L.A. Shelter Is Empty No Longer

The neat gray house on Halldale Avenue sat mostly empty until Hurricane Katrina struck and gave it a new purpose.

After fleeing New Orleans in a stifling car -- heartache and loss making the journey with them -- Schewon Kelly and her family arrived in Los Angeles and eventually at the gray house near USC known as SC Manor.

It was intended to house homeless residents, but went unused for a year because of a lack of funding. Now, with the needs of the victims overshadowing the bottom line, the owner has opened the shelter’s doors to evacuees.

“We came out here with no money, no clothes, no nothing,” a weary Kelly said, sitting on a bed in the shelter. “That’s a strong thing to handle.... We have family members and we don’t know where they are.”

For now, the family has a place to live and help making the transition to life in California, said Renae Garrett, an advocate for homeless families. Counselors and other social service agencies have been brought in to assist.

“It’s an example of the community organizing and unifying,” Garrett said.

This is the help Garrett and SC Manor owner Barbara Coleman had hoped to provide the city’s homeless. At Garrett’s urging, Coleman converted the house into a 16-bed shelter for women and children. For funds to operate the shelter, Coleman turned to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

Mitchell Netburn, executive director of the authority, said that there had been discussions but that funding was not available.

“It’s a beautiful facility ... but the amount we could pay was really far from the amount they felt they needed to adequately maintain it,” Netburn said.

Plans to open stalled until Katrina hit and brought the world images of a city in misery.

“Here is a whole city, thousands of people who are homeless, and we had an empty shelter and a beautiful one,” Garrett said. “We can help people who need help.”

The dilemma of the victims allowed Coleman to see her own life differently.

“After looking at what they’re going through, I don’t have any problems,” she said.

In the days after the hurricane hit, Garrett called the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross to inform officials the facility was available. She and Coleman have also asked businesses and other organizations to help.

FEMA has put on hold its plan to move mass numbers of evacuees to California. But in a statement Friday, Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina said evacuees are still arriving with the help of friends and families.

“Our work is not done simply because FEMA has not evacuated families to our county,” she said. “We want to make sure that we have one coordinated effort and create a seamless process for those who are here and need our help.”

For Kelly and her family, the search for services in Southern California has not been easy. They need housing, jobs and information. “There’s no one place to go for help,” she said. “I’m ready to get situated. If I can get situated here, I’ll stay here.”

Kelly sent two of her teenage children to Chicago, where she said their aunt will enroll them in school while she tries to build a home for them in L.A. “I type, I’m computer literate, I’ve driven a backhoe.... I’m ready to get to it,” she said.

But after Katrina hit, the skill she needed most was fortitude.

For five days the family remained in its home, like others in the West Bank neighborhood, with no radio, no television and a dwindling food supply. They scooped water from the streets to flush their toilets and watched as neighbors used tree branches and broken fencing for cooking fires. Any fresh water came from the sky, collected in buckets when it rained.

“They’re not showing all that on TV,” said Kelly’s 20-year-old daughter, Krysten Barthelemy, as she cradled her 1-year-old son, Khalyl, who spent his birthday in a car fleeing their hometown. “People were stealing because they were hungry.”

When the situation became unbearable, the family and friends left New Orleans in two cars without air conditioning.

But not everybody made it to Los Angeles. Krysten’s husband, Cornell Barthelemy, has a 5-year-old son who was living with the boy’s mother, Vanette Stewart, in New Orleans. They haven’t heard from Stewart or the boy, Cornell James Stewart.

After showing a photo of the boy, Krysten Barthelemy, who is five months pregnant, began to cry. On the journey to L.A., there had been no time to break down.

“Go ahead and cry,” Kelly said, as she rubbed her daughter’s back. “You can cry if you want to. It’s going to be all right.”

Seeing the tears, Garrett called everyone in the shelter together. In a bedroom, with a sleeping Khalyl on the bed, the family and those who had come to help joined hands in a circle. Then Garrett prayed:

“We come to you, God, because we’re in trouble, and you said when we’re in trouble you’re in the midst of us. I thank you, God, for saving this family.... They do have shelter. The Lord is our shelter.”