Share's crowded basement cafeteria is going to accommodate day lockers and lots more foot traffic after the agency closes its outreach trailers later this month. Downtown Vancouver will see a rise in transient traffic too, officials warn.
The people who run Share Inc. are expecting lots of complaints this fall from people wondering where all the homeless suddenly came from.
They’ve been here all along, of course, but Share has been able to help steer them off the streets and provide a home base of sorts: The Share Outreach facility, a pair of double-wide trailers across the street from the main Share House at 1115 W. 13th St.
At Share Outreach, homeless people could take showers, use day lockers, get mail and bus tickets, and talk with staff members about their plans and needs. They couldn’t hang out indefinitely, but they could spend a little time pulling themselves together and getting ready to face the world.
On Sept. 23, those trailers will shut down and move away after a nearly two-year run. Share, Vancouver’s largest provider of services to the hungry and homeless, will move some key outreach services to its main building, but others will go away for good.
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Share officials are expecting a glut of new homeless traffic in its downstairs dining and laundry areas — as well as a glut of new homeless traffic throughout downtown Vancouver.
“There’s going to be an appearance that there are many more homeless people on the streets,” said Share spokeswoman Jessica Lightheart. “There are not any more of them, but they are going to be a lot more visible.”
‘Pretty cramped’
A pair of city of Vancouver grants worth $172,000, which helped Share pay the outreach’s trailer lease as well as various other services and programs, is winding down. Share’s already busy basement cafeteria floor, where it serves three free hot meals daily, will absorb some of the functions the trailers provided, such as day lockers, case management and mail deliveries.
Moving the day lockers into the cafeteria will make it “pretty cramped in there,” said program director Amy McReynolds.
Showers and bathrooms will continue too — but just barely. Share House’s own showers can’t handle the approximately 4,000 free showers per year that Share Outreach was providing, McReynolds said. Now, just a handful of showers will be available per week, and only to people who earn the right by doing some street-level work.
“Originally we thought we’d just close the showers but it seems like the most unbearable thing,” McReynolds said. “I feel showers and bathrooms are important to the community.”
Share is eager to hear from any other downtown facilities — charities, businesses or the city itself — that could make up the shower gap. No luck so far. (The drop-in fee at the city’s Marshall Recreation Center, entitling the payer access to facilities including showers, is $5.50.)
Meanwhile, McReynolds said, bathrooms and plumbing at Share House “may need some fixing up” to handle the greater volume.
The outreach trailers served 1,400 different people last year, McReynolds said.
Distribution of free travel tickets will stop cold at the end of this year. There’ll be no more C-Tran fares getting homeless folks to local appointments and no more one-way Amtrak fares sending them places where they’ve got connections and hope.
That will certainly contribute to more homeless people populating downtown sidewalks and parks, McReynolds said.
Searching for help
Street outreach workers will accelerate their push to identify street people and steer them to the services they need, McReynolds said. Share’s new helper with this effort is a single netbook laptop computer donated by Sharp Microelectronics. Outreach workers can use it to link with other agencies and search for services street people might need.
“Share Outreach isn’t closing,” said McReynolds. “It still has funding from the city and it’s still serving people on the streets.”
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But keeping the trailers open just isn’t affordable anymore, she said. Instead, Share hopes to move its outreach effort next year to a building it bought in 2008 in central Vancouver — the former Timber Lanes bowling alley on Andresen Road. Offices for Share administration and client case management, a food warehouse and a volunteer center are already planned for the former bowling alley; now Share will try to operate the outreach there too, even though transients tend to congregate on the west side and downtown, at least partially because of Share’s own hot meal offerings there.
Neighbors of Leverich Park and the Burnt Bridge Creek trail, where homeless tend to congregate and camp, also may not appreciate the outreach moving east toward the central city and drawing more traffic with them.
If that even happens, McReynolds said. “We’re skeptical but we’re willing to try it,” she said.
Share is often hamstrung by the government grants it gets, according to McReynolds, which are dedicated to particular programs or ventures and forbidden from being shuffled to anything else. That’s why Share has had money to buy an old bowling alley or maintain a daily food program on one hand, while being unable to afford a lease for its outreach trailers on the other.
A program for street people “has been the hardest thing to get money for,” said Lightheart, because its clientele is so unglamorous. “But when the program is curtailed, people will notice the difference.”
Share is also facing the closure of the smallest of its four homeless shelters — a site in the Minnehaha area that houses 13 battered women each night — and transitional housing support for women living in local apartments. A donor is interested in underwriting the operation for one year, McReynolds said, but a deal hasn’t been closed yet.
