Across the Great Divide

Shelter Report: From Supreme Court to the Scrap Yards.

As a rule, I don't get into political discussions with guests at the Day Center.

First reason: They are guests, and they don't come there to hear what I think about the issues of the day.

Second reason: I have a tendency to call bullshit regardless of who's spouting it, and they are guests.

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Today, in addition to the constitutionality of a individual mandate, the court's vote will determine such issues as whether the federal government can require states to cover more of the uninsured under Medicaid.

A number of our Day Center guests benefit from Supplemental Social Security, Veteran's Administration hospitals and Medicaid. It would seem they might support expansion of federal programs that benefit the poor.

To be charitable, not everyone around here has thought about who administers their health care or how it is funded. The whole idea of pooled risk — whether through private insurance or a public program — is a bit arcane for the people I talked to. Much clearer: the idea government can't tell them what to do.

It's really too complicated for me to get into all the Fox News-infused health care discussions I had this week, but I will say this. The idea that voter ID laws will disenfranchise potential Obama voters may be off base, based on my small sample.

*****

Each week, I watch men and women sign in for showers. In my unscientific observation, more of the homeless are left-handed compared to the general population, just as with U.S. presidents.

*****

One of our regulars prefaced a remark about his recurring troubles with the law this way: "My real parents, my foster parents and my step parents told me..."

You can't work with the homeless and talk only of personal responsibility. So many of the people I meet have come from unstable or abusive home situations.

*****

David is a wiry guy who hauls a trailer behind his bike. Since I last saw him, he's reworked the Burley platform to a shopping cart basket that allows him to haul more cargo.

He made the front page of the local paper awhile back for his enterprise. He's cleaning up the river bank and selling his booty to local scrap dealers. 

I asked him if he'd salvaged anything weird.

He answered in the terms of a businessman, talking about volume. For the heavy stuff, he has a hand winch that he chains to a tree. The heaviest item he'd cranked out weighed 500 pounds, and when he took it to the scrap yard, they were amazed he hadn't blown his tires.

*****

The homeless have an interesting relationship with scrap dealers.

First, the homeless scavenge metals and bring them in for sale.

Second, the homeless may be a source of illegally harvested materials — brass from irrigation lines; copper from wire or plumbing; and other metal stripped from bleachers, cars, sculptures, you name it. 

Third, the homeless tend to occupy the same fringe lands left to junk yards. They can be a source of labor or irritation.

I heard about a woman and her children who lived on property owned by one of the prominent scrap dealers. They were staying in a cargo compartment stored across the river from his business.

One day, the kids yelled to their mother: "Mr. Van Gundy's throwing rocks at us!"

She went outside and saw the scrap dealer on the hill above, tossing projectiles toward their shelter.

Only later did she discover that each rock was wrapped with a twenty-dollar bill.

Shelter Report: Eye Contact.

I know Mike's gait from a block away. Darting like a wary shorebird he picks his way around the irregular traffic in the Chick-fil-A parking lot.

He's moved on across the intersection toward Lowe's and WalMart before I overtake him, so I turn on my route without speaking.

What was I going to say, anyway? Hi, Mike, how's it going? He's homeless, for Christ's sake.

On Wednesday I cross the river bridge and see Rick heading toward me. He's so grateful at the Day Center. Quiet, hangdog, even. We connect at some level. I try to let him know I know he exists and he gives thanks for my being there. A communion of a sorts. I try, without saying it, to tell him not to die. I try, without saying it, to tell him he matters.

I try not to overinflate my importance. All I'm doing is admitting this man to the shower room.

And here he comes on the narrow passage, me on my bike, Rick walking. I recognize him from far away. He doesn't look up. On the street, eye contact can be a challenge, an admission of guilt. We slip past each other as I grant him his privacy.

It's been three years since I started volunteering at the Day Center in Grand Junction. You'd think that would be enough, even part-time, for the job to get old. After all, most of what I do is sit on a stool, calling people when it's their turn to shower and then breaking out the cleaning supplies.

There's more to it, of course, and each week I discover something new.

One of the first Day Center posts concerned my lack of a name tag, yet I never got around to wearing one until this year. I'd made a joke about not being around enough to rate my own name tag—they're digitally engraved plastic with a magnetic back—and in response, Joey the crew coordinator covered someone else's badge with masking tape and handed it over.

Almost immediately I noticed that guests related to me differently. It wasn't that my name was secret before, but now it was easily accessible.

Guests sign in every day just to get in the door. Then they sign up for showers and for laundry, too. This created a subtle assymmetry in which I had the power to summon them by name, but they couldn't address me in a familiar way.

