Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part series on homelessness issues in the Monadnock region.
According to data gathered by Eastern Monadnock Housing Security Council, most of the homeless people in the Antrim-Peterborough-Jaffrey area region are elderly, and many have disabilities or significant health problems.
“We documented 53 people this winter who were consistently in need of shelter, and those were just the ones we know about. They are the ones who approached one of the agencies to ask for help,” said Christine Robidoux, a board member of EMHSC and a volunteer for the United Methodist Church in Peterborough. “There are other people out there we don’t know about.”
Karen Pellicano of the Grapevine Family & Community Resource Center in Antrim said that most of the people she helps consistently are elderly, with disabilities or chronic health problems.
“That is what we are seeing in Antrim,” she said. “I am helping people who are older and have real health struggles and nowhere to go.”
Pellicano said she is working with an elderly man who has to be on dialysis and is living in his car, as well as a young homeless woman with cancer who is not able to access chemotherapy because she can’t provide a permanent address where she will be able to recover.
“I could go on all day with these heartbreaking stories,” Pellicano said. “People do not realize this is happening in our region, but it is. None of my senior citizens I am working with have teeth, because Medicare won’t pay for dental work. If people have problems with their teeth, Medicare will only pay for an extraction, so they end up with no teeth. And when you don’t have teeth, it’s very hard to eat, especially if you can’t store food and you can’t cook your own food because you are living in your car.”
Robidoux said most homeless people in the region live in their cars, while some sleep in tents or in improvised shelters outside.
“These are people in real emergency situations,” Pellicano said. “There is a perception that people can ‘just go to Keene or Manchester or Nashua’ and find an emergency shelter, but the reality is, there are no beds anywhere. I had someone call the shelters every single night for 92 nights, and they were always full.”
Pellicano said the issue is not limited to older and single people.
“There are parents who have their kids sleep at someone’s house overnight, but the parents sleep in the car somewhere out in the woods. They go back in the morning and get their kids ready for school. I have people living in campers, back of pickups, year round, because that’s what they can live in. And this is happening right here in this community,” she said.
Pellicano said homeless people in the region who have vehicles park in the woods, where they will be undetected and safe.
“Unlike in the shelters Manchester or Keene, they can at least be safe here,” she said, adding that many seniors in the region “are not financially stable.”
“I am working with one man who is physically disabled, and this winter he used pallets and sheet metal to create a cab for the back of his truck, and then he borrowed a camp stove and put a tarp over it to try to stay warm, and that was his housing this winter,” Pellicano said. “He almost lost his fingers from frostbite.”
Robidoux said the coalition’s numbers do not reflect the total number of people in the region who lack stable housing.
“People may be couch surfing, sleeping on floors, they may just not be on our radar,” she said. “It’s really tricky to track the actual number of people who don’t have homes. In the summer, people might be camping and maybe they’re not asking for help. There are definitely other people who are unhoused, but they are not on our radar.”
Parking in the woods or camping brings additional risks, Pellicano said.
“People might not get cell service in the woods. EMS might not be able to get them,” she said. “I have people who have been living in the woods for years.”
Erika Alusic-Bingham of Community Action Partnership of Hillsborough and Rockingham Counties, formerly Southern New Hampshire Services, one of the founding board members of the EMHSC, said she hears from people who desperately need housing “every single day.”
“This is not the stereotype that people may have of ‘homeless people,'” Alusic-Bingham said. “Most of these people worked their whole lives, they are elderly, and now they can no longer work, they have lost their housing, and they have no one who can help. People do not want to believe this is happening here in our region, but every agency in the coalition sees this every day. It’s in Peterborough, and it’s in all the surrounding towns.”
Alusic-Bingham says people become homeless after exhausting all other possible options, and the majority of homeless people in the region are families with children or people with mental illness.
“A typical homeless situation in this region is a family sleeping in their car. People try to stay with family or friends, but it never works out long-term,” Alusic-Bingham said. “There is a lot mental illness. The stress of being homeless is devastating. People end up with literally nowhere to go.”
Robidoux said seeing the plight of the region’s neediest people firsthand makes her “really angry.”
“Our towns just do not step up enough to help these people. It’s really hard to get help from the welfare office when you’ve been homeless for a long time, because then the towns say, ‘You’re not a resident,’ even if that town has been the person’s home for years,” she said. “We see people get turned down by their town welfare offices, and they have nowhere to sleep, and nowhere to go.”
Pellicano said most town welfare officers are doing their best to help people, given the stringent state and federal regulations, but some towns in the region could do more.
“Usually, the welfare officer position gets tacked onto another job, there’s no training, people are overworked and stressed and they just don’t have the capacity to do the job,” Pellicano said. “We have many welfare officers bending over backwards to help people.”
Robidoux says the single most important thing people can do is to reach out for help if they are facing eviction.
“Once a person or a family is evicted, it gets a lot harder,” Robidoux said. “Anyone in danger of eviction should reach out immediately, and we will try to work with that person.”
People needing help with rent assistance or housing can contact their town welfare office or shelterfromthestormnh.org, matsnh.org, grapevinenh.org, caphr.org, or rivercenternh.org.