This article was published in the Erie Times News on Sunday, July 2, 2011; by Gerry Weiss.

Erie Region’s Rural, Suburban Homelessness on the Rise

Some stay hidden and isolated, sleeping in barns or wooded areas, and don’t want to be found.

Some live “doubled-up” with friends or relatives, at times eight people staying in a two-bedroom apartment, before the homeless in the region’s rural communities eventually move on.

There’s the married couple in Girard Township that lives in their car. They’ve done this for at least three years, maybe longer.

She used to work as a cook in a bar. He was a security guard. The couple, in their late 40s, receive frequent help from a faith-based western Erie County clearinghouse.

Sometimes it’s money for car insurance or gas. Other times it’s assistance with prescription medication for the man’s mental-health issues.

There’s the woman in North East “doubled-up” with a few friends. She’s in her 30s, a single mother with three young children.

She’s embarrassed to tell people she’s homeless, and fears her kids would be teased and ridiculed at school if anyone knew her family’s plight.

The mindset in rural and suburban areas, local advocates say, is vastly different from the city when it comes to homelessness.

City of Erie homeless have several shelters, soup kitchens and social-service agencies they can easily access by bus, taxi or foot.

Erie County’s rural areas have no operating homeless shelters, county officials said. Families and individuals, young and old, often walk country roads, aimless and hopeless, strangers going unnoticed in one community after another.

While the mindset between rural and city homelessness differs, the bleak dilemma is the same.

Thousands more people in rural and suburban areas nationwide turned to homeless shelters for help in 2010 compared with 2007, the year the recession gripped America.

A recent report by the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department cited a 57 percent increase in the number of people using shelters or transitional housing in rural and suburban communities.

Families represent a much larger share of rural homelessness than ever before, the report said, with a majority of homeless families consisting of a single mother with young children.

Rural homeless hard to track

A combination of low-income levels, high poverty, a lack of jobs and the worst recession since the Great Depression have led to a recent rise in the Erie region’s homeless population.

About 1,600 people are homeless in Erie County, up 7 percent from 2010, and the numbers are projected to pass 2,000 in 2012, according to the county’s Department of Human Services.

Officials believe 90 percent of the county’s homeless population are in the city of Erie, and say it’s virtually impossible to establish a complete picture of rural and suburban homelessness in Erie County when there are no shelters and scarce services to keep track.

But nonprofit agencies, churches, and other groups that offer help to homeless in rural and suburban parts of Erie, Crawford and Warren counties say the population is increasing.

Calls for emergency assistance from homeless dealing with foreclosures and eviction notices are up 25 percent from 2010 at a community action agency in Warren.

The number of homeless children who are students in the North East School District have tripled in the past four years.

The Mental Health Association of Northwestern Pennsylvania, which runs an emergency warming shelter at 1101 Peach St. on frigid winter nights, saw a spike in homeless people who bus there from Millcreek and Lawrence Park townships.

St. James Haven, a homeless shelter at 169 Walnut St. in Meadville, has eight beds, not including a dilapidated bunk bed that is too rickety to use.

For the past two years, especially during the winter, the number of men showing up have exceeded the Haven’s bed capacity by two, sometimes three times, manager Epi Yasay said.

“We put them on couches and chairs, or on the floor with blankets and pillows. They don’t mind at all,” said Yasay, who has volunteered at the shelter for the past 13 years. “We don’t turn them away.”

Erie County’s Department of Human Services in January conducted its annual point-in-time survey, part of a nationwide count that aims to collect data that could help local agencies learn more about the homeless.

Mark Alexa, a housing specialist with the department, said tracking rural and suburban homelessness countywide only began in 2010, and that his office is still researching the population.

“Homeless people in rural areas don’t want anyone to find them,” Alexa said. “Even though they have no money and no job, if their basic needs are met by living in a neighbor’s barn or shed, they don’t consider themselves homeless.”

‘Not much out there for them’

Bill Grove, president of the local Mental Health Association, said rural homeless are further strained by the isolation of their communities and the lack of access to transportation.

“In terms of services, shelter, places to get help, there’s not much out there for them. Downtown Erie, if you’re homeless, you can walk to get help,” Grove said. “Some in the rural spots have a car, even live in a car, but with gas prices so high, these folks have access to a vehicle but probably not to the fuel.”

Jennie Ritter, an assistant principal at North East Middle School and the school district’s homeless liaison, said most homeless families in the eastern Erie County township “feel too embarrassed or ashamed” to ask for help.

“Many don’t know help is available,” said Ritter, who coordinates outreach efforts with North East churches, food pantries, thrift stores and volunteer fire departments to provide the homeless with food, clothing and housing assistance.

Fifteen of the district’s 1,700 students are homeless, Ritter said, a 200 percent increase from 2007.

“The more we get the word out about the young children suffering through this crisis the better we can try to meet their needs,” she added. “We have to erase the myth that homelessness out here is an old man living in a box in an alley.”

Love in the Name of Christ Inc., a Girard clearinghouse that has helped the poor in western Erie County for 20 years, annually serves about 500 people.

More than 100 are homeless, said Jan Dovichow, the group’s executive director.

“A lot of these folks don’t want to go to shelters in the city, even if I call and can find them a space,” she said.

The group, part of a national faith-based organization, is funded by more than two dozen area churches and several local businesses.

“They usually say ‘I don’t want my kids in that situation,’ or ‘I don’t know who is staying there.’ I think the city scares them. It’s a busy place with a lot of people,” Dovichow said. “They know these parts, and they’d rather take their chances out here.”

Diana Ames, a local homeless advocate and director of the Pennsylvania Coalition to End Homelessness, said funding is in short supply for shelters in rural areas to operate.

“It’s not something one person can easily do alone,” said Ames, an Erie resident who was temporarily homeless in the 1980s. “It needs community interest and community effort.”

That interest, and effort, has been under way in downtown Warren.

The former Faith Inn, a nine-apartment transitional housing facility that closed in 2009, is expected to reopen this summer, said Bob Raible, executive director of the Warren-Forest Counties Economic Opportunity Council.

The agency began renovating the building in the summer of 2010, a $325,000 project funded by state and federal grants and local donations.

“Our homeless population is not the same as the city of Erie’s. You don’t see a lot of people wandering the streets,” Raible said. “But we still have a problem. It’s just hidden.”

GERRY WEISS can be reached at 870-1884 or by e-mail.