More people are homeless than ever in Orange County, with many trying to get off the streets crammed into a series of shelters run by cities and local nonprofits as they wait for an affordable apartment to open up.
But for the people stuck in shelters, they say it sometimes feels like a hurry-up-and-wait situation.
Right now, county officials estimate there are over 3,000 people living in Orange County shelters, with over 4,000 more on the streets.
[Read: Orange County Homeless Population Continues Growing]
It’s a situation elected officials and county executives continue grappling with, with OC Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento publicly acknowledging last month that people aren’t getting out of shelters and into housing fast enough.
[Read: Should Orange County Take a New Approach to Curbing Homelessness?]
“Is it a blessing to be there instead of the streets? Yes,” said Jenae Reidy, a homeless woman staying at the HomeAid Orange County Family Care Center, in an April interview. “But it doesn’t seem like it’s doing so much to help us.”
Reidy, a single mother of two children, lost her house in Newport Beach right after New Years, a home they’d only been in a short time following a few years moving around the country to outrun an abusive husband she left behind in San Diego.
For the first two months, Reidy couldn’t find a shelter that would take her and her two children, ages 14 and 16, and their service dog, spending most nights on the street and a handful of nights at a local church before Reidy said Newport Beach officials warned the church they couldn’t stay.
“Just about everywhere we slept they’d tell us it was illegal,” Reidy said. “I asked, ‘If it’s illegal for me to sleep here, where is it legal?’ And they said you can leave the city.”
Struggling to Find a Place to Sleep
Callie Rutter, who was homeless in Orange County for over two years, said she ran into the same problem of trying to find somewhere to sleep until she eventually ended up at the county’s shelter in Anaheim, called “Bridges at Kraemer.”
“It’s illegal to sleep in your car. there’s nowhere else to go,” Rutter said in an interview last week. “Jail or the hospital are the only other avenues for getting rest.”
It’s a common concern residents sleeping on the streets have raised to Voice of OC over the years: Where can someone sleep if there’s no available shelter beds?
That conundrum was on full display in early 2018, when county officials moved to evict hundreds of homeless people from the Santa Ana riverbed near Angel Stadium.
[Read: Homeless People Slowly Leave Santa Ana Riverbed: Where Can They Go?]
Many said they had nowhere to go until a lawsuit was filed and a federal judge stepped in and ordered officials find places for people to stay until more shelters were built.
Doug Becht, the head of the county’s Office of Care Coordination, said shelter beds are often taken up by people waiting for housing and highlighted how few people were exiting homelessness.
“We don’t have enough permanent housing to help assist people trying to get out of homelessness, but it also means that people in our shelter are staying there longer because we don’t have a place to go,” Becht said at a recent press conference announcing the county’s homeless population had increased.
“What that means is because people are staying there longer, because there’s not a place for us to house them, other people are prevented from accessing our shelter.”
Even for those looking for a shelter, the process of getting in can be an exhaustive one, according to David Duran, a board member of the People’s Homeless Task Force.
“You can’t just walk in, You can’t just pick up a phone, if you have a phone, and say ‘Hey can I come in?’ That’s not available,” Duran said in a Wednesday interview.
“Law enforcement can get them into a shelter, if they feel comfortable contacting the same group that criminalizes them and/or if they happen to have a direct phone number to an attorney or a nonprofit or somebody who has keys and access to getting people into a shelter.”
After looking around, Reidy found the HomeAid center in Orange, one of the few family shelters in the county, and managed to get her family a consistent spot to sleep for the night, after which she managed to get a job helping the elderly and disabled at their homes.
But since then, she says the shelter hasn’t been able to do much to fast track their exit from homelessness, saying she had a weekly meeting for housing where they told her she was doing everything right, but there weren’t any options open.
“The housing meetings you have are very clearly a check the box situation where they’re just looking towards keeping a document that they’re doing something or that we’re not just sitting around doing nothing. But it doesn’t seem like it’s so much to help us,” Reidy said.
