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This story is reported by Freshwater Cleveland, a Spectrum News partner.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — A cherry-colored 10-speed bicycle rests inside the door of room 123 at a hotel on Cleveland’s west side (the name of the hotel is kept anonymous to protect the confidentiality of the guests). The bike is overturned, forks facing the ceiling, a deflated front tire slung over a pedal.

Abel Currie has crisscrossed Cleveland on the vintage bike, sometimes on a shady park trail, other times packing a lunch and heading to the lakefront.

Lately, his rides have been an escape from the stresses of the coronavirus pandemic, which have created chaos—especially for those experiencing homelessness.

Currie, 63, hasn’t had his own place in nearly a year—since he lost his job at the Euclid Beach Laundromat when business slowed down. But for the last few months, he’s had a bed of his own and a television that blares old Westerns.

This hotel is home to more than 50 unsheltered individuals—those who are uncomfortable going through the county’s shelter system because of trauma or concerns about confidentiality.

“I’m loving it. It’s 100% better than where I was,” says Currie, a U.S. Air Force veteran who grew up on Cleveland’s west side. “It’s like having my own place.”

As COVID-19 swept into Cleveland earlier this spring, advocates started looking for safe havens for those who live on the streets.

Could they stay in emptied out college dorm rooms? What about vacant hotels? The task became more urgent in mid-March as public spaces like libraries, restaurants, and drop-in centers shuttered under state orders to prevent the virus’ spread. 

The closings left few places for unsheltered homeless people to use the bathroom, wash up, or charge a phone. At the same time, the nonprofit Metanoia Project, which provides shelter during the winter months for those living on the streets, was also preparing to shut down.

“It’s tough enough being homeless, then COVID-19 made it harder,” Currie says.

A safety strategy

Early on, Cuyahoga County and Cleveland officials, and other community partners who work to reduce homelessness in the county, made emergency plans that prioritized lowering the number of people in shelters—considered high-risk “congregate” settings by public health officials at the local and national level 

They encouraged newcomers and those in the shelters to move in with friends or family and provided gift cards to assist with food costs.

The county paid to move people staying in crowded shelters or who were deemed at-risk for COVID-19 into a handful of area hotels. Anyone who tested positive for the virus was isolated in a separate hotel.

The Cleveland/Cuyahoga Office of Homeless Services’ focus was “reducing the concentration of the nearly 600 men and women who were sleeping in congregate settings as quickly as possible,” officials said in an email.

That left out the more than 200 people sleeping on Cleveland’s streets, many of whom had used the now-shuttered drop-in centers for essential needs.

The Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH) in March started planning for a larger homeless encampment, gathering up more than 50 tents and other supplies.

“We had people with no place to go,” says Chris Knestrick, executive director of NEOCH. He says he asked Ruth Gillett, who heads the Office of Homeless Services, if the county would support hotels if NEOCH helped raise the money, but she declined.

County officials say they discussed the situation with outreach workers and decided the unsheltered homeless people were “already pretty self-isolated and were not likely to have traveled on an airplane or have participated in the kinds of group gatherings that promoted transmission.”

Knestrick wasn’t opposed to an encampment as an option, he says, at least in theory, and at the time the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had put out interim guidelines for existing encampments, recommending temporary individual housing, if possible.

Currie was one of the people, rounded up in a parking lot, ready to sleep in a possible valley encampment.

He’d slept outside before, in the dead of winter. At least he’d have a tent, he figured.

On Carter Road, near a bend in the Cuyahoga River, not far from the Centennial Lake Link Trail, Knestrick and some others scouted out a spot. The weather was still in the 40s, it had been raining, and dense fog shrouded the city.

“We would have floated away down there,” Currie recalls thinking. But what choice was there?

Knestrick says he looked around and thought about how many in the encampment would be older and would have health problems—making them even more at risk for complications or death from the virus.

“This is wrong of us,” he recalls thinking. “This is unethical and immoral for us to allow this to take place.”

