Shelters close during the holidays

Brenda Wohlfarth is not getting the beds ready at the homeless shelter at Sacred Heart in Bayside like she usually does this time of year.
In the past, Sacred Heart has housed five people, five nights a week from December until March, in “faith beds.” This year, however, the city has restructured the financing for these shelters, effectively cutting off funding for 13 shelters in Queens and 22 shelters in the city overall. So, for the first time in 26 years, Sacred Heart will not open its doors next week.
“It really makes me sick,” Wohlfarth said. “I feel so sorry for these ladies. At least they were safe here - safe and warm.”
The Emergency Shelter Network contract between the city Department of Homeless Services and the Partnership for the Homeless provided 450 beds in many part-time faith-based shelters, but DHS said last week they would restrict funding for shelters open less than five days a week or only open two to three months a year, since the contract specified these two conditions.
The faith-based shelters received the inhabitants from a “drop-in” shelter where they would bathe and eat before leaving for one of the shelters, which were staffed by volunteers.
Heather Janik, a spokesperson for DHS, said these faith beds will be streamlined in order to be more efficiently linked to the drop-in shelters, and there will be a 50 percent increase overall in the number of beds available.
Zolio Torres, a spokesman for the Partnership for the Homeless, said faith beds provided a personal alternative to large city shelters, and he worries about all the people left astray this year.
“We suspect they’re sleeping in chairs in the drop-in centers because they’re not allowed to have beds,” Torres said. “We have a system that could be made more efficient and has worked, and has continued to work. The city should expand it and not [have it] restructured and shrunk, as the city is doing at this point.”
As temperatures dipped below the freezing mark in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, some elected officials began to get involved in the fight. Assemblymember Rory Lancman wrote a letter urging Mayor Michael Bloomberg to keep the shelters open.
“If any of these homeless individuals end up on the street of Northern Boulevard, living in a box or something, rather than inside St. Andrew’s, or inside a warm bed, there’s going to be problems with the community,” Lancman said.
At another closed shelter, Immaculate Conception in Astoria, regular volunteer John Sarro said he understood the city is cutting back, but he worried about the people he has seen over the years in the shelter.
“The people we had, they were screened and they were getting better,” he said. They just wanted to move the homeless out of sight. Is that really helping them? It always seemed like they got help, these people; we never saw the same people every year. I know there are a lot of issues, but these people are without a home.