The Poor Get Poorer

There have already been cuts to homeless shelters. And they hurt.

by Isaiah Thompson

Isaiah Thompson THE SAFETY NET TEARS: The Ridge Avenue Center, the largest shelter for single homeless men in the city.

ON OUR WATCH

Vernon Fletcher and Raymond Dawson are of two minds when it comes to their current home, the Ridge Avenue Center, a shelter for homeless single men. On one hand, they can't stand the place —"I was ready to leave the minute I stepped in the door," Fletcher attests.

Dawson agrees. "Some days it feels like the military — like I'm in boot camp."

And yet, the two men — both of whom became homeless only recently, after a run of bad luck — care enough about Ridge and other shelters that they showed up at one of the mayor's recent budget workshops to advocate for emergency housing.

"I got an open bed," says Fletcher. "I might not have."

The shelters, they argued, can't afford any additional funding cuts.

That's right, additional cuts. Remember the mayor's "Rebalancing Plan for the FY09-FY13 Five Year Plan?"

No?

Remember when the mayor said he was permanently closing 11 libraries?

There we go.

Amidst all the furor of the Library Wars, the public — and, more culpably, the media (I was writing about libraries, too) — completely overlooked a $1.3 million cut to the Office of Supportive Housing (OSH), which oversees all city-funded homeless services.

As a result, OSH told the Ridge Center, the largest men's shelter in the city, to lay off all its case managers. And the city is now asking the shelter, along with two others, to negotiate new, cheaper contracts with its security guards, who stand to take pay cuts of as much as 30 percent. Even as the city holds it breath, waiting for the mayor's next budget, homeless advocates are saying that services have already been cut to the bone. The next dollar that gets cut, they say, will put people on the street.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

The Ridge shelter is situated among a few trash-strewn vacant lots in the netherworld between Temple and Center City. Despite good-faith efforts to make the place less dreary, it has few frills. Inside, the mostly-bare walls are painted a dull,uniform blue. During the day, the shelter fills with homeless men seeking meals, attending programming or just resting. After sunset, it becomes the hub for homeless single men in Philadelphia, housing up to 340 every night. It's almost always near capacity, especially in the winter.

If the first priority of shelters is to provide emergency housing, a secondary priority is to provide the means of moving to temporary or permanent housing and, depending on an individual's physical and mental capacities, varying degrees of independence.

Trained caseworkers help people achieve this secondary goal. They help residents enroll in government benefits; connect them with services in the community; do job counseling, help find housing and provide emotional support. They also keep detailed records that help ensure a resident doesn't have to start from scratch every time he enters a shelter.

Donald Myers, who manages the Ridge shelter, had just started his job when the cuts were handed down in November. He's done his best to find other ways of providing these services, having staff that used to assist case managers and assume some of those duties; he's working on getting other nonprofits and city agencies to bring services to the shelter, as well.

Our Brothers' Place, a shelter which, like Ridge, houses single men, actually managed to raise money from outside sources to keep its caseworkers: Angelo Sgro, whose nonprofit, the Bethesda Project, runs the shelter, says the workers are essential to his mission: "Without case management, what you're doing is warehousing people. We're not about warehousing. We're about recovery."

Still, Sgro only has funding for the positions through June. After that, he's not sure.

This month, the shelters learned of another cut: As of March 1, the Office of Supportive Housing will no longer supply city-contracted security guards (currently, about 30 city-contracted guards work at city shelters). Instead, Myers has been given a budget and asked by OSH to negotiate a new security contract.

While Myers says he's confident he can comply, the news is unquestionably bad for guards, who only recently joined SEIU Local 32BJ and managed to negotiate a "prevailing wage" with the city. Security guards currently working at city shelters earn about $16 an hour, including benefits. They'll almost certainly be forced to take a pay cut — as much as $5 an hour, union representatives say.

Wayne MacManiman, Mid-Atlantic district leader of Local 32BJ, accuses the Nutter administration of effectively skirting the city's prevailing wage ordinance, which requires the city to pay all contracted employees fair compensation, calculated by various criteria.

"This isn't a layoff situation," MacManiman explains. "This is a situation where, come March 1, a worker making X dollars will make less next week, and the choice is what? Unemployment?"

MacManiman also raises the question of whether the cuts could result in higher turnover and lower quality guards — and therefore lower safety standards in the shelters.

OSH Deputy Director Leti Egea-Hinton defends the decision, noting that most of the city's shelters (albeit smaller ones), already purchase their own security and, more significantly, that she had to choose between cutting guards' salaries and cutting beds. "There wasn't any attempt to be doing anything other than maintaining as many homeless beds as we could," she says.

No one — from the mayor to shelter operators to the homeless — wants to see beds eliminated. But Nutter has made clear that "everything is on the table." This scares shelter operators because, they say, there's nothing left to cut.

"We need the food, we need the shelter, we need people to clean up the place, so I do think any future costs would require a reduction in beds," says Jim Piasecki, corporate assistant director for Resources for Human Development, the nonprofit that runs the Ridge shelter. "And it would probably be a relatively significant reduction ... it would be more like closing a floor."

Sgro, from Our Brothers' Place, agrees. He says he can only compromise so much.

"If they come back and say we're going to cut even 10 percent, we would make an assessment as to whether we could run a safe. secure program that treats people with dignity. And if the answer is no, we won't do it."

(isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net)