As Shelter Season Ends, Maureen's Haven Homeless Look Ahead With Uncertainty

For Bruce, this past Friday was probably the last night for some time that he would sleep in a bed.

Bruce, who has been homeless for most of the last four years, was savoring the evening as best he could — looking forward to some shuteye under clean sheets, a belly filled with homemade beef tacos and some chocolate ice cream, and a warm coffee, hot breakfast and bagged lunch waiting for him when he woke up on Saturday morning.

But after that, he would be on his own again for a while. It might just be a few weeks, if he is lucky and a special housing program for those with debilitating medical issues comes through, but it could be considerably longer.

On the heels of a first week of spring that saw temperatures well below what was the average in the month of January, he was dreading what lay ahead.

“They say it’s going to be warm tomorrow and lots of rain, but then it’s going back down to 38 degrees,” Bruce, who is in his late 50s and grew up in Riverhead, said as he finished off a taco heaped with savory ground meat and cheese in the cafeteria at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Hampton Bays. “I will miss having this to come back to at night, I really will. Everybody here will. I wish I could come back tomorrow night. I’m not sure where I’m going yet.”

Friday night, March 31, was the last night of the winter emergency overnight shelter services provided by Maureen’s Haven, a Riverhead-based homeless services group that provides the only completely free, seven-night-a-week overnight shelter program for homeless men and women in Suffolk County.

On the final night at St. Mary’s, one of 17 houses of worship that host the Maureen’s Haven “guests” on a rotating basis from November 1 to March 31 every year, there were 22 inflatable beds arranged around the room. After arriving from Riverhead in a Maureen’s Haven van about 6 p.m., the guests quickly set about making up their beds in their own ways and arranging their few personal items around them for the night.

Most knew several or all of the others, some were close friends. Some kept to themselves. Some fell asleep almost immediately, even with the smell of simmering taco meat filling the room.

Tiarra and Tasha, who have been friends since their early teens, made up side-by-side beds for themselves in a quiet, softly lit room off the hallway that leads from the cafeteria to the chapel at St. Mary’s. Maureen’s Haven, they said, always makes sure that its women guests can have a separate sleeping area if they want one. Two nights a week, the women are sent to an entirely different location from the men.

The program has been “a godsend” for Tiarra and Tasha, who are navigating the fraught world of being homeless together — they only wish they had found it sooner.

“It stinks. They are so great here, this has been so great for us, but we just found it … not even two weeks, and now it’s over,” Tiarra said with a pained sigh, picking at a taco and a small pile of Doritos. She said she discovered Maureen’s Haven while “desperately searching online” for housing assistance options.

“This has been so good for us, it’s just what we need,” she said. “It’s what a lot of people need. It gives you a chance. It’s so much better than DSS.”

At 23, Tiarra and Tasha have been essentially homeless since the start of the pandemic. The pair went to high school together in Brentwood. Tasha went to college at SUNY Old Westbury for a time. Both were put out of work for months when the pandemic hit, and, with no savings, it didn’t take long to find themselves in a hole they have struggled to climb out of, leaving them both without stable housing.

Soaring rents since then and the many hurdles of trying to survive through public housing assistance while they got back on their feet have been a rocky path to navigate.

“I don’t think people understand how little it takes. You don’t have to do anything wrong even, and all of a sudden, boom, everything just falls apart and you can’t get back ahead,” Tiarra said. She is unemployed now — jobs are hard to hold down when finding housing requires shuffling around the region regularly — but has had jobs that paid more than the $15 minimum wage for much of the last three years. The pay still left her unable to get on firm financial footing.

With the Maureen’s Haven program ending, the pair will head back to Brentwood this week, they said. A friend will put them up temporarily, Tiarra said, but for how long she didn’t know.

Last week, Tasha secured a new job, which she was to start this week, working for a cellular provider in western Suffolk. It will pay her $18 an hour. Tiarra said she was confident she would find work soon, too. But housing will continue to be a challenge for the foreseeable future.

The Suffolk County Department of Social Services can help the homeless find housing, both in the long term and on emergency short-term basis. But it is not free, it can be unrealistically inconvenient and nearly all of the guests at St. Mary’s on Friday night lamented that the county program is so deeply flawed that it is often not a better option to sleeping in a car, at a train station or outdoors for many of them.

“They’ll take three-quarters of what you earn and leave you with nothing — a hundred dollars,” Tasha said. “You get a job and a paycheck, and they say you owe them for the nights you stayed before. And then it’s all gone and you still can’t put anything together, you know, to get on your feet.”

“And the places, they’re not good, it can be scary,” Tiarra chimed in. “That’s why these people, Maureen’s Haven, it’s so nice. Everyone here is so great and you feel comfortable. We’re so grateful to them — but now it’s over.”

Bruce described his experiences with DSS housing as “scary” as well, and frustrating. Bruce developed peripheral neuropathy in his legs about four years ago, which has left him unable to stand for extended periods at a time, forcing him to give up the job he’d had at a local Dunkin’ Donuts for six years prior.

