By Randall Beach, Register Columnist

Many of us are bracing for high heating oil prices or worrying about banks foreclosing on our homes, but we’ve got it easy compared with the wintertime prospects of the homeless.

Paul Brady, who for awhile at least has a guaranteed bed at New Haven’s Columbus House shelter, is afraid about what will happen to him and other homeless people who are no longer being offered spots at the city’s emergency overflow shelter.

That shelter used to open Oct. 1, but last week it stayed dark, the victim of city budget cuts. City officials set aside only $60,000 this fiscal year, probably enough to run the shelter just in January.

We could see at least 150-200 people living in the city’s streets during October, November, December (merry Christmas!), February and March.

“There’s gonna be a lot of people out there, with medical conditions,” Brady warned. “If one of them dies, the city will have a whole bunch of questions to answer.”

He added, “Say somebody’s on heart medication and he’s out on a bench. It’s 16 degrees outside. Most likely he’s dead.”

Brady spoke with me last Thursday at Columbus House. Sitting at a conference table in a cozy warm room, he was comfortable for the moment. But outside the wind was starting to whip up, a harbinger of onrushing winter.

Two Columbus House staffers joined us at the table. Rebecca Allen is director of program and services; Malynda Mallory is the shelter manager. They were worried, too.

“I’m getting calls daily from clients,” Mallory said. “They’re all asking, ‘When is the overflow opening?’ I tell them, “It’s not.’”

The reaction is shock. And then they ask: “What am I supposed to do?” Continued...

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“They’re outside now, sleeping in tents,” Allen noted. “But they’re ready to come back inside.”

“We are staring winter in the face,” said Columbus House Executive Director Alison Cunningham in an e-mail. “The numbers in the shelter are high now, with men getting turned away already for lack of beds.”

“We are bracing for more,” she said. “More demand on the system, more people being turned away, more people in danger.”

Cunningham noted, “The economy has shifted dramatically in the past year, making it much more difficult for people to manage the rising cost of living. High rents and utilities cannot be managed with minimum wage jobs.”

She asked, “What does this mean for New Haven? Hospital emergency rooms will be full, acting as shelter; more people will be incarcerated as a way to find shelter; people will find their way into abandoned buildings, causing disturbances to neighborhoods and property values.”

Ed Mattison of the homeless committee Inside at Night, told me, “Yale can kick in, as can the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, hospitals and churches.” And so can individuals.

Brady has been homeless since February. He lost his dishwasher job last September when the restaurant where he was working closed.

He is 48, hobbling around town on a cane because his knee “blew out” on him when he slipped on some grease at the restaurant.

“I’ve worked all my life,” he said. “I’m out there looking for a job, with a bum knee.”

He said his wife, June, is staying at another shelter. She has a store job, which pays some of the bills. He’s getting state unemployment checks ($123 weekly), for another 13 weeks. After that, he doesn’t know if the checks will continue. Continued...

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He spent five months in the Columbus House emergency nightly shelter before making it upstairs in the Length of Stay program for 90 days. He doesn’t have to wait in line anymore every night under the lottery system but he pays $90 per month for his bed.

Brady can probably get an extension on the 90 days. But staffers say if he runs out of bed money, there are plenty of people on the waiting list and it wouldn’t be right to deny them his bed if he can’t pay for it.

Brady fears going back to waiting on line, hoping for a spot downstairs. He described it as “a living hell.”

“Sometimes I didn’t get in anywhere,” he said, because the city’s other shelter, Immanuel Baptist, was also full.

“I was just walking, trying to stay warm.” He would end up on a bench on the New Haven Green with others who had no place to go.

“You hope your clothing is enough to keep you warm, but it’s not,” he said. “And you’ve got rats coming out, big ones.”

Listen: we’re going to have a nightmare on that Green this winter if something isn’t done.

Randall Beach can be reached at rbeach@nhregister.com or 789-5766.

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