Cold or Crowded?

On cold winter nights, people on the streets often have to choose between battling the freezing temperatures outside, or battling for beds in a crowded warehouse shelter. David Pirtle, a man who became homeless because of his untreated and undiagnosed schizophrenia, was invited to an NPR radio special in 2012 that explored the question: why do some homeless people refuse shelter?

One common reason is the unsanitary and dangerous conditions in some mass shelters. Even Pirtle agreed that there are a number of nice and well run shelters, but when living on the streets, he would hear stories of shelters that had body lice, drug dealers, and people who would steal the tenants' shoes. So during some of the coldest of nights, where he would fear not waking up in the morning, he would still choose the stay on the streets and hope that a hypothermia van would drive by and offer a blanket. “I think people, we're creatures of habit,” he told Ari Shapiro, the radio host of the special. He explained that he would rather deal with the risks he knew about sleeping on the street, than the dangers of a shelter.

People waiting in line for a bed at a homeless
shelter in Los Angeles, California Credit: Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority

He also shed light on the difficulties of rehabilitation from a mass shelter. These shelters sometimes have hundreds of beds, and these are given out on a nightly basis. Pirtle did end up staying at a shelter for a short time, and he discovered the struggles of trying to keep a job and keep a bed. The shelter would open at 7 every night, but people would already be in line for a bed at 4:30 in the afternoon. If Pirtle were to find a job and work regular business hours, he would lose a place to sleep at night.

A solution Pirtle saw to this crisis was to get rid of mass shelters, and create more scattered and smaller shelters. A later caller named John (who wanted to keep his last name private) explained that he had worked in these types of shelters, and had seen some of the horrors Pirtle described. Even the well-run mass shelters soon got too crowded to be a safe place. He agreed that smaller shelters were the solution to this problem. Although smaller shelters may seem like a greater cost, ultimately a center more focused on getting people of the streets permanently and into a more steady housing situation would allow for more quick movement of people through the shelter. Getting people off the streets is less expensive than keeping them there (see our previous blog post: Pendleton and Wheeler: A hope to end Portland’s homelessness), so ultimately these smaller shelters would have a better return on their investment.

-Kendra Jackson

Read the full radio special here: Why Some Homeless Choose The Streets Over Shelters