He gets disability checks now, a few hundred dollars a week, but the money is not nearly enough to keep up with the housing market anywhere on the East End. And if he did turn to DSS, much of his monthly check would be garnisheed by the county before he even received it.

Dan O’Shea, the executive director of Maureen’s Haven, said that the DSS housing can be “rough,” populated by people who were just released from prison or drug rehab centers, and is not suitable for someone with a handicap like Bruce or many of those who were at St. Mary’s on Friday night, some of them women in their 60s, for a variety of reasons.

“If I have a 65-year-old woman who is getting $1,600 a month from Social Security, and DSS is going to take half of that and she’ll never be able to get out of homelessness, that’s not a good fit,” he said.

Along with the winter shelter program, and continuing when that is over, Maureen’s Haven provides help to its guest and many more homeless and those with unstable housing circumstances to navigate the at times labyrinthine network of social services available — housing assistance programs, food stamp applications, mental health counseling, substance abuse clinics and family services. With help from Maureen’s Haven, Bruce is in the pipeline for a subsidized housing arrangement, potentially his own apartment, in the foreseeable future.

But it will likely be at least a few more weeks. He will not turn to the county housing again except in an extreme emergency, Bruce said. Various Long Island Rail Road train stations are his preferred refuge for the night. He acknowledges that he’s one of the lucky ones in that when he gets his disability check, he can get a cheap hotel room — the cheapest in the area is over $110 a night — for a night to let him clean up and get a good night’s rest.

For O’Shea and his staff, the end of the winter shelter each spring is bittersweet — the sweet more fleeting.

“We’re exhausted, but then you wake up and you know you have people out there who are going to be in difficult situations right off the bat,” he said.

Since the pandemic, the number of homeless people seeking support services on the East End has more than doubled, O’Shea said. Spikes in substance abuse and alcoholism have driven some of it — largely because so many support services were shuttered or shifted to less effective virtual programming during the early months, and the fallout of that still reverberates.

“But this is not just about substance abuse and mental illness — we saw a steep increase in people who are on fixed incomes, who used to be able to afford a $600 to $700 a month apartment,” he added. “Now that apartment is $1,700 or $1,800, and they can’t afford it, and they burn through any savings trying to hang on, and are left with nothing and they are coming to us.”

At the same time, the demand climbed, volunteers became harder to find, financial support was spread thin between other charities crying in need and the number of houses of worship willing to let their facilities be used for shelters dropped by 75 percent — many have still not resumed participation.

For the winter of 2021-22, Maureen’s Haven responded to the surge in demand by increasing the number of guests it accommodated in its emergency shelter program from a maximum of 35 to 50. This year, they went back to the 35 maximum, for the sake of manageability, but the demand for more is still there, O’Shea said.

“Prepandemic, I had 20 to 25 host sites and 99 percent volunteers,” he said. “The pandemic hit, and we were down to seven churches and almost fully paid staff. This year, we’re back up to 17 host sites, and about 50-50 volunteers and paid staff. And combine that with the increase in costs of transportation, more vans and more gas, and inflation last year and food costs going up and up on top of it all. It’s been very challenging.”

The winter shelter program also ended earlier this year than its usual mid-April conclusion — primarily because of an early Easter this year and the needs of the congregations at host sites.

Each night costs Maureen’s Haven about $1,000 for paid staff and services — the food is sometimes arranged by the host site or another organization, and sometimes paid for or split with Maureen’s Haven.

The group gets the bulk of its funding from public grants and private fundraising. Some comes from the Community Development Block Grant funding that the local towns administer — and O’Shea must come and plead for at public hearings around the five towns each year.

At St. Mary’s on Friday night, Russell Rose, one of the congregation members who helps organize the Maureen’s Haven hosting at the church, said he wishes that local communities could step up the aid they lend to the homeless. The problem, he says, seems too easily brushed aside, blamed on substance abuse, illegal immigration or other stigmas with which homeless people are painted.

“People have this perception that someone is lazy or unproductive, but that is not what you see here,” he said. “They’re hardworking, they’re motivated. They’re down on their luck and they can get so caught up in the system that it’s hard to climb up out of it.”

Rose, who said he regularly puts together a dozen bagged lunches and goes in search of homeless people to give them to, said that he wishes more people in the local communities would step up and kick in more — financially, personally and spiritually — to help the local homeless, of which there are many more than what is visibly represented at Maureen’s Haven. Food distribution and outreach to those who are living out of sight, often just beyond the limbs of trees within yards of main streets, is in dire need of expansion.

O’Shea said that if the financial support was there, he would love to see Maureen’s Haven continue its shelter program year-round — though demand for shelter would drop significantly once the weather warms for a variety of reasons.

That Maureen’s Haven, a tiny nonprofit barely capable of keeping up with three dozen guests a night for five months, is essentially the only program of its kind in a county of more than 1.5 million people, is a glaring shortcoming, both Rose and O’Shea said.

“It costs the county $100 per night, per bed,” O’Shea said. “Last year, when we were pushing 45 or 50 people a night, we provided 6,400 beds. People should realize that we are saving county taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.”