Havens for Homeless Facing More Than They Can Handle

ST. LOUIS —  Every night in this city, homeless men and women knock on shelter doors, desperate for a place to sleep, desperate for a bed for their babies. More than half are turned away.

Mothers and fathers line up outside food pantries in the cold, hoping for a box of groceries. They get a small bag: macaroni, cereal, peanut butter. Enough for a few days, if they’re sparing.

Every day, the need grows. More are homeless. More are hungry. “We are not able to keep up,” said Bill Siedhoff, the city’s director of human services.

His colleagues across America echo that assessment, with alarm.

The nation’s mayors reported last week that demand for emergency shelter and food has soared over the past year as the economy has stagnated. Housing costs continue to rise faster than incomes. And increasingly, even working parents find themselves unable to pay the rent and still feed their families.

In St. Louis, the crisis is especially acute: Requests for shelter are up 64% -- the biggest jump in the country. More than 43,000 people seek food handouts every week. “It’s overwhelming,” said the Rev. Larry Rice, who runs a downtown shelter. “People are coming to us saying, ‘We’re cold.’ ”

“I had nowhere to go. Just nowhere to go,” said one 31-year-old mother who sought shelter with the Salvation Army here last month.

She earns $9 an hour at a full-time job she’s held for years. But she cares for her four children and her 2-year-old grandson. After she and her husband separated, she tried for more than a year to hold on to their apartment. The rent ate half her income. The bills piled up, unpaid. She couldn’t make it.

She was humiliated, and scared. But she knew where to go. She works as a social services counselor -- helping needy families find emergency services. She has many clients. She now knows why.

Across the nation, requests for food and shelter jumped 19% this year -- among the steepest hikes in a decade, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Even as need soars, however, both public and private agencies are finding their resources severely pinched.

Many charities report that donations are down. The Salvation Army’s annual fund-raising campaign, for instance, is running more than $400,000 behind last year’s collection in the St. Louis region. Meanwhile, state after state is faced with immense budget gaps; they are cutting back social services, not pouring more money into homeless shelters.

The result: Nearly two-thirds of the 25 cities surveyed in the mayors’ report have had to cut back their grocery handouts, rationing food to ensure that every needy family got at least a little to eat. Half report that they cannot provide enough food to the hungry.

“We give them just enough to survive,” said Pearl Willis, who distributes groceries at a St. Louis church.

Though they have tried to expand capacity by adding more beds -- or, sometimes, floor mats -- many cities report that their shelters are overflowing. Fully one-third of the homeless families who seek emergency shelter in Los Angeles are sent back out to the streets. One shelter in Nashville reports that it has to turn down half a dozen families each day.

“These are not simply statistics,” Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell said. “These are real people who are hungry and homeless.”

As despair washes over city after city, St. Louis is facing especially hard times. This struggling city of 348,000 on the Mississippi River has lost thousands of manufacturing, telecommunications and transportation jobs in the past year, including big cutbacks at American Airlines and Boeing Co. The unemployment rate is stuck at 8.2%, well above the national average.

Last year, officials handled 3,800 requests for shelter. This year, they expect to get close to 6,000 requests. Only 42% will be granted. The other men and women, even children, will have to fend for themselves, doubling up with friends, huddling in their cars, or camping out on the streets.

Bill Siedhoff begs for more federal aid to address the overwhelming need.

“We need help,” he says.

But Philip Mangano, director of the federal Interagency Council on Homelessness, can promise only a “modest increase” in next year’s budget -- a proposed hike of $75 million, spread among a dozen programs that target homelessness. President Bush is also requesting additional funds to help teens in foster care and newly released convicts move into independent housing so they don’t end up on the streets.

Mangano remains confident that even without a huge new investment, the nation will be able to meet the president’s goal of ending chronic homelessness within a decade.

Homeless mom Toni Woods has a much more modest goal: getting her family an apartment by the spring.

Woods, 26, abandoned her rental house last year when she learned that her twin toddlers had lead poisoning from the flaking paint. She moved in with one relative, then another, but the bedrooms were too crowded, the life too chaotic. She couldn’t save up enough money for a security deposit on a new home from her part-time job as a sales associate, at $6.50 an hour.

So last week, she moved into a Salvation Army family shelter with her twins and her 10-year-old daughter, their clothes neatly packed in orange plastic tubs. Her family shares a small private room with two bunk beds -- one now strewn with stuffed animals donated for the twins’ Christmas.

Woods is permitted to stay in the shelter for 120 days. That means she has four months to get on her feet again.

Her oldest daughter, Onnica, can’t wait.

Onnica can’t practice her dance moves at the shelter. There’s no room. She can’t play her music, either. She might annoy the other guests. There’s no desk for her to spread out her homework. There’s no kitchen for her to cook up her famous pickles sprinkled with Kool-Aid powder. Worst of all, she can’t invite her best friend over to trade manicures.

“I miss that,” Onnica said, her voice low. She’s ashamed to tell her friend she’s moved into a shelter. “It’s not good,” she said. She won’t look up.