by Sarah Gerard
“The guy with the bald head and the black shirt,” Jake says, gesturing to a man conferring with a cluster of residents. “His name is Charlie. He’s the case manager for the folks that are living outside here. He’s employed by WestCare. His whole focus out here is the folks that have substance abuse—the great majority, I don’t have any numbers on it, but I would say easily estimated at about ninety percent of our folks have mental illness. And ninety percent of those folks are treating that with substance abuse, or are unwilling to get treatment. So, those are the folks that don’t want to follow the rules, so those are the folks that wind up out here.”
Safe Harbor works on a reward/punishment model. The philosophy is that clients are rewarded for good behavior with increasing levels of comfort, the pinnacle of which is housing. Likewise, they’re penalized for not working hard enough, coming back drunk, or behaving badly inside—they go back to the outdoor pod.
“We want to move them in as fast as we can,” Jake says, “so Charlie’s out here, and me and him are in communication every day. Who can we get moved inside? Who might not have come back sober last night, but if we move them inside, will they come back sober? A little carrot on the end of a stick to get people to do something right.”
It occurs to me that Jake might have it all backward. As we pass the check-in area on our way inside, I remember something G.W. said after that breakfast a few weeks ago. We’d finished cleaning and gone outside for a cigarette. He pointed to a man I’d met earlier, JR, who’d had the same hip replaced twice, had diabetes, and walked with a cane.
“JR, they cut off three of his toes, but he’s not sick enough to qualify for a disability check,” he said.37 “He sleeps on the sidewalk every day, goes to the hospital every day so they can infuse him with antibiotics” after an infection hospitalized him for weeks. “Every day! Tell me you’re not going to have something alcoholic to negotiate the sidewalk.”
Many substance abuse experts agree with G.W.38 Substance abuse is both a cause and result of homelessness, and the majority of people abusing substances on the street are mentally ill, so treating substance abuse alone is inadequate; it must be tackled alongside homelessness simultaneously.39 As G.W. says, put them in a house and wrap services around them, and ensure that they can’t lose their house no matter what.40 Only once people are safe and secure in their living arrangements can they focus on themselves. This approach is commonly known as “housing first.” It proceeds from the idea that housing is a human right and not a privilege.41 For the last ten years or so, it has been widely acknowledged as the only effective way of ending homelessness.42
Safe Harbor is stark: The hallway and floors are concrete. A central hallway connects the whole building. Rows of lockers line either side. People are busy painting the walls yellow as we move through. We pass an inmate from the jail employed by Safe Harbor. Inmates come over to do the cleaning and the chores that Safe Harbor doesn’t encourage residents to do, Jake explains, because—he lowers his voice—sometimes people are lazy. They can ensure that an inmate is going to get up and do the work. Low-custody, nonproblematic, low-flight-risk guys doing six months or less. These men have never had drug arrests, and they have never been to the shelter before, so they don’t know the ins and outs of it—they’re unlikely to steal things or traffic drugs. They work for eight hours a day; then they walk back to the jail.
Jake stops in front of a large open area used for storage. An office stands on either side of the entryway; caseworkers share one, and twenty-five interns from the public defender’s internship program share the other. The open area is where classes take place: work readiness, addiction recovery, and budgeting among them. Donations of clothing, bicycles, and food are received here. Clients can stay as long as they want so long as the staff sees that they’re trying, Jake says. They also discourage clients from doing only temporary work and day labor. They want them to succeed, and they tell them to go if that’s the only work they can get—but it’s not going to get them off the streets and keep a roof over their heads. It’s going to keep them in shelters.
“A lot of our folks show up, sometimes, they’ve been living in the woods or off the grid for the last ten, fifteen years,” Jake says. “They have no work history, they have no ID, they have no social security card, they have no birth certificate. They walk in the door and they’re a clean slate. They have to work very hard to get all those things; it’s hard post–9/11 in this country. They’re going to sit for six to maybe eight weeks.” Only then can they send them out to find a job.
Three pods house men, and one houses women. Numbered areas taped along the concrete floor designate sleeping assignments—clients sleep on thin, hospital-blue, plastic-covered mats like the kind you see in correctional settings. This saves the county money and prevents bugs from spreading.
“At the same time, we don’t want [clients] to be so comfortable that they don’t want to leave,” Jake says. “A mattress on a floor, it’s not glamorous. But it’s not a bus stop, it’s not their car, and it’s not jail.”
Clients shower and shave in communal bathrooms. Plastic tables and chairs fill the center of the room, on the far side of which a door leads out to a fenced-in rec yard, open twenty-four hours a day for people to smoke a cigarette, clear their heads, “do what they got to do.” These people have a lot on their minds. Safe Harbor sees a lot of people that are waiting on Social Security Disability Insurance approval, for instance. That process can take a long time, from two months to two years. “If they’re unable to work and being advised by their lawyer not to work, it’s tough to get them money,” Jake says. The county has disability advocates—Safe Harbor encourages people who haven’t yet secured a lawyer to go through the county because it’s a lot faster. If a client has an external attorney, sometimes they can wait two years before getting approved.43 Still, even people going through the county are usually turned down the first few times they apply for disability. Once they have their meeting with a judge, it takes another sixty days to get a decision.
