County office building doubles as ‘warming center’

By Charles Taylor
SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Camden County, N.J., like many urban counties, has a homeless problem. But unlike other localities, the county has taken a novel approach to housing the hardcore homeless on the coldest nights of the year.

Three years ago, county Freeholder Carmen Rodriguez got the idea to open a county office building on “code blue” nights as a warming center for those with no place else to go.

It’s a problem she knows all too well. Years ago, a great-uncle who lived across the Delaware River in Philadelphia — where Rodriguez grew up — “froze to death one night on a bench.”

  “I was particularly concerned about the homeless, in particular the ones that kind of chose to be homeless,” she said. “Because we do have shelters throughout (the county) and doors are open, but there are people who are afraid to go to shelters.”

Rodriguez convened a meeting of homeless advocates, Board of Social Services members and others to address the issue in February 2006. “I started to hear a lot of little stories, like how sometimes the homeless would break a car window so that they can get arrested, so I thought, ‘That’s not good.’”

The group decided that the Aletha Wright Administration Building, which houses many of the county’s social services programs, would be an ideal location — since many of the homeless frequented it already to obtain services.

For many of the homeless who receive welfare checks, the Wright Building is “home,” or at least their home address, Rodriguez explained. “Because if they don’t have a home address, what they do is list the address for the Board of Social Services.” Within four hours of the meeting, the warming center was open.

On nights when the temperature dips below 20 degrees, or is 32 degrees with precipitation, the Wright Building opens its lobby from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. The accommodations are bare bones, and there’s no “lights out.” The county provides two security guards to keep things safe, a place to come in from the cold and access to bathrooms — but no services or meals. Paper cups are left out near the water fountain.

The homeless sleep on floors or benches with blankets, sleeping bags or huddled in their coats. Rodriguez said there’ve been very few problems because the shelter users “police themselves.” “Just as quickly as this came, this can go away. So we don’t have the behavioral problems that could potentially arise.”

Robert Smith, the county’s health officer, makes the call as to when the warming center and other emergency shelters in this county of 517,000 residents should be opened. This year, that’s been “almost every day in January” and several in February.

“It would be a very risky situation for those people if they didn’t have a place to go and get warm,” he said.

The cost to the county varies with the frequency of the building’s usage —costing more during colder winters. In some years, costs have approached $10,000, which pays for the security guards and utilities.

For anyone concerned about the county’s spending, Rodriguez said “we’re actually saving money.” She said without the warming site, the county might have to house some of these people in jails — those who commit petty crimes just to get off the streets — or bear the cost of putting out fires the homeless might start to keep warm in abandoned buildings.

“So I think in the end we save more money than we could ever spend.”

Rodriguez said the facility doesn’t take the elderly or frail, for whom the county has other assistance, nor families, who are given priority at shelters. The county hasn’t widely publicized the location, to discourage use by those who don’t really need it. But word-of-mouth has brought in up to 70 individuals on some nights.

“We have always tried to keep it low key,” Rodriguez added. “We want to make sure the program continues as long as necessary until we find a solution to homelessness, which I hope happens in my lifetime.

“This is for those people, who for whatever reason, can’t get a space in a shelter” — or don’t want one. She said some chronically homeless don’t want to sign up for services, as some shelters require, or provide their Social Security numbers.

So the county’s overnight warming center is a non-judgmental temporary haven.

“Homelessness is one problem. Not having shelter when the environment is completely hostile, that’s something else,” Rodriguez said.

“These people that are here, they’ve been written off by society, most of them. But this is somebody’s brother. This is somebody’s son — or father.”