Published Thursday, July 12, 2007
Ralph Staley’s morning routine consists of waking up, packing his belongings, walking from Lincoln Library to St. John’s Breadline and getting in line to put his bedroll and bags away for the day.
Staley goes to the Washington Street Mission for doughnuts and coffee and the Breadline for his afternoon meal. Then he waits until 4:30 p.m., when he can get back into his storage locker to gather up the belongings he needs for the night.
“Then I go back to the library,” said Staley, a Springfield native who has been sleeping outside the library at Seventh Street and Capitol Avenue for about a month.
He said he became homeless after a divorce. He’s been bouncing around, even hitchhiking for a while before coming back to Springfield and living on the streets.
“I want off the streets. I’m not used to this,” he said, adding that as a veteran, he’s decided to seek help through the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The Portable On Demand Storage unit, or “PODS,” has been in place on property owned by St. John’s Breadline, 430 N. Fifth St., for about a month. The city pays monthly rent of $150 for the unit, which houses 21 individual lockers — a temporary solution, at least, to the heaps of bedding, backpacks and other items belonging to “the library homeless” that had been piled up on planter benches outside Lincoln Library for months.
Overall, Staley said, the PODS set-up has been a success.
“I think it’s working pretty good,” he said. “The only problem is you can’t get in until 8:30 (a.m.), and for people who work, that’s a problem.”
Norm Adkins, 57, said he doesn’t use the lockers but believes they’re a good idea.
“I’m not knocking the homeless. I am homeless, but it did look like a trash dump around here,” he said while sitting on the west side of the library Wednesday afternoon.
Adkins said the homeless who live around the library take care of each other, consider themselves a family and have a strong sense of pride. He said that when Ward 2 Ald. Gail Simpson was attacked earlier this summer by a homeless man with mental problems, “it made us all look like bad guys.”
Linda Freer, assistant supervisor of St. John’s Breadline, said her organization has nothing to do with the storage unit. However, because it’s on Breadline property (in a blind spot that used to be occupied by homeless people who would drink there), she’s nosy about it.
“I go out when it opens in the morning and in the afternoon to see how many people are participating, because I want it to be a success,” she said.
Initially, only about 11 people were using the storage lockers. But the number climbed finally to 21 — full capacity — and that’s where usage has been for the past several weeks, she said.
“I see this as a step program, and that is the goal,” she said. “We want them to progress.”
The storage unit resembles a truck trailer without the wheels. The Breadline agreed to allow the unit to be parked on its grounds provided its responsibility ended there. No one at the Breadline even has a key; that’s handled by police officers and workers in the city’s community relations office.
Each morning from 8:30 to 9 and each afternoon from 4:30 to 5, someone from the community relations office and someone from the police department come to open and close the unit.
Homeless people line up and wait. Each is assigned a locker and given a combination lock for that locker. They have to give organizers their names and sign a contract saying they won’t store alcohol or drugs in the unit. The contract also says that, if they fail to claim their belongings after a week, organizers can throw them out.
Sandy Robinson, director of community relations for the city, told a meeting of Homeless United for Change on Wednesday that the program has been running smoothly.
In a few cases, however, people have put items in lockers and not come to retrieve them.
“It’s not intended for long-term storage,” Robinson said. “If someone hasn’t checked on their belongings for three to four weeks, those belongings are not necessities, and that’s what this was meant to be. Maybe we need to come up with a different plan for that.”
About once a week, someone asks whether any lockers are available. Occasionally some are, said Mike Accettura, community program specialist with the city.
“People have come and gone. People have given up their locker, and someone new comes,” he said. “It’s been working very well. You begin to know people by name, and then you get to know what people need — housing or work.”
Jim Donelan, mayoral executive assistant, said the storage unit is doing the job it was meant to — the library has been largely cleaned up, and the homeless have both another resource for help and someplace secure for their items.
“We consider this to be a positive step, but not the final step toward working toward a solution to the whole problem” of homelessness, he said.
Robinson said he has taken the problem on as a personal mission and that the city is letting him devote much of his work time to it.
“The end goal is to have the (library/Munici
“Do we see that as the end of our work as the city as a whole? No. But please understand that’s where this train is headed.”
Sarah Antonacci can be reached at 788-1529 or sarah.antonacci
