The 140-bed personal-care home was set to close on Feb. 22, but is staying open on a day-to-day basis until everyone is relocated.

Forty-three residents remain - 17 without a clue of where they will go next. Beds are so tight in Philadelphia that many of them will end up in other counties.

"We're living on borrowed time here," Faulkner explains with urgency in her voice.

Only one of them has a city mental-health case worker. The others need Faulkner, who works for a nonprofit that advocates for those with mental illness, to show them the way.

"Some are in denial," Faulkner says. "They don't want to go out anywhere."

Victoria Walos, 47, finally speaks up. "Can you take me to look at places?"

Faulkner immediately calls a place in North Philadelphia. It has one bed - the last available spot for a woman in a state-regulated facility in the entire city.

The Cambridge residence, one of the largest personal-care homes in Philadelphia, has suffered financial losses in each of the last three years, according to its managers. Its closing has exposed a critical shortage of housing for people with mental illness.

Cambridge residents, most of whom have mental illness and low incomes, were relocated as far away as Erie and Reading because of the shortage of housing options for them in Philadelphia.

"We've exhausted all the available beds in the city with this closing," said Faulkner, an advocate for the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania.

Personal-care facilities are boarding homes that also provide a basic level of care, such as handing out medications and providing meals. Such places are ill-suited as long-term housing for the mentally ill, but are used that way because of the dearth of housing options.

Joseph Rogers, the past president of the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania, said many homes were nothing more than "mini-versions of state hospitals."

Advocates argue that Philadelphia needs more help from the state to vastly expand the availability of permanent housing with services for mentally ill people. Without it, they run the risk of landing on the streets. In Philadelphia, 85 percent of the homeless people on the streets suffer mental illness, addictions or both.

"This is a very vulnerable population," Rogers said. "There are not enough beds and no one really there to catch them."

When the owners of the Cambridge facility announced the closing in January, most residents were relocated to housing in other parts of the city.

Others were sent to places in suburban communities such as Norristown, or even across the state.

Rogers said that last week, he drove a 60-year-old mentally ill Cambridge resident to a new place in Reading. She had lived at the South Philadelphia home for six years.

"I'm concerned about her mental-health stability," Rogers said. "She's been plucked out from the place she'd grown used to and moved a couple hours away."

Most of the residents at the Cambridge facility survive on fixed incomes and get a little more than $1,000 a month between Social Security and a state supplement for housing.

For Victoria Walos, last Thursday was moving day.

After seeing the last bed available in the city, she took it.

"It's OK" was all she had to say of her new home.

Walos, whose only income is her disability check, packed her clothes into a suitcase and black garbage bag and waited for a van to take her to North Philadelphia.

Walos had lived at Cambridge for two years. The big four-story building was just a block from the Melrose Diner and right in the hubbub of things near Broad Street and Snyder Avenue.

Her new residence - the Wilson Personal Care Home - houses more than 30 people within three rowhouses. Five men from Cambridge already have relocated there.

The home, just north of Temple University, is across the street from an empty lot, an abandoned building and a train trestle. Residents spend the day in a spare, tight common room that doubles as the dining area.

Faulkner said that if Walos hadn't taken this bed, she would have had to find a place for her outside the city, which would have been a problem. Walos has two grown children who live in Kensington and visit her regularly.

In her new place, Walos shares a bright room with curtains with two other women. She has a twin bed, a chair, and a shared dresser.

As she unpacked, she stacked her clothes on the bed and reached into her suitcase for a framed photo - a faded color photograph of her daughter.

Walos placed the picture where she could see it on her dresser.