I was a capo, I guess.

This small change made me easier to approach and many people took the opportunity. Now, when I greet them by name, they can do the same. And they do. They use my name. They thank me by name. They're reading it off the badge, but they are making the effort to connect. Some of them may even know my name.

I wish it were the same on the street.

From a block away, I can pick out Mike and Rick and Kelvin and Carl and Melissa and Susan and Erin and Mitch and Linda and Tracy and so many more.

I don't need them to pick me out, but I wish they would raise their eyes up. I wish they didn't have to slink past. I wish I didn't need a name tag.

Shelter Report: Rooting for Redemption.

You remember Paco. He was the guy headed to Ohio to donate a kidney for his sister. Then he was the guy who hadn't left yet because he'd been jailed for an old warrant.

Today he was back at the Day Center. It should have been clear all along that Paco was never going anywhere.

The doctors in Ohio finally figured out what everyone here already knew. As Paco put it, his drawl exaggerated, "I indulge a bit too much."

In a few weeks, he's gone from playing the caring brother with the life-saving tissue match to the black sheep with fuck-up embedded in his DNA. It's hard to tell from his shrug if he feels he let his sister down. On the surface, he seems relieved, but not about avoiding the surgery. I wonder if contemplating this good thing challenged him to reconsider his entire sense of worth. If he made this sacrifice, then would people expect him to continue as a solid citizen? What would he be called upon to do next? Now excused but able to take credit for his willingness, he can go back to being the old Paco—genial, even-tempered and floating beyond the bounds of responsibility.

I can't know this, probably have no business even speculating about him, but you can't can't work here and not root for the redemption of everyone who walks through the door. And when it doesn't quite work out that way, you can't allow yourself to feel disappointment. It doesn't help our guests to come here and run into more people they've let down.

*****

We found Victor. 

A call finally came back from the hospital where we was, and he had not lost his foot after all. 

Since family ties get so stressed by homelessness, it seems like a good sign that his kids are coming to take him back to Delta. 

*****

Ron and Don came in today, riding motorcycles. I hadn't seen the twins for a year, not since they were featured in a story on panhandling by a local TV station. They weren't very truthful the first time the reporter came around, which didn't help their credibility the next time he saw them and suggested they were raising money under false pretenses.

In the video, Ron maintained he wanted to work, but would rather live on the street than take a $6-an-hour job to put gas in their camper generator. Don fretted about losing coverage for his bi-polar meds. 

Now Ron is working again and Don is hanging out at home. They both looked pretty good, and that may be why they decided to come by today.

But as I've seen again and again, appearances here don't mean much from one week to the next.

***** 

Last week's tale of the skunk passing through Robert's camp became a parable of homelessness for me. I thought all week about the man who smelled the skunk coming but couldn't shrink from it, so he got to know it. One outcast comforted another as fear gave way to curiosity and then acceptance. 

I was looking forward to seeing Robert again, able to greet him now as an acquaintance. 

He came late, after the showers and the laundry had shut down and the coffee pot was down to the dregs. Most guests had left and I was mopping the shower room floors. He was red faced and slow, like any movement was painful.

He asked if he was in the way, if he was bothering us, and I said, no, he was why we were here. He moved over to make a phone call and then I thought he'd left until he approached me at the shower room door.

Can you help me out, Charlie?

I knew what he wanted, but I asked anyway: What kind of help?

I'm out of money. Have you got four bucks for cigarettes?

This was the first time I'd been asked directly for money in the Day Center. I wanted to help him, of course. His story was worth more than four bucks to me, but the money wouldn't help, whether it went to cigarettes or a bottle.

I can't, I said. We're not supposed to give people money in here.

Okay, I understand. Where can you? I can meet you in the back. Or outside. I don't have anything.

I give my time here. That's how I try to help everyone. I can't play favorites and give you money, I'm sorry.

Once I gave in to my kinder impulses, the requests wouldn't stop. I'd become a cash machine, where guilt pushed the buttons.

Maybe Robert was looking forward to seeing me, too.

Shelter Report: And Finally the Smell Goes Away, Too.

On my way into town, I take a bike path that loops under both ends of a bridge over the Colorado River.

A solitary man has been spending nights under the east end all winter, buried in a sleeping bag so only the cap on top of his head is visible. A few days ago when I passed by at noon, he was still there and I had to resist the urge to check if he was alive.

His spot is more exposed than the one under the west end I wrote about here. It's much further below the sheltering span and right next to a well-traveled bike path. In the photo, you can see the slightly compacted spot near the fence and his ground cover rolled up and concealed just below the drop to the river bank.