Instead, Knestrick rented 25 rooms at the hotel. NEOCH didn’t have the money to pay for the rooms, he says, but he put out a call for help.

A new routine

A little more than two months after Knestrick’s call for help, Paula Miller sits in a first-floor room; a hotel bed is her desk. Curls of her blonde hair peek out from under a ball cap as she updates a handwritten log passed from shift to shift by the workers hired to staff the hotel and assist the residents.

Miller, a member of the Catholic Worker community, moved into the hotel with the first wave of residents, helping out along with two others, Dawn Vought and Jean Kosmac.

After aiding refugees on the Mexican border in Arizona for nine months, Miller knew the importance of providing basic needs and dignity to those facing hard times.

The hotel team now has a routine that includes daily health screenings, including temperature checks for residents, distribution of meals (provided by West Side Catholic Center, Bishop William M. Cosgrove Center, and St. Augustine Church), helping residents track down government stimulus checks, and filling out housing applications.

Doctors from MetroHealth Medical Center come once a week to tend to medical needs, and FrontLine Service case workers visit the hotel to provide support and mental health services.

In the first few weeks at the hotel there was a lot to figure out about how to run what essentially had become a transitional housing program overnight, all while facing a global pandemic,

For instance, Miller says it wasn’t safe for the hotel housekeepers to come into the rooms each day to clean, out of fear of transmission. So, the team had to assemble cleaning kits for residents, some of whom had been living outdoors for a while, to wipe and disinfect surfaces and take out their trash.

And many of the unsheltered homeless who moved in were anxious, Miller says, because their routines were disrupted. 

“What people lost was their sense of community—the volunteers, the organizations, the services, and the personal, spiritual, and mental connection it provided,” she says. “That is just as vital to wellbeing as the physical stuff.”

There’s been turnover. As expected, for some unhoused people, living in a hotel was too big of a change. “They weren’t used to being indoors,” Currie says. “Some people had been outdoors so long they didn’t know how to act.” The hotel, he says, was “like a prison to some of them.”

One resident had a mental health episode and had to be hospitalized. Another scraped up money to rent a room, where he had a small party—and then was asked to leave.

Miller says NEOCH lucked out with the hotel management, which has worked closely with them, even as they remain open to the public.

The hotel manager, Sarah Dontenville, says she’s taken a “figure it out as you go” approach. The 30-year-old was just weeks into her managerial job when the coronavirus hit Ohio. As other hotels emptied out, hers filled up.

There have been a few tough moments, Dontenville says, but she’s had those moments in her life too.

At one point, years ago, she was in the same spot as some of her hotel guests, struggling with addiction with nowhere to go. “I want to see people get help,” she says. “I’m that kind of person that just cares about people.”

For Brandon S., who grew up in the western suburbs of Cleveland, the hotel gave him a roof over his head for the first time in months.

“This is a blessing,” the 31-year-old says. “It’s a huge peace of mind. It keeps you out of the elements.”

Brandon’s hours had recently been cut at a job in litigation support he had held for 11 years, and he could no longer afford his apartment. He tried the shelter system but felt unsafe after having his belongings stolen.

Instead, Brandon chose to sleep outside. The pandemic caused a lot of the public showers he had relied to shut down. “It’s been a struggle to say the least,” he says. 

From a public health stance, the use of hotels seems to have prevented large outbreaks of the virus in shelters by reducing the populations by more than 65% at the men’s shelter and by 58% at the women’s shelter. 

As of June 5, MetroHealth had screened more than 650 shelter and hotel residents for the virus, with 3.5%, or about 20 people, testing positive.

At the hotel, only one person tested positive, and that person was moved to a different hotel to quarantine.

A wide variation in testing doesn’t allow for much comparison between cities, and most states are not separately tracking COVID-19 infections among homeless populations.

