ATLANTA — Every year the state surveys the unhoused population and the resources to help. On the night of the count in Atlanta, the city reported 33% of its emergency shelter beds were not being used.
That statistic might lead one to believe there are more beds than need, but 11Alive’s investigative team found out firsthand, the data isn’t telling the real story.
Melissa Becker reached out to 11Alive’s Savannah Levins to see if she had any contacts that could help her get into a homeless shelter. Levins did a story several years ago about a cold case involving her son’s murder.
Both Levins and Becker started making phone calls to area shelters, but it was Sunday and they were closed.
On Monday, when the shelters did have intake, all of the beds were allotted before Becker could get there. Neither had any luck on Tuesday either.
“I knew it was going to be scary. But I just felt if I showed up, basically did what was asked of me, that I would have a social worker help me in finding a solution,” said Becker.
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Becker wasn’t comfortable sleeping on the streets downtown so she took a bus north to sleep on a concrete bench at a MARTA bus station.
“It became like critical not only for hydration, for water, for food, but for that sleep. That lack of sleep, it accumulates,” said Becker who until this point had never been unhoused before.
Becker also struggled to maintain communication. She ran out of data on her phone and there was nowhere to plug it in to keep it charged.
By Friday, 11Alive’s Rebecca Lindstrom was also involved trying to figure out why it was so difficult to find her a safe place to sleep. Lindstrom picked Becker up before dawn and took her to MUST Ministries in Cobb County. There she watched as the line waiting for intake grew.
“I think it’s all the unknowns that makes it so bad,” Becker said to another man waiting in line. “Is this the right choice at this moment in time?”
Learned through trial and error, lines for shelter start hours before the doors open. Emergency shelter beds are first come first serve. Becker was not the only one trying to get in.
“The demand is staggering. It's growing by the day,” said Ike Reighard the CEO of MUST Ministries.
He says once in the shelter, people can stay for 30 days but when the shelter’s full, new people can’t come in, until someone leaves.
“The hardest job at MUST is the person who has to look at someone and go, 'we don't have any more beds,'” said Reighard.
MUST says it served 2,384 people in the shelter in its last fiscal year, not counting families who were sheltered in area hotels because the facility was full, or those that stayed in the warming or cooling centers.
Cathryn Vassell, the CEO of Partners for Home, the non-profit that put together the Point In Time report for Atlanta, says the demand on shelter services can vary by the time of year, think extreme heat or cold. She said shelters with the fewest ‘barriers’ have a higher utilization rate than the overall average published in the report.
Vassell said during periods of high demand, some beds may go empty because the people in that line don’t fit the shelter’s criteria.
“I really think we need the will among some of our providers to be willing to change the way their front door operates,” said Vassell.
Some cater to a specific gender or only families. Most will screen to make sure those seeking shelter are not actively using drugs and alcohol, or have a severe mental illness. Some require an appointment or referral to even be considered for shelter. 11Alive noted several shelters that require the inquiry to come by email, something that would never have worked with Becker.
Vassell said it’s that intake process that risks leaving shelter beds empty. It’s not just the rules, it’s also the time intake occurs.
Most shelters fill their empty beds in the morning. When curfew rolls around at night, not everyone returns which means those unexpected empty beds go unused even when someone like Becker is right outside.
“It’s really, really frustrating to think you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing and you’re desperately needing help, yet it still seems not to be obtainable,” said Becker.
Right now, when someone gets turned away there’s no one who can say if tomorrow will be better or if a shelter down the road has space. 11Alive realized a person only really had one shot each day because intake happens around the same time at every location.
“It’s not like you could go to one and if that didn’t work out, go to the next one, wait in line because you would be too late by the time you got there,” said Levins.
“We should be eliminating that burden," Vassell said, "to streamline the process and make it as easy as possible."
Vassell adds at a time when people can go online to book a vacation, shelters should be able to create a portal that allows people to find a shelter bed when they need one.
“We are definitely striving to get there,” said Vassell, who says she shared that vision at a recent luncheon to see if shelters would be willing to come onboard.
Cobb County, where MUST is just one of the shelters available, reported a higher emergency bed utilization during its Point In Time count, 81%.
Reighard said the growing need stems in large part to a lack of affordable housing and that hospitals are also trying to figure out what to do when someone is medically ready to leave but has no where to go.
“We have days that Ubers will pull up and someone will step out and still have on their bracelet from the hospital, because the hospital has sent them here to us to try to find a place to house them,” he explained.
For five hours Becker waited with everything she still owned packed in two bags. When the gates opened, the chaos began. People cut in line desperate to get in.
At first, it looked like Becker would have to spend the weekend sleeping on the streets before she could try again on Monday. Thankfully, MUST found another bed.
“The fact there are so many shelters with hundreds of beds all over the metro Atlanta area and it took us a week to get one woman a roof over her head was mind blowing to me,” said Levins.
The Way Home: Is an 11Alive News Investigates series examining why tents line our freeways and families struggle to find stable housing.