Cities offer homeless free storage

Last Thanksgiving, Phillip Black says most of his belongings were thrown away by the police.

Police told Black they mistook the bags in a Whole Foods shopping cart for trash. "I couldn't even enjoy my Thanksgiving," he says.

Finding a place to safely leave possessions is one of many challenges homeless people face each day, homeless advocates say. Some cities, including Portland, Ore., St. Petersburg, Fla., New York, San Francisco and Chicago are trying to help people in Black's situation by offering free storage space to the homeless.

This month, Portland became the latest city to begin offering free cubicles where up to 50 homeless individuals can store a shopping cart and other possessions, city Housing Commissioner Nick Fish says.

Portland contributed $30,000 and the Portland Business Alliance contributed $8,000 to the center that is designed to be a temporary solution until a new Resource Access Center opens next summer, Fish says. The goal is to give people a place to keep belongings safe from theft and bad weather while they go to appointments or job interviews, as well as to keep piles of belongings from blocking the streets, he says.

The need for storage space is dire among the homeless population, but in most places, if shelters offer storage at all, the units are too small to do much good, says Tulin Ozdeger, civil rights program director for the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. City-sponsored programs remain rare, she says.

Many homeless individuals end up paying for storage and spending thousands of dollars that could have gone toward a home, says Neil Donovan, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. If they cannot afford storage, it is very likely their identification and important belongings will be lost, forcing them to start from scratch, he says.

"Their memories, their investments, books and things like that are dismissed with," Donovan says.

New York City offers to pay the bill for a homeless person's use of any local storage facility, says Seth Diamond, commissioner of the New York City Department of Homeless Services. The city is hoping to transition the program and establish a few specific commercial storage facilities to work with throughout the city, Diamond says.

Until everyone has a home to return to, free storage at least allows people to keep their prized possessions, says Nancy Radner, CEO of the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness.

She says she once met a struggling family with two young boys, each clutching an Xbox gaming system. "It was a symbol of the middle class they had just left that they were very much trying to hold on to," Radner says.

Source Article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-11-18-homelessstorage18_ST_N.htm