Emergency shelter for women to open for summer as women with children overwhelm existing center.In yet another sign of rising demand on Charlotte's charities, the Emergency Winter Shelter will open today - for the summer - and soon fill with a record number of homeless women.
Many of them will be overflow from the Salvation Army's Center of Hope, a shelter for women (which also houses children) that is so crowded, it has been forced to bed people on the floors.
This is the third year in a row the winter shelter at 3410 Statesville Avenue has been opened for the summer. But things are different this time around, says Deronda Metz of the Center of Hope.
Capacity is being increased by 25 percent, to mirror the rise in numbers at the Center of Hope this past year.
There's also a cash shortage to contend with. It's estimated that operating the winter shelter through Sept. 1 will cost about $105,000.
However, Metz only has $80,000, which is left over from a pool of money used to operate a temporary shelter for families at Hall House , which will close later this month.
Metz is hoping the community will help close the funding gap in coming weeks.
"We always see a rise in the number of homeless women and children during warmer months," says Metz. "It went up about 17 percent last year, when school let out. We believe it's because people have been doubling up during the winter.
"But when school closes and the weather is warmer, the people they've been staying with don't feel as guilty about putting them out of the house," Metz said.
Also a factor is the tough choice some single moms must make between keeping a low-paying job and taking care of children who are out of school for the summer.
The Center of Hope currently shelters 310 women and children (a 22 percent increase) at two sites. Opening the Emergency Winter Shelter will allow Metz to move women without children from the Salvation Army center. A plan has been approved to move the women from the emergency shelter to another seasonal shelter on Sept. 1.
"We have a strategy," says Metz. "When you are working with human beings, you can't tell them the building closes on a particular day, leaving them with the anxiety of not knowing what will happen. You always need to have an outcome. Not just a start date and a stop date."
Such creative thinking is needed because of a critical shortage of shelter space, said Liz Clasen-Kelly of the Urban Ministry Center. It's estimated there are 5,000 to 8,000 homeless men and women in the Charlotte community.
"This is a great solution we have for women, but we still have a lot of men on the street," she says. "Our community is resourceful and creative, but we can only do it to a point. We really do have a shelter crisis. Our capacity has hardly increased in the past decade, but the homeless population has."
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