Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Homeless shelters face challenges
Space becoming limited as virus cases rise and winter temperatures continue to fall.
PORTLAND, Ore. — After three years on the streets, Tiecha Vannoy and her boyfriend Chris Foss plan to weather the pandemic this winter in a small white “pod” with electricity, heat and room for two.
Portland this month assembled rows of the shelters, which resemble garden sheds, in three ad-hoc “villages” — part of an unprecedented effort unfolding in cold-weather cities nationwide to keep people without permanent homes safe as temperatures drop and coronavirus cases surge.
“We just get to stay in our little place. We don’t have to leave here unless we want to,” said Vannoy, wiping away tears as they moved into the shelter near a downtown train station.
The pandemic has caught homeless service providers in a crosscurrent: demand is high but their ability to provide services is constricted. Shelter operators who already cut capacity to meet social distance requirements face new stresses with winter looming. Coming in from the cold can now mean spending a night in a warehouse, an old Greyhound bus station, schools or an old jail.
And people experiencing homelessness face difficult choices. Many are hesitant to enter the reduced number of spaces available to escape the cold for fear of catching the virus.
“Those (are) folks who would under normal circumstances maybe come into a drop-in center to warm up, or go into the subway to warm up, or go into a McDonald’s to warm up — and just not having those options available to them. What then?” asked Giselle Routhier of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York City.
With more space needed, providers have gotten creative.
In Troy, New York, Joseph’s House and Shelter is renting 19 rooms in an old convent for a seasonal shelter. The Poverello Center in Missoula, Montana, cut its capacity by half in April and scrambled to add 150 socially distant beds at a new winter shelter in a warehouse. Portland opened new shelters in a former Greyhound bus station and an unused jail and is renting out 300 rooms at six motels in addition to the 100 pods.
Vannoy and Foss were terrified to stay in crowded shelters and worried about the safety of collecting used soda cans for change. Charities they’d relied on for hot lunches, free clothes and warm showers closed. At one point, Foss went a month without changing clothes. Now, they have a safe space.
“People just locked themselves in the house, I get it,” Foss said of the sudden dearth of services. “But it really made it dirty and nasty and you really had to put your own instincts for survival into high gear.”
Many localities are using federal CARES Act money to increase winter shelter options for people amid COVID-19 — and some say the solutions provide a glimpse of what would be possible with more consistent, long-term funding.
Portland is paying $1 million a month to rent the motel rooms for homeless people at high-risk of COVID complications. In Delaware, a former 192-room Sheraton Hotel purchased for $19.5 million by New Castle County for use as an emergency shelter recently opened.
“There’s something a little poetic about taking a pretty nice hotel and putting the most vulnerable individuals up in those hotels to see if we can transition them to something different,” said County Executive Matt Meyer.
In Ithaca, New York, advocates have expanded outreach to encampments and other places where people are sheltering.
When Jose Ortiz tested positive for the coronavirus last month, he was able to isolate at his elaborately crafted shelter in “The Jungle,” a patch of woods on the city’s outskirts where dozens of people settle in tents and more permanent structures. Advocates brought him food, water, a propane heater and cough drops as they kept tabs on him, said Deb Wilke, homeless crisis alleviation coordinator at Second Wind Cottages.
“This is my home, so this is where I want to be,” Ortiz said outside his camp, complete with a tarp-covered “tree house” built waist-high off the ground, “and they were pretty good at making sure that I had whatever I needed.”
The encampment is served by the Christian ministry Loaves & Fishes, which boxes up about 250 lunches or dinners a day for delivery around the area.
Still, despite masks and distancing, outbreaks have hobbled some operations.
An outbreak that started during Thanksgiving at the Union Gospel Mission in Portland eventually sickened 18 people in transitional housing. As a result, the organization temporarily closed its doors, stopped daily meal distribution, shut down its thrift shop and briefly shuttered another winter shelter. The mission has since rebounded and is preparing to serve more than 1,000 Christmas meals.
In Missoula, coronavirus outbreaks have sent one-third of The Poverello Center’s staff into quarantine twice already. Meanwhile, the motel purchased by the city for shelter is full nearly every day, said executive director Amy Allison Thompson.