Read Part One
The old Black Hawk Mini Park on the Iowa City pedestrian mall was the distribution point, the place for the drop.
It was mid-November and a mild autumn was giving way to winter. About a dozen men milled around waiting to get a bag. There were a lot of sweatshirts, flannel and thick beards. A few men were sitting on a bench near one of those purple-painted parking meters soliciting coins to help the homeless that was installed in June, after panhandling was banned.
“This just saved me 80 bucks!” said a man hoisting a large black sleeping bag wrapped tight in a pack to a friend as he walked away.
It probably saved him more, since these “arctic sleep systems” retail for $450, but Pastor Michael Langer was able to get a dozen of them from military surplus for $175 each.
From his jeans and canvas sneakers and rainbow-colored stocking hat, Michael Langer does not look a clergyman straight out of central casting.
“You understand how this works, right?” Langer asked a man in a hooded sweatshirt and a MIA/POW baseball hat. “You can’t dry clean it because that will ruin the Gore-Tex.”
Langer insisted that the bags be top-quality and tough.
“These aren’t cheap $15 sleeping bags from Walmart,” Langer said. “This isn’t car camping for the weekend. They’ll put a blue tarp over the top, and that will be their house for the winter.”
Langer cites Biblical precedent for this: Jesus gave the poor the best stuff, the good wine, etc. He dealt in premium goods, never offering half measures. He says his congregation is small–services are held at the city recreation center–but it doesn’t lack for ambition. They want to do all they can to make sure no homeless person freezes to death this winter. “Not on my watch,” Langer said.
Iowa City’s renovated and recently opened 70-bed Shelter House not only offers more than twice as many safe places to sleep as the old shelter, but it offers an abundance of helping services. Still there is a remnant of the local homeless population that–for whatever reason–is not likely to stay at this shelter. Some are fiercely proud of their independence. Some have social phobias or other mental health problems or they aren’t ready to give up drink or drugs (sobriety is required at Shelter House) for the prospect of shelter.
Langer focuses his effort on this subset of the homeless population. Langer asked a homeless man who goes by “Dog” how many local homeless men and women would sleep outside all winter. Dog said a dozen. Langer returned three weeks later with the sleeping bags.
Langer made arrangements with Dog to be there at 6:30 p.m. on the dot and Dog rounded up everyone who needed a sleeping bag.
“Dog saw me coming up Washington and he immediately signaled to the guys, ‘Get up. Stand up, walk to this guy.’ And before I’d even handed out the first bag, Dog was saying, ‘You need to tell this man “thank you” before you take this bag. You need to say, “thank you” to this man.’”
Dog remembers when Iowa City’s Shelter House on North Gilbert Street allowed homeless men to drop in and sleep on the porch, but that was a long time ago. For years that old house had all its beds full and a collection of churches around downtown sheltered the overflow as best they could during the winter months.
Dog has a bright beard and smiling eyes. He talks about riding trains and travelling all over the country. He praises the drop-in shelter model of places like New York City, where a place to sleep is provided no questions asked. He likes the tent cities that they have for the homeless in Las Vegas. Dog likes his freedom and doesn’t like the rules and structure of Iowa City’s Shelter House, oriented as it is toward pushing people towards stability–sobriety, a conventional job and an apartment. He says they take any money you make.
Shelter House director Chrissi Canganelli says it is not the case that Shelter House “takes” clients’ money, but she confirms that it is expected that in exchange for staying at the shelter rent-free, clients are expected to save 75% of their income towards setting themselves up to live independently.
Canganelli says Shelter House offers an abundance of programs to help people but it “most definitely is not for everyone,” and clients must submit to the guidelines.
“If you’re going to stay here, these are our rules. And it’s invasive, and people have to make a decision.”
While the new Shelter House has more beds than the old one, soon they will fill, too. Canganelli says that without rules and the use of “carrots and sticks,” intended to encourage people to put their resources into ultimately moving on out of Shelter House, more deserving people will be unable to get help.
As for Dog’s wish that there be a more no-questions-asked approach to offering shelter, without requiring sobriety, Canganelli says that is not possible at Shelter House.