A week ago the bridge reeked of skunk. The smell hit me first as I passed underneath, and the odor remained strong all the way across the river. I couldn't help but think of the man sleeping there, breathing it in all night.

Because he burrowed so deeply, I never saw the man's face when I rode by, but eventually I was able to connect him to the red bicycle he locked to the fence overnight.

I'd seen him at the Day Center before, but didn't know him. He had the florid, phyllo dough skin of a hard drinker and a history of misadventure showed in the tectonics of his face. He kept to himself, slumped in a chair against the wall, far from my station. He usually seemed to be thawing and simultaneously surfacing from a hangover. He didn't make eye contact, and all the other signs said No Trespassing, so I left him alone.

But today after a warm night, he seemed more animated. I heard someone call him Robert. He was at the table nearby, explaining the laws of algebra to Charley, who has having trouble preparing for the math portion of his GED exam.

When I got the chance, I asked Robert if the skunk smell had bugged him.

He didn't recall it being bad. He said there was a skunk that traveled along the fence every night and passed right next to him.

I can't run when I smell it coming, so I just freeze, he said. It's friendly, like a cat. It'll come right up to my face and sniff my nose. It never gives me any trouble.

I told him a car had hit a skunk on the bridge right above him just last week. Now it's just a matted black lump, with no odor at all.

I wondered why it hadn't been by, he said. That's sad, isn't it?

It is.

Shelter Report: Homeless Say Goodbye to the Point.

As spring turned to summer in 2010, three Grand Junction police officers visited a homeless encampment called the Point in search of a copper wire theft suspect.

A railroad trestle provided residents easy but illegal access to the Point. The police, though, parked high above the tracks and descended the steep bluff sheltering the Point and made their way around a bare mound that hid the wooded camp from the downtown side of the river.

What happened next was the beginning of the end of the Point as a decades-old homeless haven.

The cops cut down clotheslines and over-hanging tarps, slashed tents and tossed their contents, and flattened bike tires before climbing back up to their squad cars. Their reports gave no hint of how they'd treated what one officer later called "abandonded property."

Today, this flat triangle of land at the junction of the Gunnison and Colorado Rivers is scraped bare of all settlement. Tents, furniture, camp toilets, generators and even CD players and TVs are gone. Fire circles have been scattered. Pallets, propane tanks, porch swings and plastic water barrrels have joined shopping carts, space heaters, sneakers and car seats in dumpsters and recycling bins.

Scrap wood and other waste that wasn't hauled up the bluff was burned in pits where residents used to warm themselves during the winter.

Only flattened footprints of the shelters remain in the barren earth. Before long, there will be no trace of human habitation.

With the spring melt, the dog turds at the end of the beach will wash downstream and the waters around the Point will belong to the kayakers who once coexisted with the unhoused residents—except when the camp pit bulls waded into the shallows after them. 

The dozen or more men, women and dogs who lived here have already dispersed to shelters, other towns or down river, as did others before them. And later this month, Union Pacific Railroad will begin work to make the Point inaccessible and uninhabitable from this day forward.

But there's something I've held back from this picture.

The cops who slashed the tents were fired. The new Police Chief replaced the damaged property and decided his administration would do things differently. He advanced a plan to help the town's hundreds of chronic homeless without making the city more of a destination for transients in search of a friendly situation.

The department established a Homeless Outreach Team (HOT Team) modeled on successful efforts elsewhere in Colorado to reduce policing calls related to the homeless, who account for a disproportionate expenditure of public resources.

The HOT Team focused on connecting people with other resources in the community instead of busting them for warrants outstanding from past offenses. They built relationships, and though they never stopped being cops, their first priority was to serve, whether that meant getting a gallon-a-day drunk into rehab or helping a mentally disabled woman find safe housing.

The street cops added an important link to the soup kitchen, the shelter, the library, the day center, the housing agency, the VA, churches, treatment facilities and community clinics that all shared the goal of reducing homelessness and the pain and pathologies that accompany it.

So when I joined the other volunteers clearing the Point last weekend, I was not part of an eviction proceeding but of a celebration—of an important passage. Some of the people who'd lived there were part of the cleanup as were staff from the homeless shelter, a humanist organization, some religious folks, a great group of college kids and railroad workers.

 The transition off the Point has been relatively trouble-free, but it's not quite as rosy as stories from the very engaged local news media might lead you to believe. Mark Hirschberg, a widely interviewed Point resident, was one whose tent was cut two years ago. He's now staying at the shelter and is volunteering there and at the soup kitchen. But he also plans to move back to the river bottom as soon as the weather warms up. 

Some people love the river and hate walls.