“So, what’s their recourse in the meantime?” Jake says. “They bounce from shelter to shelter.”
I ask why the process takes so long.
“Ask the federal government,” he says. “I don’t know.”
I ask if these are people with legitimate disabilities.
“I don’t want to say ‘legitimate disability’ because the judge is saying they don’t have a legitimate disability,” he says. “But, you know, they present as disabled. They’ve got a walker, they’ve got medical records to show they’re disabled.”
We continue down the hallway. In a separate pod, veterans and people who work or go to school full-time have the privilege of sleeping on real beds whenever they want to—that’s the third tier of the program, after sleeping outside and sleeping on a mat on the concrete floor.
The last pod is the women’s. There are more than four men for every one woman at Safe Harbor, roughly representative of the homeless population as a whole. Men and women are not allowed in each other’s pods. Jake hollers as we step inside: “Male coming in, ladies.”
A woman sits alone at one of the tables doing a crossword.
“Twenty-four/seven, doesn’t matter what time of day it is, there’s always a woman sitting here,” he says. “Not because we tell them to—they’re very protective over their area. A lot of them are victims of different things.”
On our way back to the intake area, Jake stops by his office. A daily count of Safe Harbor’s veterans hangs near the door. The number hovers between thirty-five and forty on any given day.
“We don’t do follow-up case management,” Jake says, handing me a business card. “So, once somebody walks out the door and has other resources to follow, unless they come back, we don’t know about them.”
I ask if that’s because they don’t always know how to reach them.
“I don’t have the funds, I don’t have the availability. No staff, no money for it. It’s not something
we’re interested in. We’re primarily here to keep people out of jail.”
I ask him how well he gets to know the people who come here.
“Some of them, we’ll see them for two weeks, they save up enough money to put down that first, last, whatever, they’re out the door, we never see them again,” he says, leaving me at the outdoor pod. “I’ve been at Safe Harbor for two years. Some of them I’ve known since I started at the sheriff’s office thirteen years ago. They’re in and out of jail all the time. They’re starting over in life for the seventeenth time. Some folks—when we’re talking about the level of mental illness, substance abuse issues that these folks have—are in and out. They’re trying over again and again.”
The following Saturday, I arrive again at G.W.’s breakfast at eight o’clock. Pastor Tom Snapp is sitting outside the elevator in the fellowship hall. Snapp is part of Celebrate Outreach, the consortium of churches that hosts the breakfast and dinner, along with G.W. and fourteen other local faith workers. Snapp is frail, in the early stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He sits in the hall and counts the people who enter, and gives counsel while the others serve breakfast. People know to come up to him for guidance. This morning, I stand by while he talks to a man whose wife has a developmental disability. “I married them,” he tells me later. “Right here on the stage.”44
The kitchen is lime green and outfitted with two refrigerators, a large restaurant-style grill, a row of industrial sinks, and an island counter. G.W. is goofing around with a couple of volunteers. One stands at the grill frying potatoes. One is cutting corn bread. Another is doing the dishes. Two serving trays of eggs sit atop a plastic rolling cart at the edge of the grill, one with ham and cheese, the other plain. A large bowl of cut fruit sits covered in plastic on the island next to a serving tray of grits. A pot of coffee collects condensation near the door. I watch as the volunteers finish preparations and wheel the food out to the plastic tables lined up under the windows. We circle up again for a prayer.
G.W. begins. “If you pray for something and you believe in it, and act towards it, you can get that thing,” he says. “This breakfast ain’t nowhere near being over. Lack of money ain’t never stopped me from doing nothing.”45
People look at one another.
“If we have to do the grits like we do the eggs now, we can do that. I got stuff. And I can make pancakes from scratch. We might not have eggs every week, but we’ll just have faith. We don’t need eggs for breakfast every week,” he says.
He steps back into the circle. We all take hands. Tom Snapp speaks, “Lord God, we thank you that we’re here today. We ask you to send funds for this breakfast, that we can continue. We thank you for those who have come to serve, and those who have come to prepare, and those who’ve come to eat. Bless us all with your grace and presence and love. We pray in Jesus’s name. Amen.”
We wear plastic gloves and greet each person. Again I serve grits. Some people ask for the grits on top of their eggs. Some crack jokes. Some prefer not to make eye contact. I recognize a woman with paint around her mouth from the last Saturday, and a man who wears his bandana down over his eyes. Couples move through the line together, bickering or talking sweetly, holding plates for each other. About 150 people attend the breakfast each week, and more toward the end of the month before they get their government checks. It costs $240 to feed them all,46 some of which comes from grants, but most of which came from the budget of Trinity Lutheran Church and the congregation doesn’t want to pay anymore.