“People want both, don’t they?” Canganelli says. “Well you can’t have both. You can’t be all things to all people.”
She says sometimes communities have contradictory expectations. One minute, shelters will be criticized for harboring “those lazy no-good so and sos, just drinking all the time, not doing anything.” And then if someone freezes to death under a bridge in the middle of January, she says, that same critic will say “Oh, why didn’t that person have a place to stay? We have a shelter.”
Canganelli says she wanted the shelter to be able to provide a healthy living environment for families and adults so they could address their situation–whether financial hardship, chronic health or mental health problems–and move forward in their lives. But, she says, Shelter House is not a substance abuse treatment center. They don’t have the health clinicians on staff to deal with people mired in drug or alcohol dependency and all the complications that come with it.
“You can’t have somebody who is heavily intoxicated, and then going through sobering back up and the stuff that can happen along the way, sleeping in next to other people who are not, who have to get up at four o’clock in the morning and go to work,” Canganelli says. “That’s a different program, but our not having people in who are intoxicated does not mean we do not understand that there’s a problem and an unmet need.”
Dog isn’t above receiving some help, living off the fat of the land (and Iowa City has considerable fat, with its constant influx of free-spending students with large allowances). But Dog has a certain ethical code. He rides a mountain bike and loads its wire baskets up with bulging garbage bags full of cans most every day, working for his nickels and sleeping at his camp at night.
Dog discerns moral gradations among various panhandlers and has a certain contempt for those who maybe don’t work as hard or aren’t entirely straightforward. He makes a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate panhandling. Dog says one man stays in a motel but comes downtown dressing like he’s more homeless than he is; he says another guy doesn’t really need the wheelchair he sits in when he’s panhandling.
He respects the “hardcore,” those that eat at the Salvation Army and sleep outside. He admires “Walker,” who camps far away, walks several miles into town for a long day of collecting cans for deposit, then eats some dinner at a deli before walking home for the night. And Dog says there are some that just don’t fit in the Shelter House model.
“Some of these guys can’t stop drinking, or they took drugs too long, till they ate away their brains. A lot of these guys are veterans but they’ve never come back, if you see what I mean. Chipper was a tunnel rat in Vietnam. Do you know what that is? He doesn’t want to be confined anywhere anymore. These guys have been in the army, have been bossed around. And they don’t like being treated like children.”
Amy Correia, a social services coordinator for the county, has worked in the “helping industry,” as she puts it, for twenty years. She and her colleagues strive to be sensitive to the needs of people who might not want to get help. “If they don’t want to get help, that’s their choice, that’s their right,” Correia said.
For about six months now panhandling downtown has been legally proscribed on the theory that giving money to beggars only enables addictions and substance abuse. Parking meters were planted in the pedestrian mall so passersby could bypass panhandlers and donate their change to social service organizations.
I asked Langer if he found it odd that the sleeping bag drop-off took place right in front of one of those meters?
“I hate those meters,” says Langer. “I hate them. I think it’s impersonal.
Most of these guys never cause any problems in this town. These guys are invested in the city. They live here. It doesn’t benefit them to go break in windows and mug people. I think it was an overreaction. And I think it’s stupid. And they’re not invisible. They’re people. And you would think in a city as progressive and open and intellectually advanced as Iowa City, they would treat them with some modicum of respect. You know our paradigm is that all people are created in the image of God. And therefore should be treated as such. So giving a sleeping bag to somebody so they don’t freeze seems like a very minimal thing you do. It doesn’t seem like that’s an awesome thing, that seems like that’s God-given humanity and honoring it as such.”
But wasn’t there some logic to the parking meter idea proposed by the city council? Panhandlers funding a booze habit might not be the best stewards of charitable donations. Wouldn’t giving that money to social services ultimately make for a better outcome?
“Well, you can’t shove a sleeping bag into those meters,” said Langer. “I’m sorry, but you can’t. You can put a quarter in there, and a quarter doesn’t fix the problem. Giving a quarter to that machine isn’t a conversation with somebody where they feel some amount of dignity.
“And that’s what we’re shooting for. If we can develop real relationships with these people . . . that leads to real restoration, that leads them to real hope, then we are doing what we’re supposed to do.”
