Why You Shouldn't Stay At a Homeless Shelter If You Can Help It At All
Of course, when you're looking into staying at a homeless shelter, it's usually a sign that you don't have a lot of other options at your disposal. So I get if the title seems unhelpful. But if you do think you're going to stay at a homeless shelter, you need to be prepared for what you're getting into. I... really wasn't. And I ended up REALLY lucky. So, let me tell you some things that will hopefully help you.
(By the way, I write for tips, and my tip jar is here.)
First of all, my situation: I'm living in a car with my husband while waiting for job and housing opportunities to open up. We typically like to stay together wherever we go. Well, there's not exactly couples' shelters anywhere in our area (Portland Oregon). So if we weren't staying in our car together, we'd be trying to get two permanent beds at the same shelter. It's already hard to get ONE of those! And it definitely takes some waiting. Well, what do we do when we can't sleep in the car for a few days? What DID we do? My husband was in the hospital for about a week. (He's set his terms for how and when he'll talk about that.) During that, for a couple days I had to find emergency lodging with no emergency funds available. I got directed to the local homeless shelter, walked in, and managed to land a temp bed the first night. (THAT IS ACTUALLY VERY HARD TO DO. I would find that out later.)
First of all, getting into the shelter is both a hassle and a joke. They wand-wave you to make sure you don't have knives or guns on you, and then you hand over any large bags like duffels, backpacks, laptop bags, trash bags... but plenty of people had plastic shopping bags they brought in without checking them, so you can imagine how full of holes this system was. Anyway they put my bag in a room with no closed door between it and the front door, and tied a ziptie tag onto it with my first name and last initial written on it so that everyone around me could know what my name was by looking at my bag, and then... well, it just stayed there as far as I can tell. I don't know what their theft prevention looks like but I felt pretty nervous about my stuff. So, if you can avoid bringing valuables it helps. Possibly have a locking bag. Know that a visible lock tells people you're keeping something valuable.
This was just to stay inside and have meals and use daytime services, by the way. No open containers allowed, no drugs, no weapons. There was a rule about not making noise but several people were listening to loud cell phone videos or playing games with the speakers on. No one was enforcing noise rules unless the noise was someone complaining about the staff. (Witnessed a lady complaining about ADA violations because you have to walk down like 25 steps to get to the front foor of this place. I think the one guy who comes in and uses a wheelchair has some sort of special elevator access that he has to call in for and then staff lets him in.) Staff at desk were semi-helpful. Anyway I got onto the temp bed list that night and was really lucky, because that's not normal. At 7PM we all had to leave the daytime shelter and then wait upstairs at the sleep facility. It opened at 7:30PM but we had to wait until 7:40 for a staff member to actually let us in. No reason was given.
I had hot food in me and I had a place to stay and a shower I'd signed up for the next morning. I was pretty grateful for this. I also felt like I was in a jail-adjacent experience. Everything was facility-based. We got a very small thin pillow, no allowance for two. One sheet, one thin blanket, one fitted sheet for the bunk, a pillowcase. Anything else you should have brought. Pajamas, extra pillow, more of a blanket, whatever--you need to have it with you. They don't have that for you. They look at you like an idiot if you ask. The experienced people with permanent beds had pajamas and blankets for themselves. So that's extra stuff you need to carry into this place, by the way, and you have a locker that's about the size of a large duffel bag to put your stuff inside of.
By the way, you need a padlock. For the locker your stuff goes inside of. They do not have a lock for you. You need a lock. You will find this out way too late to GET a lock the first time you need a lock. So yeah I luckily got a top bunk which meant I was in a safer-stuff-zone, so I just brought everything valuable into my bed and, in some cases, slept on top of it since I stuff my wallet and a few other things into my pillowcase. And boy, was that mattress thin, so I slept pretty light. I tossed and turned a lot. Luckily there was a jar of earplugs at the front desk so I had something to mute out the snores and random shouts/gasps in other traumatized people's sleep.
There was a library, it was stocked alright. I just wasn't in a mode where I could read that copy of Neuromancer, so I handed it back in the next morning unread. The library was sort of the social area, plus a couple other mingle spots between bunkbed clusters. There was not a place to be trans or queer. It was very cis, and very hetero. We were separated out by gender and the assumption was we were all cis, so my short young-looking trans-looking body was really nervous. Everyone was bigger than me where I slept and obviously much more experienced with living in a shelter. I don't know what went on over at the women's end of things but there was no closed door between the two ends and I felt a bit creeped out that pretty much anyone could walk between the two at any time. There was very little to ensure personal safety in the place.
Lights went out around 9PM I think. We were woken up around 6:30AM or so and out of there by 7AM. That was for the people with temp beds. We handed back our pillows and sheets as we walked out the door. All my stuff was where it was supposed to be. I headed back downstairs for breakfast and a shower.
The shower I had to sign up for the day before was creepy to take, the stalls were set up like you'd set up toilet stalls in that they were right next to each other, and again, just didn't feel a lot of personal security here. There was about 2 feet of space between a naked cis man and a naked me during both of our showers. We had about 20-25 minutes to clean off and I did my best with the time I was given. The guy in the next stall over played crappy music on his phone the whole time.
Breakfast. A smoothie and oatmeal. With the meals here I felt they often skimped on protein and were more children-sized portions than adult. Either they were stretching the ingredients or not ordering enough. There's no food napkins in the dining and communal area nor are there kleenex so everyone was going into the bathroom to get paper towels out of the dispenser there and that area smelled pretty strongly of toilets. So yeah I only went here for meals when really desperate. Not a lot of great seating options either, there were these big circular tables that sort of awkwardly forced people to sit together who didn't want to. There was a lot of space hoarding to keep people from sitting next to others.
Now, could I sleep there again? I signed up for a temp bed and got told to check after 3PM if I had won the "lottery" for one. Well I showed up around 4-5 and found out you have to be there AT 3PM DURING the drawing to have an eligible slot, so I was just out of luck that night. They had nowhere good to direct me to, saying that all the shelters would have filled up by then, and no advice for where I should sleep otherwise. (And by the way, there were options they did not tell me about. They were either ignorant or purposefully unhelpful.) I ended up managing to contact a friend who helped me with lodging that night and that's how I stayed off the street.
The shelter really bothers me in how it was set up. The staff acted like they were dealing with children. Often I was asking about resources and getting blank looks, so I think a lot of the desk staff weren't trained on what they even offer. I was told the resource center that was next to the sleeping facility upstairs would have clothing and staff who could advise me on things and it was just never open, even during the hours posted on its door. So I was just not being given the help I was told would be there if I went there.
What I learned most during all of this was that I couldn't depend on this service and a lot of services for homelessness in our area, and maybe any area. I had to think very fast, be alert and on guard at all times, and constantly keep an eye on the time. I also had to keep meticulous track of my possessions and remember all of the things I had to do while basically constantly on the run. I plugged in and charged devices at the shelter while eating, then hoofed it elsewhere, trying to make our car living situation good enough again that I could just stay there. Because it's cold, and it's small, and it's a car, but it's better than living at the shelter. That I know now.
I write for tips. Please tip me if you found this article interesting, useful, or otherwise to be something you appreciate. Keep an eye on the @documentinghomelessness blog if you want to know what happens on our journey. Stay warm, and please, stay safe.
