Resources in short supply for homeless
Indigents being shunted to social service agencies
By Robert Howk
(Headline, page 1)
The names of some interviewed individuals have been changed out of respect for their requests for anonymity.
“The ravens are coming back to town,” Mandy observed as she dug another can of beer from her backpack. “That’s a sure sign winter is on the way.”
A pair of the sleek black birds, harbingers of the changing season, wheeled overhead as her husband Jim and a group of six other, mostly homeless and unemployed men and women, lingered around a picnic table on a sunny, late summer evening.
Entertainment for the gathering consisted of copious amounts of alcohol and a large, bearded man who calls himself ‘Red Zepplin’ belting out respectable versions of Grateful Dead songs. His buddy Larry beat out rhythms on Red’s guitar case.
At sunset the group disperses, some heading to illegal encampments in the woods of northeast Anchorage. Despite their constant bickering, Jim and Mandy stagger together back to their dilapidated, unheated campershell in a Mountain View backyard.
Jim gets a disability check from the Veterans Affairs and about $80 in food stamps each month, but the party will be over soon. He said his landlord has given them one month to clear out of the camper.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do. Try to find an apartment, maybe, but they cost so much and a lot of them don’t like our cat, Boobix. I don’t know,” he said.
He added that he has been living mostly on the streets in Anchorage for 34 years.
“We’ll figure something out.”
Thanks to a plethora of community services, they and others do not have to go without shelter or sustenance.
Safety nets
Mark Lessard is Emergency Services Coordinator for the Municipality of Anchorage’s Safe City Program. The program was launched several years ago with a primary focus on providing public safety information for transient visitors to Alaska’s largest city, particulary Alaska Native women new to town from Bush villages.
It has since evolved to address a variety of social ills.
“There are some real commonalities between homelessness, substance abuse and inter-personal violence such as child abuse and domestic violence,” he said.
Lessard pointed out that the Safe City Program is “pretty unique” to Anchorage in the way it helps coordinate information and data bases between numerous social service providers. There are other communities around the United States that have developed similar programs based on Anchorage’s experiences, he said.
Among other things, the office operates the Community Service Patrol that gets public inebriates off the streets for transport to the “sobering center” near the Anchorage city jail. He said much of the public’s perception of the homeless and street people is of the “typical single adult male. Those are what we call the visible homeless.”
But there is a fairly large segment of the dispossessed who are single-parent families, he noted.
“They’re not the ones who are standing on street corners or downtown. They are the ones who are precariously housed in a motel, or staying with friends house surfing.”
He said there are many entities in town helping to advance families away from dire circumstances.
Those include the Anchorage School District, AWAIC women’s shelter, and Clare House Shelter operated by Catholic Social Services.
Lessard said there are “plenty of food banks, plenty of places to eat and for people to stay. We haven’t seen many years where these facilities are operating at above capacity.”
More kids and families in need
The Child in Transition Homeless project of the Anchorage School District is operated under federal guidelines known as Title 1, and is more and more in demand, said Patricia O’Gorman, project coordinator.
“Last year we identified over 2,500 children and youths who were homeless at some point since July 1 2004 through July 2005,” she said.
“It’s a growing problem, and there are a variety of reasons for that. Part of it has to do with lack of affordable housing,” O’Gorman said. Alaska Housing Finance Corporation provides vouchers to assist families, but that takes time, she observed.
“Our goal is to identify homeless children and assist them with enrollment and attendance in school and with community resources, to help them be successful in school.” she said.
Janet Levin also works with the Child in Transition project, and she is worried about funding. “Many families are in pretty dire situations in terms of housing,” she said. There will be some state funding at the end of September, the first time state money has been available since January, she noted. “However, there is virtually no assistance for families with their move-in expenses or deposits. “I’ve never seen a school year start out like this, with no resources to turn to,” she said. The municipality programs won’t have money until January, she added. “Anybody else who is not being served by those programs now....it’s a really tough situation. They’re living in cars, or tents, or motels.
“My greatest fear is waking up to see a headline about a child being found frozen to death.”
Haven from the storm
A main site where homeless people can get help is the Brother Francis Shelter at 1021 E. 3rd Avenue.
Begun in 1980 by Brothers Dave and Bob and then- archbishop Francis Hurley of the local Catholic diocese, the shelter’s namesake is Saint Francis of Assisi, said Dewayne Harris, the shelter’s director of homeless and emergency services.
Until this year it was contained in a corrugated steel building that was a city vehicle maintenance facility. In May, they opened the doors to a brand new $4.2 million structure and demolished the old building.
It is operated by Catholic Social Services, which pays a $1-per-year lease to the municipality, and it houses an average of 130 people per night, he said. The shelter has an emergency capacity of 240 people, he added.
