Helped off the streets

Friday, Nov. 18, 2005 | 7:55 a.m.

Marlon Pfaff was looking for cottage cheese Thursday at the 99 Cents store on Charleston Boulevard.

"It's weird the kinds of things you want that you can't get on the street," the 59-year-old Vietnam-era veteran said.

Accompanied by outreach workers who recently began helping homeless people on Las Vegas' streets courtesy of a first-ever appropriation from the state Legislature, Pfaff was shopping for the first time in years.

Pfaff is in his third week of living in a downtown Las Vegas room that is twice the size of his bed after two years on the streets. So it is unclear whether he will be able to overcome failing health -- what people working with him feel may be undiagnosed mental illness -- and a strong taste for beer.

A morning spent with some of the homeless made it clear that Pfaff's case is not uncommon. Addictions, psychiatric disorders and an ever-shrinking number of affordable apartments pose daunting challenges to a recently recruited small army of trained advocates.

The $3.1-million project is led by HELP of Southern Nevada, working with six other agencies. The program tries to get housing for the hardest of the hardcore homeless -- those who have been on the streets the longest, spiraling toward self-destruction while bleeding the taxpayer-funded system.

Specifically, it targets people such as Dana Lee Corley, a tall, gangly, surprisingly good-humored man who's been sleeping in alleys for more than two years.

When the white van that U.S. Vets uses for the project pulled up to Circle Park in Huntridge on Thursday, Corley broke into a smile and hugged Kelly Robson, long-term housing case manager for HELP.

Robson rode in the van with Deon Derby and Elizabeth Edmonson, outreach workers for U.S. Vets.

Robson knew Corley from his attempt to kick crack cocaine at the WestCare treatment center, where she worked before joining HELP's new project.

Corley ran through a tangled tale of trying to resolve for the umpteenth time the problems caused by having the last name of Moore on his birth certificate but the last name of his stepfather, Corley, on his Social Security card. Having two last names has made it impossible, he says, to reach his real goal -- a picture ID.

"They asked me, 'Which one are you?' " Corley said. "I said, 'I'm both.' "

The lack of a picture ID made it difficult for him to get work and to get off the streets, where temperatures have been dropping.

But he also admitted that the real problem was the crack, which was responsible for him losing his identification in the first place when he hit Las Vegas a few years ago.

Confronting the ID obstacle, Robson, almost by reflex, made a move that occurred several times throughout the day. She called Linda Lera-Randle El, founder of Straight From the Streets, an organization that tries to get the chronically homeless into housing and then tackles their other problems.

Lera-Randle El decided to participate in the new program with the hope that it could make a difference, convinced that its flexible rules and action-oriented focus would outweigh her reservations about accepting government money.

On the cell phone with Robson, Lera-Randle El told her that cheap motels would not accept Corley without ID. Robson then called some privately owned rooming houses, but had no luck there.

That spawned a new strategy, getting a picture ID from a check-cashing store.

Meanwhile, Corley described the hell his life had become:

His jail time was an example of how much a chronically homeless person can cost taxpayers, Robson said.

It is cheaper to pay for housing and then "intensively hold his hand" while getting him help with his addictions and mental illness, with the goal of getting him back to work and able to support himself, she said.

A Clark County Social Service study showed, for example, that 113 of the most hardcore of a population of 3,244 homeless clients had used 55 percent of public resources aimed at helping the homeless during a three-year period.

And on Thursday, as 1:30 p.m. approached, the day still sunny, Edmonson suggested that the three get moving to find ID for Corley and others who seemed likely candidates for the program.

"Daylight's burning and we should go get them," she said.

For Corley and those trying to help him, the day ended with a temporary success. A motel agreed to let him stay for the next month -- in a room registered under Lera-Randle El's name.

But Robson tried to be clear-headed about the unresolved challenge -- finding a place for the many other Corleys to live.

"That's one of the biggest, overlying obstacles in this valley -- finding the housing," she said.

The people in the different agencies working in the project are trying to pool information about motels and apartments willing to work with the amount of rent the program can pay -- up to about $#036;600 a month -- and the types of clients they are working with -- fragile, troubled people.

So far, the program has housed about 16 people in less than a month, with dozens more in the pipeline, according to JoAnn Lujan, HELP's social services director. In working on such challenging cases, Robson said, one must be prepared to take one step forward and another back -- and then try to move forward again.

"Do I think we're going to lose some people? Of course," she said. "We'll lose some and then pick them back up again. But I think this will work."

Timothy Pratt can be reached at 259-8828 or at timothy@lasvegasun.com.