Houston’s homeless refuse to go to shelters

A group of Houston’s homeless is shaking off Tropical Storm Harvey’s historic flooding and devastation — refusing to head to shelters and instead hunkering down in their tents under an overpass.

“It’s just rain,” said vagrant Billy Matthews, 46, one of about a dozen vagran🌄ts who chose to brave the storm in their camp, made up of about 20 tents, occasional pi🗹eces of furniture and mounds of trash, under Interstate 59.

Michelle Brown, 41, another camp inhabitant, said, “The main thi🦂ng people do here is survive and make it another day.”

Brown lost her home after an electrical fire and has been living in the camp for a few months. She said that not much has changed for the city’s homജeless since Hurricane Harvey rolled into Texas on Aug. 25, adding that the storm underscores the thing homeless people do best — survive.

The camp’s unofficial leader, Stanley Unc, 56, came there after a stint in jail for a drunken-driving arrest and said that even had Harvey worsened conditions, most in his group wouldn’t have blinked after being toughened by thei🔥r lives on the street.

Some who live in the camp haಞd phones to follow news about the hurricane, but others relied on scraps of information being passed around. They do not know whether to believe tales of the storm’s devastation, only that flooding in the💯ir camp was minor.

Still, some oওf Houston’s homeless population did seek respite from the storm.

Joseph Cohen of the Salvation Army says that their Houston facility housed about 450 homeles🍸s people.

The Coalition for the Homeless in Houston worked with partner organizations and the Houston poli꧅ce 𝄹to direct people to shelters.

Desiree DeMarco, 29, is bipolar and said she had been hearing voices as the storm approached. She deci🀅ded to turn to Ben Taub Hospital for refuge, saying she figured it w🍨as the only place she could go.

“I need♓ed to get out of the rain. I needed to go somewhere,” she said.

Earlier this year, the US Department of Housing and Urb𒐪an Development found that there are about 3,400 homeless people in Houston, no doubt an undercount, as the city is home to 2.3 milꦛlion people.

Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homeless﷽ness said Houston will be “sorely tested,” after the storm.

“A lot of poor and vulnerable people who lost their homes will be at risk ඣof homelessness because there will be les꧃s affordable housing to replace them,” she said.

With AP