Harris said the population increases in winter months as people seek respite from the cold weather and seasonal employment tapers off.
There are “pretty basic” ground rules for those who need to stay at Brother Francis.
“A person has to be 18 years of age or older, be able to meet their own daily living needs and be able to function in a congregate shelter, and not be a danger to themself or to others” he explained. Illegal drug use and alcohol consumption is prohibited.
“We have a limited-stay policy of 30 days. If an individual needs to stay longer we can extend their time, if they are working on a plan to transition out of the shelter,” Harris pointed out. “We try to empower and counsel people to make choices, whether it’s getting into treatment or finding transitional or permanent housing.” The average length of stay for people there is about 20 days, he said, and in 2004 the shelter served more than 2,500 individuals.
“One of the messages that I like to give,” he said, “is that any one of us, in any given realm, can be just one or two paychecks away from needing our services. They are our brothers and sisters, our neighbors.”
Harris said one of the most challenging things is when people are frustrated, unable to find employment and affordable housing and those barriers continue to exist. “They may turn to other areas of solace such as drinking. So we really try to counsel folks to never give up, to keep trying.”
There is a weekly meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous held there and volunteers from Anchorage Community Health Services provide medical assistance, along with representatives from Providence Hospital’s family health service, he said.
45 percent of the shelter’s annual $600,000 operating budget comes from community support, Harris said.
Let’s eat
Directly across the parking lot from the Brother Francis shelter you can find Bean’s Cafe and Outreach Center, and a nutritious breakfast or lunch.
“We’re serving about 1,000 meals a day. 500 to the homeless and 500 to kids,” Jim Crockett, executive director of the cafe said.
“We deliver the meals to eleven different sites for Kid’s Cafe. We do the Boys and Girls clubs in Muldoon and Mountain View,” and nine other programs, he said.
“What we’re really trying to do is what we do best, and that’s cook. We can cook here and then distribute it out to the needy, kids and adults. Our idea with the kids is to get one step ahead of prevention, you know, before they get in the black hole called Bean’s Cafe.”
“Once a person has a little food in their stomach, then there’s a little more hope,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is take that hope and elevate it to help get them out of the homeless environment.”
Crockett said Bean’s is collaborating with Nine Star Enterprises to conduct after-hours training sessions to assist clients with G.E.D high-school equivalancy certificates. The cafe’s outreach program also works with the nursing school at University of Alaska Anchorage to help get medical treatment for clients, and two local attorneys do pro-bono work with people to help clear up any legal outstanding warrants people may have hanging over them.
Also, he said, Brian Anderson, the social services director at Beans, is trying to develop a local newspaper “written by street people and giving it a street people approach.”
An independent non-profit organization, Beans has an annual budget of approximately $3 million with $2 million of that coming in the form of in-kind contributions, including labor and supplies, Crockett said. Sixty-five volunteers are needed each day to operate the cafe, he noted.
Soup and sandwich
Another option for those in need is the Downtown Soup Kitchen, operated by manager Dan Rouggly and volunteers from the non-denominational Change Point Church.
Located off on the east edge of downtown Anchorage, the kitchen is a regular destination for street people, and anyone else who wants to stop in between noon and 1:30 p.m. weekdays.
“Last year we served about 90,000 cups of soup,” Rouggly said. At the first of the month, about 250 to 275 people come by daily. By month’s end when budgets are tight, it serves up to 400 a day.
The soup kitchen operates year-round and Rouggly said the number of visitors remains “pretty consistent,” even during the coldest months of mid-winter.
“The transients keep the numbers higher in summer when it might otherwise be lower, but in the winter it’s all regulars, pretty much,” he said.
“We do it all in the name of the Lord.”
Unhappy campers
It will be another couple of months before the deep dark winter weather sets in, and for many, a small tent and a sleeping bag is still home.
Street folks in Mountain View are well aware of who’s camping where, and many of them are breaking the law, at least on paper.
“On public property, or private property where there has been no permission given, it’s considered trespassing and technically it’s illegal and not allowed,”
said Lt. Paul Honeman, public affairs officer with the Anchorage Police Department.
Generally speaking, he said, APD has been “moderately aggressive,” in enforcing trespassing law, but not as aggressive as in past years when sweeps have been conducted to root out illegal campers.
“A lot of that is due to staffing and resources.” he said.
“I might have to go back to Barrow this winter,” said Shirley, a young Inupiaq woman who is living on the streets in Northeast Anchorage. “Being homeless here you never really know who your friends are. You think they’re a friend, but they will steal from you and hurt you,” she worries. In Barrow, she says, her family will take care of her.
For now, Jim and Mandy are not planning to move from the camper shell into a tent, but like the ravens who mate for life, they are planning on sticking together to get through another winter. “I’m gonna plead with the landlord and see if can’t talk him into another month’s rent.”
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