Long Wait Times for Housing
Gina Cunningham, the executive director for HomeAid, said while the program does work, it takes some time – the average wait time for families at the shelter looking for housing is well over 200 days.
Since it opened in 2017, the shelter has served over 360 families, with about 90% of their families leaving to permanent housing when they exit.
But Cunningham also said they’re planning to briefly close the shelter in June to make some much needed upgrades, including a full rework of the plumbing, which frequently breaks down and new walls to give families more privacy.
She noted they planned to set families up in either motels or other shelters until the renovations were completed in 3-4 weeks, but final details are still being worked out.
“It’s very important we do not exit families back into homelessness,” Cunningham said.
Rutter said the only reason she got out of the Kraemer shelter was because her stage three cancer diagnosis got her fast tracked for a room in Project Homekey, a program that converts old motels into housing.
[Read: OC Cities Increasingly Look to Motels to Help House Homeless People]
“If I hadn’t been diagnosed with stage 3 cancer, would I have been put in Project Homekey? Would I have then gotten my voucher?” said Rutter, whose cancer is in remission and now has her own apartment through a housing voucher .
“You have to go fight for your housing, you really have to fight for it.”
As of last week, Reidy said they have yet to hear about where they’ll be sent when the shelter closes.
She also said the shelter’s restrictive rules sometimes create problems, including when her autistic son was moved to a different ward without her permission after they got into an argument one night.
Life in the Shelters
Rutter highlighted a series of issues when she was living at the Kraemer shelter until 2021, including no hot water, no access to electrical outlets and bans from leaving the shelter.
“You are not allowed to walk off the grounds,” she said.
She couldn’t sleep because she could hear other people crying and having nightmares.
“I’ll never forget hearing the women just weep at night,” she said.
Rutter highlighted her experience living in a homeless shelter in a 2019 community opinion article.
[Read: Rutter: I Am Not Homeless. I Am a Human Being]
Duran said he’s had to advocate for a diabetic man in a shelter to keep their insulin and get food they’re able to eat.
“What about the other 200 people in a shelter that don’t have an advocate?” Duran said.
“A shelter needs to be some place that’s safe, some place where people can recuperate, some place where people can safely eat and shower,” he continued. “That’s not what is happening. If you’re in a shelter, you sleep with one eye open.”
Reidy said she was sexually assaulted at the shelter and that a man exposed himself to her daughter as well.
When asked about Reidy’s assault, Timothy Huynh, chief programs officer for Mercy House, which runs the Homeaid shelter, said they were aware of her complaints about sexual assault but couldn’t share details publicly.
“We’ve done an expedient and thorough job to investigate those claims,” Huynh said. “We certainly are following up on any allegations of that type.”
He also acknowledged her son was moved to an adjoining sleeping unit after an argument between Reidy and her son.
“We don’t dictate necessarily to our parents how they discipline or if there are disagreements between a parent and a child, but as a shelter operator it’s important that those kids have beds to sleep in,” Huynh said.
Moving Out
But the HomeAid shelter in Orange also has some success stories, like Linda Callihan, who’s currently living at an affordable apartment in Orange with her husband and two children.
Callihan said she spent about nine months at the shelter before they found her housing after her family was forced to leave the RV they’d been living in in Buena Park due to health complications.
Callihan mentioned she was grateful for the shelter’s help, but also raised issues with staff members trying to intervene with their kids.
“There were some disagreements in terms of the staff members trying to parent our kids rather than letting us parent our kids,” Callihan said.
She said the shelter also helped set her up with rental assistance for the first few months after leaving, which runs out in June.
“We’ll be able to stay,” she said. “But it’ll be a challenge.”
Rutter pointed out how even with a housing voucher it’s hard to hang onto housing in Orange County, with many landlords wanting to still see a strong credit score, along with first and last month’s rent before they’ll consider a lease.
“It’s really sad to see how sheltered the public is from the reality of that underbelly of what’s going on,” Rutter said. “I can’t wash my homelessness off of me. It is still with me, no matter how many times I take a shower it will never go away.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.