Out in the Cold

Workers at the New Image homeless shelter prepared chicken and vegetables Tuesday for the 200 homeless men and women expected for a last night of shelter from the rain and cold.

Even though forecasters predict more unseasonably wintry weather, Los Angeles County today ends its shelter program at New Image and 23 other facilities for the homeless.

Funding from the county’s Homeless Services Authority allows the facilities to serve the homeless every night between Dec. 16 and Feb. 28, and to open during especially cold or rainy weather throughout March.

It is on early spring nights like Tuesday’s that many of the homeless and their advocates say provisions should be made to extend the program.

“When it rains there’s a lot of people sleeping on cardboard boxes that have to come up off the streets,” said Willie Banks, 38, a homeless man who both works and sleeps at the New Image Emergency Shelter southeast of downtown. “They catch pneumonia out there in weather like this.”

New Image, a former textile warehouse now outfitted with hundreds of olive-green cots, heaps of gray blankets, showers and a big-screen television, was open seven nights in March, including Tuesday.

“It’s not enough,” said Banks. “It ain’t never enough.”

Banks said the shelter was not allowed to open its doors Sunday evening even though 30 or 40 people waited outside in the cold wind. (Staffers did feed them and offer them blankets.) In March, shelters only open when the forecast predicts temperatures below 40 degrees or a greater than 50% chance of rain.

Between today and Tuesday, rain should hit every 36 to 48 hours, bringing low temperatures in the upper 30s to upper 40s in the area, meteorologists said.

Paul Rossi, program manager for the Homeless Services Authority, said the winter shelters in March operated for two more nights than they were budgeted for, and that no funds were available to extend the program into April.

“It would be our desire to be able to keep this thing going as long as possible,” Rossi said, “but based on the information we have to date, we’ve determined it’s not feasible.”

There are about 10,800 short-term shelter beds available year-round in Los Angeles County for an estimated 84,000 homeless men and women, according to a 1996 survey conducted by Shelter Partnership Inc., a company that provides technical assistance to homeless services organizations. Some activists put the number of homeless people much higher.

“Clearly, when you look at L.A. as a whole, there are insufficient shelter beds,” said Paul Tepper, director of programs at the 600-bed Weingart Center near downtown, which he said fills up every night. “In some sense, [closure of the wet weather shelters] doesn’t impact us, except that the lines will be longer,” and the center will have to turn away more people, he said.

County official Rossi said he did not anticipate any confusion among homeless clients about the shelters’ closing date.

But New Image’s executive director, Brenda Wilson, who also operates a cold/wet weather shelter in Long Beach, said she had received 14 phone calls and eight visits from clients concerned about finding a place to stay during the rains.

“[County officials] need to revisit the operation of the program,” Wilson said. “The weather-activated [phase] needs to be continuous.”

Tuesday in Glendale, homeless men and women gathered outside the Lord’s Kitchen, a Salvation Army soup kitchen, and tried to figure out where to stay tonight.

“I’ll probably sleep in a doorway near a church,” said Charles, 47.

Quincton Vickers, 58, said he had spent a night last weekend at a county-funded shelter on 48th Street and south Vermont. He knew Tuesday night would be the shelter’s last night in operation, but he expressed little worry. “I’ll find a shelter somewhere,” he said. “I’m a survivor.”