Meeting people where they are

After Knestrick’s big risk, the Community West Foundation, the Greater Cleveland COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund, and a host of private donors stepped up to help cover the cost of the hotel rooms through June.

The cost of the rooms and staffing the hotel with outreach workers is about $40,000 a month, Knestrick says.

When NEOCH’s money ran out, the county agreed to pick up the cost of those rooms as well though its contract with Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry (LMM), supporting more than 200 total rooms with a capacity to house more than 380 people, depending on need. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs also paid for some of the rooms. 

The county has agreed to pick up the costs of the hotel rooms and staffing through the end of October and has arranged for LMM to manage the hotel.

The hotel setup has offered a glimpse of what having a transitional housing environment could offer for people who might not be able to adjust from going to a shelter straight to an apartment.

It was out of necessity, Miller says, that they created what is basically a low-barrier “meet people where they are” transitional-housing setting—much different from a more bureaucratic or structured setting. 

But she says she’s noticed that people have started to work on their future plans, whether they are getting into a rehabilitation program or finding permanent housing. 

“I think people just feel supported for who they are,” says Miller. “Just accepting them and loving them. I mean, we just love them so much.” 

Miller says she sees value in having a middle step between the streets and permanent housing.

“Not only is this a good transitional place for people to just kind of land,” Miller says, adding that the arrangement is good training for maintaining your own space. “Really basic stuff that might be obvious to us, but if you are not used to that, and there are a lot of our folks who are not, there’s a learning curve, and they get to practice that.” 

Shelter settings, because of the number of people housed, tend to have a focus on rules, which can be necessary to keep people safe, Miller says. Smaller communal settings allow time to develop relationships.

Miller says she and the other staff at the hotel know each person staying in each room. That allows people the freedom to open up, and to think about their paths forward, instead of just where their next meal will be coming from, she explains. 

“There’s the physical space, but then there’s the emotional space, and that’s what were able to provide,” says Miller. “In a way, that has made this a unique setting because we’ve become a family and a community. You can’t put that into your guidelines. It’s just developed over time.” 

Now, those involved are looking at whether using the hotel has opened the door for was a way to address the needs of people who traditionally have been resistant to shelter.

“No one really knew what we were doing here,” says Miller of the emergency decision. “This is a unique moment in time and an opportunity to create something pretty special and use it to our fullest advantage to our folks as part of our overall goal at NEOCH to end homelessness. But [we can] also really create a model that could be replicated or continued.” 

County officials say they tried using transitional housing from 1989 through 2009 but were unable to reduce homelessness in the area or connect people with permanent housing using that approach.

Officials say they hope to ramp up rapid rehousing assistance to people currently staying in hotels to keep shelter numbers low.

“We know that hotels will not be available forever,” a county spokeswoman stated in an email.

The plan currently is for NEOCH to transition out of running the hotel—its staffing was never meant to be permanent—and to focus on its outreach to unsheltered homeless.

Looking ahead—and back

Despite everything, the hotel doesn’t solve all of Currie’s problems. “It’s helped me greatly,” he says. “I’m not stressed out as to where I’m going to lay my head tomorrow.”

But Currie still has a list of things to do: Find a job and an apartment, hopefully on the near west or east side near bus lines and bike trails.

“It’s just hard with this COVID thing,” he says. “A lot of things are closed. It’s hard to look ahead.”

Currie also must heal some scars that date back to 1974, when his older brother was shot and killed. That was when the 16-year-old Currie started to disconnect from his friends and from the world. 

He graduated from high school early. He drank and partied, eventually entering the Air Force.

“I was just losing myself, I guess,” says Currie. “I didn’t want to face reality, so to speak.”

It took Currie many years to realize he was traumatized and didn’t know it. Now, in the midst of a global pandemic, he’s had some time–and space–to reflect.

This story was originally published by the Cleveland Street Chronicle and is sponsored by the Northeast Journalism Collaborative, which is composed of 16 Greater Cleveland news outlets, including FreshWater Cleveland.

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