Women face fight for spots in city's shelters; On this night, 35 win and 6 lose in bid for night off the streets

As their names are called, the women step forward from the darkness of West Harrison Street and file politely inside a former mop factory now filled barracks-style with wall-to-wall beds.

An elderly white woman with a walker takes her turn. Close behind is a thin black woman dressed like a boy in a plaid flannel shirt, baggy jeans and stocking cap pulled all the way down over her face on this warm September night. All told, 35 women will pass through the doorway, most middle-age and African-American.

A young man with a clipboard stops calling names and double- checks his list.

"Totally full. No more open beds," he announces from beneath the sign for Franciscan House for Mary and Joseph, one of the city's largest homeless shelters. "I'm sorry, ladies. We don't have any more open beds tonight."

No room this night at Mary and Joseph's inn.

Byzantine procedures

As the announcement is made, I look up into the faces of six women left standing on the sidewalk. Their last, best hope for finding a place to sleep has slipped away.

What I see in their faces is fear and anger, resignation and annoyance, desperation and bemusement. And shock.

Connie looks shocked -- and afraid. And tired. Don't forget tired.

She didn't sleep much the previous night, nor for any of the last two weeks since losing the apartment in Ukrainian Village where she'd spent the last seven of her 56 years in Chicago. For these two weeks, she has been living on the street.

Connie says it's the first time she has been homeless. The look on her face would seem to confirm it. Unlike all the women familiar with the homeless drill, Connie looks lost and adrift, like a rag doll washed up in a hurricane tidal surge.

She'd been turned away from here the previous night, too, before Franciscan House staff took her to wait out the night in the emergency room at Stroger Hospital. Around 3 a.m., hospital security kicked out the homeless women, and a city Department of Human Services van then transported them to DHS offices at 10 S. Kedzie, where they were given cots.

Connie returned to Franciscan House early and waited, hoping to make the cut this time, but the shelter gives first dibs to the women who slept here the previous night, and all of them have returned.

"You want any food?" another Franciscan House staffer asks the six women.

"Soup would be good," says one. Soon all have a steaming hot bowl of chicken and rice soup to go with a ham sandwich. The same meal awaits 214 men now lining up at the other end of the building. All will make it inside tonight, filling the shelter one short of capacity. Don't let anyone tell you homelessness is declining.

Father Larry Janezic, the Franciscan priest who is the shelter's executive director, tells the women he will drive any who wish to the hospital.

"You think they going to throw us out again, Father?" asks a woman in a Cubs cap who looks like she could be somebody's grandmother.

Father Larry tells them he doesn't know but that established city procedure calls for homeless in need of emergency shelter to go to a hospital or police station, where personnel are supposed to call Human Services for assistance.

But some of the women balk, citing prior bad experiences. They ask Father Larry to take them directly to the Human Services office at 10 S. Kedzie. He explains that's not the proper procedure.

"Could you at least call?"

"They won't take our calls," says Father Larry.

A young, fresh-faced woman with a Targus backpack watches all this from the fringes. A half-smile on her face seems to hide the turmoil inside. This is her first night on the streets, she says.

She came here from Florida two months ago expecting to live with relatives, but that didn't work out. Then she tried staying with friends she'd made, but "you can only do that so long."

So she went to a library, looked up the city's homeless shelters on the Internet and came here on a bus. Eventually, she and Connie and two other women accept Father Larry's offer to go to the hospital.

The last two are still threatening to sleep right here on the street or in the forbidding Lawndale neighborhood around it. Renee, a home health care nurse wearing her uniform and ID badge, says she has to be at work at 7 a.m. and needs to get to bed. "I could be taking care of your parents tomorrow," she told the DHS worker who sent her here.

The other, Rika, wants to know why the shelter isn't set up to accommodate more women. Father Larry says it's unusual to have to turn away this many women.

Finally, Renee accepts a ride to the hospital. A while later, Rika gives up and takes a lift from me to the police station.

"Pray for me," Rika asks. That would be a place to start.

Mark Brown, Women face fight for spots in city's shelters; On this night, 35 win and 6 lose in bid for night off the streets, Chicago Sun Times, Section: News, 9/16/07