“It’s been going for six years,” says Tom Snapp, counting as people file out of the elevator. “G.W. started it. We’ve got enough for one more week. I made an appeal to the congregation several months ago, and they gave a couple thousand dollars. But you know, at two hundred forty dollars a week, it goes quickly, and I don’t think the congregation’s in a mood right now to want to shell out more and more.”47
We get to the end of the line and start serving seconds. As the food runs out, volunteers carry away the trays. A few people come back with empty pastry containers and ask for food to go, for friends who couldn’t make it this morning.
“Everyone consistently says it’s the best breakfast in town,”48 G.W. tells me later, smoking out on the steps. It rained during the breakfast and the sidewalks are heating up, making the air kind of balmy. People mill around the church entrance, sleepy after filling their bellies. “St. Vincent was never a breakfast place. They’ll give you a frozen bagel and a hunk of cream cheese. Watery coffee. And just call it breakfast. This breakfast is made with love and care. The cooks are real good, you know? I’m kick-ass. Now I train other people to do it because I don’t believe in top-down solutions. I don’t believe in solutions that are brought to you by a committee that doesn’t have any skin in the game.”
G.W.’s most recent episode of homelessness began in St. Petersburg in 1998. He was living in a mother-in-law apartment behind a house, and it burned down. He was cooking then, in various beachside restaurants, and doing the books for his landlord, who managed some small companies. He lost everything he owned in the fire. He thought he could get another place immediately—then he lost his job. Then someone stole his belongings while he was sleeping. He couldn’t clean himself, nor present himself as a chef. He lived on the streets for the next eight years.
“When I was homeless,” he says, “the people who were lying on either side of me were coming to shake the bush, to get me out of the bush, so that I could take a birdbath and go cook for people.”
He’s interrupted by his phone ringing. On the other end, a woman he’s known for years asks him for money. She secured supportive housing through Boley, a local agency that serves people with mental illness. But she’s brought another family to live with her—eight additional people, along with her and her daughter—and her government check has run out. G.W. tells her he’ll meet her later.
“I’m just scared they’re going to get kicked out,” he says, hanging up. He puts out his cigarette, collecting his thoughts. “The power of transformation is the power that people have already inside themselves that they’re not aware of, that hasn’t been exploited,” he says. “If you don’t identify power in somebody and give them power, then you haven’t transformed power. I feed people, but I usually call it food sharing, or food distribution. Because when you ‘feed people,’ they sound like animals in a zoo. The only responsibility that they have is to accept the food, eat it, and chew. I try to make people see that we’re feeding each other.”
So the breakfast helps him, too, I say.
“I’d take a bullet for every single one of them,” he says. “I wasn’t religious when I was on the street. I was just trying to be a good guy. Just trying to be a factotum—the barber of Seville, you know? Invent a constituency of people and deal with them every day, their pains and their dealings. I had all this time, and time is a killer. Time on the street? What are you gonna do on the street? Ed the Mop, he comes here every Saturday and he mops the floor. He stayed in there and cleaned up as long as he could today, and now he’s on the street. So what is he gonna do? Gonna wait for supper somewhere, and just idle away his time.”
I ask him what it’s like trying to find a job when you’re living outside.
“It’s futile, mostly. Nobody’s going to hire a homeless person. A lot of people, when they get inside, they just erase the evidence that they were homeless, but I didn’t do that. It’s hard to have a society when you get out of homelessness. Who are your friends going to be? I turned around and walked back to the people.”
A woman has joined us on the steps. “Can I say something, a thing you said that was true?” she says. “You’re right, when people are homeless and they get off the street, a lot of times they do separate themselves. Half the time, they do so because they don’t want to be reminded of the hardship. Of sleeping in the rain.”
G.W. nods. “I really believe that three or four years down the road, homelessness will end,” he says. “I re
ally believe that God brought me to this point, and to this particular place, so that I could contribute toward the end of homelessness.”
I ask him how homelessness is going to end.
“We have the money to end homelessness now,” he says. “We have to provide affordable housing. And if we are successful in the argument of supplying affordable housing, and making sure that everybody has a means to get it, homelessness will end. But we have to come up with a story. We have to have a story that resonates with people who will say, ‘Yeah, man, we’re the richest country in the world. Why are people sleeping on the street?’ The enemy has sown weeds in the wheat saying, ‘They want to, or they’re drunks.’ Even if they’re drunk, they shouldn’t be sleeping on the street. Most drunks live inside.”
In 2014, three years after he initiated the program, the City of St. Petersburg called Marbut back for a follow-up evaluation.49 The homeless problem was creeping back in; people were again congregating in Williams Park, and downtown business owners were complaining of people loitering outside their storefronts. While Marbut claimed the city’s nighttime population of homeless people had decreased, the county’s point-in-time count showed that the number of people experiencing homelessness in Pinellas County hadn’t changed—it had just moved north from St. Petersburg into the area around Safe Harbor, much to the dismay of High Point residents nearby.50 The problem overall had gotten worse: That January, Homeless Leadership Board volunteers counted 5,887 total homeless individuals in Pinellas County51—exactly what they’d counted in 201152 when they built the shelter. From 720 unsheltered people that year,53 they were now up to 1,178.54 Over 2,500 of those counted were children.55 Half of those counted lived in St. Petersburg.56
