The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

St. Vincent’s 2 shelters serve record numbers

Video: Record numbers flock to shelter

E-mail this page

Updated 10:48 PM Thursday, January 7, 2010

St. Vincent de Paul Society’s two shelters welcomed 399 homeless people Wednesday night, Jan. 6 — a record number — but there’s still room at the inn.

“We’re at full capacity, but we will do everything possible to make sure no one gets turned away,” said Lisa Glandon, director of marketing and development for St. Vincent de Paul of Dayton.

Kaitlyn Parker, 21, admits the overcrowding can make things uncomfortable. “But I have a roof over my head, a bed, and food to eat,” she said. “I’m 100 percent grateful. It could be so much worse. You could be living under a bridge.”

She knows what she’s talking about. Before landing at St. Vincent she stayed for two nights in the “Tent City” nestled between the Great Miami River and the St. Vincent Gateway shelter on Apple Street. “I was wearing those nonstick safety shoes and my feet froze,” Parker said.

She said she couldn’t sleep because of highway noise — and fears of who might be lurking nearby.

Even the hardiest souls have abandoned Tent City, where most of the tents have collapsed under the weight of the snow.

“There are people outside who do decide to come in,” Glandon acknowledged, but for the most part it’s not the weather that causes the shelter numbers to fluctuate.

She said that the two shelters operated by St. Vincent’s are seeing the greatest increases in older men and women who “are forced to choose between their housing cost and their medicine.”

Glandon said she hopes some of the older men will be able to move to permanent housing at Lyons Place on Hoover Avenue in West Dayton when the $9 million, 67-unit complex, run by St. Mary Development Corp., opens in February. Seven residents from the Gettysburg Gateway men’s shelter already have applied to live there.

The night before the storm, St. Vincent’s housed 249 men, 80 women and 24 families — a 78 percent increase from the same night last year.

Deanna Hicks, 46, and Lisa Van Epps, 44, are lifelong friends and former housemates who lost their jobs about the same time they were given 30-days’ notice of their apartment being torn down. They shared math notes in junior high school, and now they’ve shared living quarters at the homeless shelter for 15 months.

“Too long,” Van Epps said wearily.

Hicks can’t find work.

“I’ve looked everywhere, and there’s nothing,” she lamented. “I used to feel so sorry for those homeless people in the bad weather. Little did I know ...”

Nikki Fernandez, 40, has lived at the shelter for four months and wholeheartedly endorses St. Vincent’s open-door policy. She can’t find work because of multiple health conditions. In the outside world, she said, too many people treat a homeless person “like you’re a disease.”

Not here. “I feel safe and secure here,” she said. “I thank God for this place and the people who work here. And I wouldn’t want them to turn anyone away.”

For more information on how to help, visit www.stvincentdayton.org.

Share this article