Observer Highlights Need for More Shelter Beds

From the front page of the Charlotte Observer 9/24/07
by Tim Funk

As Charlotte's Emergency Winter Shelter closes its doors today to more than 30 homeless women, leaders from local social agencies and houses of worship plan to meet Tuesday about how to cope long-term with the growing number of women who have no place to sleep.
That includes Rochelle Alexander, 41: She moved here from Durham to stay with a cousin. When it didn't work out, she began bunking at the Emergency Winter Shelter on Statesville Road. But that's no longer an option: Starting next week, those beds are reserved for men.
Alexander, who will start working at a temp agency this week, also can't stay at the Salvation Army's 200-bed Center of Hope, the city's largest shelter for women and children. It's filled -- and then some, with 25 cots recently placed in the television room to handle some of the overflow.

So starting tonight, Alexander and the other women who'd been relying on the Emergency Winter Shelter will be farmed out to different churches for a week at a time until Thanksgiving. But only a dozen churches have come forward, meaning some weeks only one church will be available. That likely means the Salvation Army, which has rented the Emergency Winter Shelter as an overflow for women without children the last two summers, will have to turn away some newly arrived homeless women -- or squeeze in even more cots. It's an arrangement that makes Alexander and the others, ages 18 to 60, anxious. "I still feel like I'm in the street," she said. "I don't know where I'm going to lay my head. It's scary."

Tuesday's meeting at Covenant Presbyterian Church was called by Peter Safir -- Mecklenburg's homeless services director -- at the request of the Salvation Army. "This first session will be more brainstorming about what we can do to get more bed capacity," said Safir, who estimated that women and children now make up 40 to 45 percent of Mecklenburg County's 5,000 homeless persons. The continued growth in Charlotte's population will mean an increase in homeless women, says Deronda Metz, who's on the front lines as director of social services at the Salvation Army. She also cites a lack of affordable housing and a jump in the number of women who are homeless -- and stay so -- because of health problems. And many of the women on the streets are there because they've fled husbands or boyfriends who've beaten them. But the local battered women's shelter run by United Family Services only has 28 beds.

"We need about 200 more beds for domestic violence victims, which gets mixed in with this (homeless) population," said the Rev. Bill Jeffries, senior associate pastor of Providence United Methodist -- one of the three churches in line this week to feed and shelter the women who can no longer stay at the Emergency Winter Shelter, which is a men's shelter from October through April. Jeffries, a member of the Emergency Winter Shelter's board, would like to explore on Tuesday the idea of building an emergency winter shelter for women. He would also like to see more churches "step up" to provide a week of emergency shelter for women. About 100 local churches do participate in the Urban Ministry's "Room in the Inn" program, but that is limited to housing and feeding the homeless one night of each week.

Dale Mullennix, who heads the Urban Ministry, says local houses of worship do a lot for the homeless already. He'd like to see more urgency on the issue from local elected officials.
"Churches have a responsibility to help the less fortunate, but it's not their primary responsibility to figure out solutions," he said. "These (elected) folks sought responsibility for leadership of this community. Why aren't we hearing from them?" Whatever the solutions turn out to be, there's no denying the growing problem, says Mary Wilson, executive director of the Friendship Community Development Corp. -- sponsored by Friendship Missionary Baptist, another of the churches volunteering this week. "We're finding more and more women who've just had a change in life they weren't prepared for, some in their 50s and 60s who got divorced, lost jobs and are now homeless," she said. "These are people who could be our sister, cousin or daughter. They've fallen on hard times."