For Some Homeless, No Room at the Inn

Rick Lawrence knows the routine of being turned away from the Antelope Valley’s only emergency shelter as the bitter chill of night settles on the Mojave Desert floor.

There is the gathering up of blankets and the forlorn trudge out to the desolate lot across the street. You flop on an abandoned sofa, if you’re lucky. Then you bundle up and try not to panic as the cold eats through your coat.

“You feel desperate -- just like there’s no hope,” said Lawrence, who managed to secure a cot at the Lancaster Community Shelter on Tuesday night, when lows dipped to a record 15 degrees.

The shelter -- located, in brutal irony, next to an ice cube factory near downtown -- has long assigned its 45 winter beds on a first-come, first-served basis. But recent temperatures in the teens have made the scramble for a cot particularly desperate. Unseasonable lows in the 20s are expected in Lancaster through Saturday, followed by rain and freezing temperatures Sunday, according to the National Weather Service.

On some recent nights, staff members at the city shelter have handed blankets to the unlucky few men and women who didn’t make the cut, and reluctantly dispatched them into the dark.

It’s not a decision that sits well with shelter worker Tony Shy.

“If they are trying to come to the shelter out here, then we know they have nowhere else to go,” he said.

Sometimes shelter workers turn a blind eye to the rules and squeeze everybody in. Tuesday was one of those nights -- 53 people, most of them men, were packed wall to wall in a recreation room, flopped on cots too narrow to toss and turn on.

This year, the area’s homeless are feeling more isolated than usual. The closest alternate winter shelter used to be in Santa Clarita, about 30 minutes to the south, but city officials closed the facility this season, opting to bus homeless people to shelters in the San Fernando Valley and downtown Los Angeles.

The United Way estimates that 4,000 homeless people are living in the fast-growing Antelope Valley region. The figure is disputed as too high by some, including Palmdale officials.

The Lancaster shelter is the only one in the Antelope Valley that provides emergency cots during cold weather. Charities that help other homeless people, such as battered women, refer cases to either the Lancaster facility or the next nearest emergency shelters, in Bakersfield and L.A., said Diane Grooms, a vice president of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles.

Those who remain apply for hotel vouchers, sofa-surf with friends or sleep in cars or desert encampments.

In the winter months, the valley’s homeless begin lining up for a cot at the Lancaster shelter in the late afternoon. At 4 p.m., staffers let them in to the nondescript stucco building five at a time to register and take mandatory showers.

Employee Shonte’e Pettus said it can get ugly when the shelter reaches its limit and is forced to turn people away.

“It’s not a good feeling at all,” Pettus said. “A lot of times they use racial slurs, but it’s not a racial thing. We just have to do it.”

On Tuesday night, Pettus and Shy were busy managing a full house. One man complained that the donated denim coat Shy had given him was apparently cut for a woman.

“Hey, when it’s 18 degrees out, I’d wear a ladies’ dress,” Shy cracked.

Some of the temporary residents went to bed early in the darkened rec room, surrounded by the snores of strangers and the pungent smell of unlaced shoes. Others watched sitcoms on a blurry TV or shared cigarettes and banter in the chill of the outside porch.

Most said they were happy to have a warm place to crash. But they also shared their worry and regret.

Lawrence, a pemmican-faced 49-year-old with burning blue eyes, said he was kicked out of his mother’s house a few weeks ago after returning to the bottle, after a three-year hiatus. Lawrence said he has been spending his days in the vacant lot across the way, drinking and reading Zane Grey westerns in the warmth of the sun. His job search has proved fruitless in the valley, and with a motorcycle as his only transportation, he said: “It’s getting too cold, so I can’t go down the hill [to L.A.] to look.”

James Fields, 44, has been homeless for 4 1/2 months after losing his job as a motel landscaper. Though he grew up in Chicago, Fields worried about bearing the cold of the next few months.

“This is deadly cold,” he said. “My bones aren’t used to it anymore.”

Lawrence spent 90 minutes in line Tuesday and got a bed. He said he’d probably be back in line in the coming days. If he doesn’t get inside, though, he knows the drill.

“My Plan B would be to get a couple of sleeping bags I kind of have hidden off somewhere,” he said. “Then I would try to just cuddle up as best I could.”