On any given night, more women and kids are seeking emergency shelter or even living on the streets of Atlanta. In a couple of months, as winter sets in, there could be a lot more.
There are two primary reasons. The Gateway Center — the city of Atlanta’s answer to alleviating the homeless problem — quit taking women and kids in its emergency shelter last summer. And the city’s largest shelter, at Peachtree and Pine streets, could close if it loses a lawsuit set to go to trial in November.
Advocates say that homeless women present different problems than homeless men, who still make up a large majority of the people living on metro Atlanta’s streets or in shelters. While addictions to alcohol and drugs are responsible for many of the homeless men, the weak economy and health issues bear the blame for many of the displaced women and children on the streets or in shelters.
“The economy definitely had a big impact on the increased number of women with children,” said Bruce Deel, executive director at the faith-based City of Refuge, which offers transitional housing for 140 women and about 80 to 100 kids and programs to help them move to permanent housing. “The number of women and children is as high as it has been since I’ve been doing this. A lot of the women with children were moms who were working hard, but when they lost their job, they were living week to week.”
Deel said the beds for homeless women in Atlanta were limited, especially for ones who did not have an addiction or mental health problems. Besides City of Refuge, My Sister’s House has 264 beds — many of them dedicated to treatment programs — and there are a handful of smaller programs. Many of the women might eventually qualify for federal housing vouchers, but it a laborious process and generally has a waiting list for new applicants, he said.
The number of homeless people in metro Atlanta — the vast majority of them in downtown Atlanta and the southwestern part of the city — has proved to be an intractable problem for decades, with a barely noticeable change despite millions of dollars spent over the past 10 years to move them toward permanent housing.
For instance, in the annual homeless count in Fulton and DeKalb counties in 2003, there were 2,304 people living outside and an additional 4,253 living in transitional housing and in shelters. This year, the numbers were not that different, with 2,077 people living outside and 4,587 in transitional housing or shelters. They included 351 children ages 17 and under living in shelters, and an additional 34 of the streets with 15 mothers.
“It’s been de ja vu,” said Paul Bolster, who headed up homeless issues for the United Way when Atlanta launched an initiative to substantially reduce the problem.
Ebony Wallace lost her job at a fast-food restaurant two years ago when she was eight months pregnant. Since then it has been a string of shelter beds or begging to come up with $34 for a motel.
“I haven’t been able to put a real roof over my kid’s head since when she was born,” the 35-year-old woman said. “I’ve been going shelter to shelter. Some people help. As soon as I get the $34.86 I need, I go to the motel.”
On a recent night in downtown Atlanta, Wallace feared she had hit a new low. She brought 2-year-old Geneva to the shelter at Peachtree and Pine, run by the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, to join nearly 90 other women and children clustered in chairs or on the office floors — away from the 400-plus men occupying the rows of cots in the actual shelter.
It is no place for a woman or a kid, as Anita Beaty, the task force’s executive director, acknowledges. For instance, she said, the financially struggling shelter is not on a school bus route. “Some of the children are getting transport to school, many are not,” she said. “Everybody is overwhelmed. There is no space anywhere.”
They are there in part because the Gateway Center’s board of directors announced in June that it was closing its shelter for women and children in July while keeping a small number of dorm beds available for families until the City of Refuge opened a 100-bed emergency shelter for women and children in September.
They can stay in the emergency shelter for 30 days, which can be extended if they are good candidates for the transitional housing program because they are cooperating with the shelter’s health, counseling and job programs, Deel said.
Gateway Chairman Jack Hardin said the center closed its shelter for women and children because its programs were more focused on men — who often have alcohol, drug or mental-health problems — move into social programs to deal with their chronic issues and then on to permanent housing.
“The total focus was trying to find another place for them, and it wasn’t time well spent and it wasn’t good for the women,” he said. “It didn’t have the facilities it needed to make the time for women and children productive.”
In a written statement, the board noted the families in the overflow section were required to sleep on the floor and at times the shelter operated outside the Gateway philosophy “because it was not advancing people along the path to independence.”
“In addition,” the board said, “(Gateway) provided a place for many consumers that enabled them not to take advantage of other housing opportunities or responsibility for their decisions and life.”
Wallace, 35, said that wasn’t her attitude when she stayed at the Gateway Center when she couldn’t find someplace else. Her luck may have changed. On a Wednesday night this month, the task force gave her enough cash for two nights in a motel near Geneva’s state-sponsored child care and the bus route to her new job at a Waffle House in DeKalb County.
“I was hoping they they could give me a bit more because I don’t get paid until Saturday,” she said. “But two days is better than nothing. I’m not trying to go back to another shelter. I don’t want to put my child through that again.”
Electra Crowder, 25, has managed to avoid the Peachtree and Pine shelter since the Gateway Center told her she and her two boys, 6-year-old Nehemiah and 3-year-old Isaiah, needed to move on. She found shelter at the City of Refuge. They left there after their 21-day emergency stay was used up. She said she didn’t qualify for the transitional housing program because she had failed at it before.
Now she is camped out in an abandoned house in East Point. “The task force, I can’t do that,” she said, alluding to the men at Peachtree and Pine. “I’ve been the victim of rape, and I need my children to be safe.”
Peachtree and Pine may not even be an option much longer. It’s facing the possibility of eviction after defaulting on its mortgage. A trial is scheduled for next month to settle the case.
Beaty calls the dozens of women the latest sign of the failure of Atlanta leadership to deal with the problem.
“Right now, the women are cycling back from the City of Refuge,” Beaty said. “If they are lucky, they get a bed at the Salvation Army or else they end up back here and that is unconscionable. It is really playing musical chairs with people’s lives.”
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