Homeless segregated in shelters
Staff denies discrimination, says wristband used to identify people with ‘special needs’
Shelby Hoogendyk says that when she, her husband and her 17-month-old son arrived at an emergency shelter as Hurricane Irma closed in, they were separated from others by yellow wristbands and told to stay in an area with other people like them — the homeless.
Sheriff’s deputies, she says, told them the wristbands were prompted by problems that arose among homeless people at the shelter during Hurricane Matthew a year earlier.
“We were treated like we were guilty criminals,” Hoogendyk says.
In the storm’s wake, homeless people and their advocates are complaining that some of them were turned away, segregated from the others, denied cots and food, deprived of medication refills and doctors’ visits, or otherwise ill-treated during the evacuation. Many of the complaints have been blamed on misunderstandings, the sheer magnitude of the disaster, the crush of people needing shelter immediately or inadequate state and local emergency planning.
All told, a record 72,000 Floridians sought refuge from the hurricane in early September at nearly 400 shelters. The response varied widely by county.
In Miami, more than 700 homeless Helen Haynes reads at a special needs shelter at Florida International University in Miami, Fla.
were picked up and taken to shelters. In Collier County, the sheriff sent officers into homeless encampments in the woods to bring people to a shelter. But in Polk County, Sheriff Grady Judd warned that any evacuees with warrants against them and all sex offenders seeking shelter would be taken to jail. And in Volusia County, some officials were accused of turning homeless evacuees away from shelters without explanation.
“Communities were all dealing with the fallout of not having very
comprehensive planning in place to deal with this population,” said Kirsten Anderson, litigation director at Southern Legal Counsel, a non-profit public interest law firm in Florida.
She said if a shelter discriminated against people based on their economic status, it could be a violation of federal law that protects people in federal disaster zones.
In Hoogendyk’s case, St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar and school officials who ran the shelter at Pedro Menendez High vigorously denied segregating the homeless, saying the yellow wristbands were simply used to identify people with “special needs” — substance abuse problems, mental illness or other “frailties” — who needed to be closer to the bathrooms. But Hoogendyk said neither she nor her husband claimed any special needs when they checked in. Other homeless people said they, too, were automatically issued the yellow wristbands, while others around them got blue or other colours denoting them as part of the “general population.”
Gary Usry, a 57-year-old homeless man who arrived at the same St. Augustine shelter, said the first night was rough.
“We were left on concrete floor overnight. No blanket, no nothing,” he said. Usry said a few cots were provided to people with wristbands of other colours, but not to any of the homeless in his yellow-band section. Usry said he felt “insulted, demeaned.”
While insisting homeless people were not singled out, the sheriff also said that the homeless population has “a disproportionate representation of those with mental illness, substance abuse problems and, quite frankly, those with criminal backgrounds.”
Sheriff’s spokesman Cmdr. Chuck Mulligan said that last year, during Hurricane Matthew, there were numerous arguments, fights and instances of drunkenness among homeless people at the shelter.