STUDY: MORE WITHOUT HOMES KIDS NEARLY HALF OF LOCAL HOMELESS.

Byline: Patricia Farrell Aidem Staff Writer

SANTA CLARITA - They checked in cars parked on city streets night after night, they looked under bridges that cross Santa Clarita's miles of dry riverbeds and they walked along the secluded areas behind shopping centers.

What they found was that in affluent Santa Clarita, where new half-million-dollar homes sell faster than they can be built, was that more and more families have no place to call home.

``Anywhere you can find 'shelter' was checked,'' said Steven K. Peeples, spokesman for the nonprofit Santa Clarita Community Development Corp., which runs the city's seasonal homeless shelter.

``What was remarkable about the findings was that homeless or near- homeless people in the Santa Clarita Valley included far more families and children than anyone had known or understood before.''

A survey by a City Council-appointed task force on homelessness that culminated in an eight-page study found that 175 homeless people live in Santa Clarita, nearly half of them children.

More troubling were those who are a step away from losing their homes - 1,641 in a given week - fell in the ``at-risk'' category, according to the data compiled by Joe Colletti of the Institute for Urban Research and Development. The measure for the ``at-risk'' households was that the family was one paycheck away from homelessness. Of the total, 58 percent were children.

``It's pretty critical now,'' Peeples said. ``We know what need is out there and our approach is kind of evolving to meet those needs.

``We're working on further developing the family aid program, trying to do more outreach to reach those families with kids to check in with us. There is a kind of a renewed effort based on this information to help families with kids, single moms with kids, families whose principal breadwinner has lost his or her job for whatever reason.''

The community development corporation will open its shelter Nov. 23 in temporary buildings near the Via Princessa Metrolink station in Canyon Country. It will stay open as long as the nights are winter-cold.

It is the sixth year the group, formed by a coalition of local churches, has run the shelter. Armed with its new statistics that show a growing need to house children, the corporation is looking at its options because its current facilities are not appropriate for youngsters. Typically, vouchers to local motels are distributed to homeless people with children. But there are so many families with kids anticipated this year, the group is trying to raise money to expand its program.

The task force conducted its count March 11-15, and the numbers were correlated and published over the summer. Identification codes were assigned to those questioned to ensure they were counted just once.

The survey also found that of the adults, 60 percent of those currently homeless are men, and 60 percent of those at risk of becoming homeless are women.

Ethnicities, however, better matched the overall population. Seventy percent were white; 14 percent, Latino; 9 percent, African-American; and 2 percent each Asian and American Indian.

Nearly two-thirds of the homeless adult population was 30 to 49, while those at risk of becoming homeless were much younger, falling in the 18-to-29 age range.