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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 2, 2015)
Page 8 News Street Roots More shelter from the storm Salvation Army Female Emergency Shelter prepares to expand permanent housing opportunities for . women seeking refuge from the streets BY SARAH HANSELL “Men feel like they can take advantage of us because we’re out here,” Kate said. According to the Portland Housing t’s the middle of December and the Bureau’s 2013 Point-in-Time Count, 38 temperatures are dwindling dangerously percent of the city’s homeless population close to freezing. It’s about midnight were women, a 22 percent spike in women the time the doors of the Roseland Theater who are “literally” homeless — unsheltered open and the post-concert crowd emerges, or in emergency shelter — since 2011. Only wrapping scarves around their necks and 21 percent of the available beds in shelters, shoving hats on their hëads. Their excited however, were designated for single women chatter leaves steam in the air as they filter at that time. out of the theater in different directions, “You can clearly see that in actuality a toward parked cars or to the corner of the homeless person is not necessarily an sidewalk to hail a taxi, the promise of a roof elderly man sitting on the corner of the and a warm bed awaiting them. street,” SAFES Executive Director For Kate, huddled across the street in the Bernadette Basilio said, “The definition of a doorway of St. Andre Bessette Catholic homeless person completely has changed.” Church, this means she will finally be able SAFES is working to provide for these to get to sleep. For her, however, there is no homeless women, who are among the most warm bed, just her wheelchair and a 4:30 vulnerable to violence on the streets. a.m. wake-up call as the police officers make Operating out of a new and much larger their rounds. Time to gather her things. A ndw aît/ThereddoorsofSù^ùidré^sw in^ building as of 2013, SAFES is now able to ■ expaiid'their emergency*stieltei Options ter- o penaO ^æ nK ^or^îecIîûrcntopra^a^^ 45 mats, rather than the previous 15. The their daily breakfast From there it’s on to winter shelter* which opened Nov. 1 and the next place to escape the cold, the extends through April, is in addition to Salvation Army Female Emergency Shelter SAFES’ regular night and day shelters. (SAFES) where she spends the days. And And now, after nine months without the same thing the next day, and the next, permanent leadership, Basilio is seeing and the next SAFES through the development of 42 new This was Kate’s reality for four.years — single-room occupancy apartments, which the time she spent sleeping in the doorway are scheduled to open by the end of the of S t André Bessette in her manual year. This new housing option will protect wheelchair, a knife tucked away in case 42 more women from the cold and the someone threatened her, the lack of sleep dangers of the street making it hard to stay alert. And these dangers aren’t lost on the “It makes you more vulnerable because women who face them. when you’re tired you don’t pay attention to “Safety is the biggest (concern), because what’s going on around you,” Kate said. men have to worry about safety, but we are And for a woman sleeping on the streets more vulnerable than.them,” said Crystal, a of Portland, paying attention is key. ST A FF W R ITER I The new face of homeless veterans BY EMILY GREEN female veterans experiencing homelessness. According to a study released last year by Disabled American ina McDowell runs Sgt. McDowell’s Veterans, women who are veterans are two Military Relief, a nonprofit started to four times as likely to experience by her late brother-in-law that helps homelessness than women who are not Portland-area veterans connect with social services and escape homelessness. Last veterans. While only 0.9 percent of homeless adults are women, 8 percent of fall she noticed an increase in the number homeless veterans are women - about of women seeking out her services. She 4,500 nationally. With more women used to get about one call a month from a enlisting m the military, more women are female, but between August and becoming homeless after returning to September alone, eight female veterans reached out to her, looking for help getting civilian life. According to the report, “African American women veterans, ages off the streets and into housing. 18-29, who live in poverty, were shown to This was no fluke. What McDowell is seeing is part of a national upward trend in be particularly susceptible to becoming ST A FF W R ITE R ■ woman who used SAFES’ services in the past and is now housed and works at SAFES as a resident assistant Crystal was on the streets living with addiction for five years. In those five years she found shelter under the the Vista Bridge, the Burnside Bridge, the Morrison Bridge, next to the 1405 off ramp, at the Park Blocks in front of a church and in the doorway of an old theater. But wherever she found herself laying her head at night, she made sure she wasn’t alone. She always kept a companion close for safety, Not all women, however, have this option. Sandra, who came directly to SAFES after being kicked out of her nephew’s home, homeless, with 36.3 percent experiencing homelessness compared to 11.9 percent of all other women veterans in poverty,” Nancy Sloan, the women’s programs manager at the Portland VA, says many women join the military because they see it as a means to acquire a career, housing and stability. But when they return from deployment, she says, “they have trouble reintegrating and feeling like they’re the same person that they were when they left.” She says their friends and family have a hard time understanding what they saw. “That was a lot of trauma and experiences that many will never see in their lifetime, “ she says, “to come back and just pick up where they left off is next to impossible. On top of that trying to go to school, go back to mothering their isn’t from Portland and didn’t have a network in the city. So unlike Crystal and the many other women who seek safety in numbers, she had no companions for protection. As a survivor of child and sexual abusé, her fears of being forced to sleep outside were amplified. Luckily, she was never unsheltered. “My constant fear throughout homelessness was, ‘What am I going to do if I get kicked out of a shelter and I have to walk the streets all night?’” she said. Some women who are alone and do find themselves on the streets at night feel they See SHELTER page 9 children, trying to find work, all of that is a huge, huge challenge.” McDowell says by the time women contact her, “They are so stressed out they can’t focus on what to do n ex t” It can be hard for many of them to get the services they need if they decided to wait until after they were discharged to speak up about sexual assault or trauma from combat, she says. “It’s really important that the person filling out their claim is the right person.” In most of the cases she’s come across, the women were living out of their cars, in some cases with their children, “Pride has a lot to do with it. They’d rather sleep in their car than in a shelter where there’s no common law and it’s hard to keep the males separate from the females,” says McDowell.
