruffy men and women beg from pedestrians on the main shopping artery. They urinate in alleys, rummage for food in supermarket dumpsters, snooze on store stoops. Their beer cans and assorted flotsam dot the lush green parks. They are Santa Barbara's homeless, perhaps 2,000 displaced people in a population of 75,000. The city's mostly retired, wealthy, conservative Establishment, although resigned to their presence, is determined to contain their numbers in the prosperous town just 29 miles from Ronald Reagan's Rancho del Cielo.

The debate over the homeless came to the fore as a jury deliberated in a murder trial last week. David Kurtzman, 18, a brawny cadet at Northwestern Preparatory School in Santa Barbara, was accused (along with a pal, who will be tried later) of the knife murder of a homeless man whom they found sleeping in a park one night last August. The schoolmates are charged with stabbing Michael Stephenson, an unemployed house painter, 17 times, then slashing his throat. It was the second murder of a homeless person in Santa Barbara in nine months. Kurtzman admitted the killing, but defended himself by explaining that he had been looking for gang members who had harassed some fellow students. At week's end the jury had not reached a decision.

Homeless people have camped out in the Santa Barbara area since the Southern Pacific Railroad came to town in 1887. But never before have they seemed so omnipresent. Some attribute the worst of the problem to the wholesale release of patients in the 1960s. Without adequate halfway houses to care for them, the ill ended up on the streets. Others believe homelessness has been aggravated by unemployment, divorce and eviction; people sleep in the parks because they cannot afford the city's high-priced housing: two-bedroom apartments rarely rent for less than $800 a month, after two months' deposit.

Santa Barbara's civic leaders have taken aggressive measures to let the homeless know they are not wanted. In 1979, with camping in public already forbidden, the city outlawed sleeping outdoors after dark; a ban against drinking in public followed in 1983. A police task force set up to combat street crime has racked up 1,255 arrests for sleeping and camping violations in the past two years. While attempts to prohibit the eating of garbage have failed, some grocers deter hungry vagrants by sprinkling bleach on discarded food. Santa Barbara County election officials had been denying voting rights to people who did not have an address; three months ago, a state appeals court struck down the practice.

The city's moves against the homeless have not gone unchallenged. In 1984 some 30 homeless people marched on Reagan's ranch, and recent weeks have brought several sleep-ins at city hall. "The laws haven't been a deterrent," argues Attorney Willard Hastings, director of the Legal Defense Center, a local nonprofit legal-aid organization that was instrumental in fighting the voting-rights restriction. This month the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the city government to reply to the center's legal challenge to the sleeping ordinance. Churches have offered assistance to the homeless as well, and a few wealthy residents, like 79-year-old Oil Heiress Kit Tremaine, have provided funds. Said Tremaine: "The community has to realize that it's dealing with people and not sacks of garbage."

Saying that "the general public has its rights too," Mayor Sheila Lodge defends the city's laws against vagrants, and has resisted pressure to fund more shelters. "We don't want to become something we aren't," says Lodge. But Santa Barbara's persistent tree people have changed the town already.