The town always had uneasy relations with the homeless. On one side, a very generous and supportive charitable sector has built a safety net that serves local homeless and attracts others from less benign communities. On the other side, residents fret that the visible begging, petty crime and occupation of several city parks is diminishing quality of life for everyone else. See the comments on this story for a flavor.

That divide will remain in this politically conservative county. But there's no question there are lessons to be learned here about how private charities, government agencies, the media and other community institutions can work together to end homelessness.

Perhaps most striking—a few days after I joined college football players hefting mattresses, plywood and plastic sheeting up that bluff—is that no politicians made big pronouncements about ending homelessness, one way or the other. Political posturing was absent.

People just showed up and did what was needed. And instead of two days of work, we finished virtually everything by noon.

Two former denizens of the Point say goodbye.

Shelter Report: Who Counts Among the Homeless?

This month, local homeless advocates are doing a survey in Grand Junction as part of a nationwide effort to identify vulnerable individuals and prioritize them for housing. Volunteers for the Vulnerability Index Survey will reach out to people on the street and ask them 45 questions about health status, institutional history (jail, prison, foster care, hospital and military), length of homelessness, patterns of shelter use, healthcare and income sources.

The survey seeks to identify vulnerable individuals as well as build a composite picture of a community's homeless population. The idea is that people who have more markers* indicating mortality risk should receive more immediate assistance.

This is the first year the city will participate in the annual effort. It will be conducted by the local coalition for the homeless, which includes most of the institutions that address homelessness here — from the shelters and soup kitchens to the library, police department and VA.

While I think this is a good effort, I can see why some are suspicious and may resist questions about mental health, substance abuse, sources of income, etc. Attaching their names and faces to the answers may facilitate help, but it can also give the impression a dossier is being compiled. 

And believe me, many homeless people feel targeted already. I saw one of them in the library today. Mike frequently helps me with cleaning at the Day Center. He was returning two statute books he'd studied to inform his ongoing battle over being hassled for being on the street with a pack on his back.

For people who are trying to get back into housing, the tradeoff between privacy and help is probably a good one. But for many among the chronic homeless who simply don't feel comfortable in tight quarters — and who may have outstanding warrants, a drug problem or some other part of their past they're trying to escape — a five-page, face-to-face survey may feel like more of what Mike meets on the street each day.

So far, I haven't found a national compilation of past survey results. Though each participating locality asks the same questions, they report to their communities in slightly different formats and may omit some data.

Nevertheless, I've looked at reports from Portland, Hartford, Nashville and Charlotte. While the populations vary, a few points stand out:

The percentage of homeless veterans is high relative to their 7% portion of the population, ranging from 30% in Nashville to 14% in Hartford.

Most have been jailed. In Portland, 80% reported spending jail time and 30% have been in prison. They've also been victims. 45% of those reporting in Portland said they'd been a victim of a violent attack since becoming homeless.

Close to half are medically vulnerable. Both Portland and Charlotte had 47% of their populations who reported at least one of the eight high risk factors. In Portland, more than a third of those surveyed had a chronic medical condition co-occuring with psychiatic and substance abuse issues. Hartford reported 25% had a tri-diagnosis, and 93% "reported or were observed to be suffering from mental illness or substance abuse problems."

Few have health insurance. The rates of the uninsured ranged from 63% (Portland) to 74% (Charlotte). Not surprisingly, then, the homeless are frequent users of emergency room medical services. (Hartford reported 16% in 2011, which is close to the national rate for the uninsured. I don't know what accounts for the difference.)

Despite the stereotype, most don't panhandle. Hartford broke out sources of income, which I've converted to percentages of those responding.

• Food stamps: 66%
• Social Security Benefits of some sort: 20%
• Working “off the books”: 18%
• Working “on the books”: 17%
• Public Assistance: 17%
• Recycling: 7.5%
• Panhandling: 4%

• No income: 10%

Of course, anyone's free to decline, but I hope the survey gets good participation. It'll be interesting to see how our smaller community stacks up against these cities. And maybe someone who hasn't yet gotten help will find what they need.

If homeless people are going to count in our communities, it helps if they're counted,

_____________

* The eight Vulnerability Index risk markers are:

 

More than three hospitalizations or emergency room visits in a year

More than three emergency room visits in the previous three months

Aged 60 or older

Cirrhosis of the liver

End-stage renal disease

History of frostbite, immersion foot, or hypothermia

HIV/AIDS

Tri-morbidity: co-occurring psychiatric, substance abuse, and chronic medical conditions

 

Four Years Ago

I wondered what I was blogging about on leap day exactly four years ago, when I posted just about every day.

It wasn't about homelessness.