City’s family shelters are filling up faster, sooner

For four days, Yasmeen Goodmond, 23, went to the city's homeless-services office, asking for help.

And for four days, she was told there were no beds for her family.

With nowhere to go, Goodmond and her two children went to the emergency room at Hahnemann University Hospital. They slept in chairs in the waiting room and slipped out in the morning.

But their welcome was wearing out. On Monday night, Goodmond asked her cousin to watch her 5-year-old daughter for a few days, while turning to her grandmother for help with her 2-year-old son.

For herself, she stayed on the streets, walking all over Center City, never sleeping.

At 6:30 Tuesday morning, Goodman went immediately to the Appletree Family Center, the cheery name for the city's main intake office for homeless families, at 15th and Cherry Streets in Center City.

But when the staff opened the doors at 9, they delivered the same news: no beds.

"They just tell me there's nothing they could do," Goodmond said as she sat outside a Center City sandwich shop with her son, who was smiling and eating grapes in his stroller. "They're giving me nowhere to go."

Advocates for the homeless say that the city's shelters for families always fill up in the summer, but that this year, that seems to be happening sooner than usual.

Marsha Cohen, an attorney for the Homeless Advocacy Project, which provides free legal help to homeless individuals, said mothers with children could often double up with friends or relatives during the school year. But once summer arrives, they either choose to leave difficult situations or are forced out.

She said the spike in homeless families this summer was most likely a reflection of the poor economy. "I've heard 10 horror stories in the last week."

Cohen said a father and his 10-year-old son were sleeping at the 69th Street bus terminal. In another case, a mother with an infant and two children were placed in a shelter, but there weren't enough beds for everyone. The 5-year-old slept with his mother, while the 4-year-old was sent to stay with a relative.

Nationally, the number of homeless families is rising. In the annual report to Congress on homelessness released Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said the number of homeless families has increased 20 percent from 2007 to 2010.

HUD also reported that the proportion of homeless families in shelters or transitional housing has increased from 30 percent to 35 percent during the same period.

"It's not surprising given the economic crisis that we are seeing an increase in homeless families," HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan said in a conference call with reporters.

Cohen said the city's Office of Supportive Housing (OSH), which manages the shelter system, should have anticipated a rising number of homeless families.

"This is the third consecutive year that the city has seen this," Cohen said. "So for them to be caught so flat-footed at the beginning of the summer is unconscionable. There is going to be significantly more families flooding into the system."

In Philadelphia, 425 families are housed in emergency shelters, with an additional 335 families in transitional shelters, which offer both housing and services to help families move on with their lives. (The city maintains separate facilities for single men and women who are homeless.)

Overall, there are about 6,000 homeless men, women, and children in Philadelphia, living in emergency shelters, transitional housing, or on the streets. Nationally, on any given night last year, about 650,000 people were homeless, HUD calculates.

Dainette Mintz, the city's OSH director, said families have been placed in shelters based on when they requested help and whether they had special needs, such as a woman dealing with domestic violence.

"We monitor and use all the resources available to us to place homeless families," Mintz said. "Unfortunately, however, there are instances when we are unable to provide immediate assistance."

HUD has focused much of its attention in recent years on reducing the ranks of chronically homeless individuals who live on the streets. Most are older or middle-aged men. It also has introduced special programs for preventing homelessness by offering one-time financial assistance for families to stay in their housing and not to enter the shelter system in the first place.

In another initiative, HUD is providing funds to rapidly get people out of shelters and into permanent housing through rent assistance.

But Donovan acknowledged that the federal housing agency was "not as far along in developing tools and solutions to end family homelessness."

For Goodmond and her two children, meanwhile, the wait continues.

Goodmond became homeless after being evicted from her apartment in Germantown. She wasn't on the lease and had to leave.

On Tuesday morning, she used the last of her money to buy breakfast for her son. She made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at her cousin's house, but those, too, went quickly.

She seemed restless, lost. She took her son to LOVE Park and to look at the fountain at Logan Circle. In a few hours, she would take him to her grandmother's house. His clothes were packed into a knapsack that hung from the stroller handle. Her daughter already was with a cousin.

And for herself? "I don't know what I'm going to do."

Come the morning, she would be back on the front steps of the Appletree Family Center, hoping to hear better news.