Is a shelter a safe place for people experiencing homelessness during the coronavirus pandemic?
That’s the question Santa Monica’s homeless outreach workers are grappling with as they try to bring people inside amid an outbreak of a disease that could devastate the homeless population, which is disproportionately older and likely to suffer from chronic health conditions, and has the potential to spread quickly through institutional settings such as shelters.
Shelters have taken precautions against coronavirus, spreading beds at least six feet apart, providing hygiene kits, sanitizing shared surfaces and providing masks to residents when available.
No clients of The People Concern, which operates Santa Monica’s three main shelters, have tested positive for coronavirus, but a few had displayed symptoms, executive director John Maceri said last week.
Throughout Los Angeles County, 18 people experiencing homelessness have tested positive for coronavirus as of Friday, including three shelter residents.
Maceri said The People Concern’s unhoused clients have expressed anxiety about the virus and the shutdown of restaurants and libraries, which has made it difficult for them to find food and connect to online resources. People residing in the organization’s shelters have told Maceri that they feel safer indoors and are less worried about contracting the virus.
“The interim housing residents … are handling it much better than our unsheltered clients,” he said.
But some outreach workers say their clients are skeptical that they will be able to avoid catching coronavirus in a shelter environment.
Zachary Coil, who leads the Santa Monica branch of The People Concern’s C3 Team, said he has been placing vulnerable individuals in Westside motels because many clients have told him they wouldn’t feel safe in a shelter.
“There’s a reasonable argument to make that putting 100 people inside a big room and expecting them to physically distance themselves from each other at all times is unrealistic,” he said. “People are definitely better off in a motel than in a shelter.”
In the first few weeks of the local outbreak, officials emphasized the need to bring people experiencing homelessness indoors immediately. The city of Los Angeles turned 16 recreation centers into temporary shelters with a combined 1,100 beds. One newly-opened shelter in Granada Hills reported that a resident tested positive last week, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Now, county officials are focusing on scaling up efforts to put vulnerable people experiencing homelessness in hotels and motels.
Heidi Marston, interim executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, said Wednesday that the agency is trying to secure 15,000 rooms as part of the state’s “Project Roomkey” effort and will have more than 1,700 rooms online by next week.
Marston said the 15,000-room goal is based on the number of people experiencing homelessness in L.A. County who are older than 65 or have chronic health conditions. Roughly 60,000 people are homeless in the county and more than 70% of them are unsheltered.
Each hotel will have 24-hour security, homeless services organizations will serve residents three meals a day in their rooms, and nurses will monitor the temperatures of residents and staff.
Residents will be expected to abide by the stay at home order and physically distance themselves from others, Marston said.
In the meantime, Coil said outreach teams will have to help address a deeper shortage of food available to the unsheltered population as restaurants close, grocery stores run out of non-perishable goods and food pantries struggle to accommodate a sudden influx of people who have lost work amid the pandemic.
With very few people out on the street, panhandling to get money for food has become nearly impossible, he added.
“The hunger is much more dire than usual,” he said.
madeleine@smdp.com
