ASHLAND — Amber Lester walked back to her minivan on a drizzly and unusually balmy Tuesday night in February when a man approached her in a hotel parking lot.
The man, a veteran originally from Texas, asked her for help finding food.
It was around 9 p.m., a couple hours before he started his 11 p.m. shift at a nearby factory. Lester, the Housing Program Manager for Appleseed Community Mental Health Center, happened to be conducting the county’s Point in Time homeless count that night.
She told him she could help and asked him some questions to collect demographic data, part of the protocol for recording information on homeless people.
He put his hood over his head and smoked a cigarette while Lester asked questions from under the cover of her van’s back hatch while the skies spit tiny droplets.
Lester and two other case workers from Appleseed drove around Ashland on Tuesday night to predetermined areas in search of people experiencing homelessness.
The PIT count showed there were 19 people experiencing homelessness in Ashland County that night.
Two of them were sleeping in their cars, what the U.S. Housing and Urban Development agency considers “unsheltered.” Another two were in hotels, one of which was the man who flagged down Lester.
The other 15 were sheltered, either with Safe Haven, a domestic violence shelter for women, or apartments owned by Ashland Church Community Emergency Shelter Services, or ACCESS.
Lester said the man in the parking lot wasn’t unsheltered, but he was experiencing homelessness because St. Vincent DePaul had paid for his stay at an area hotel.
St. Vincent DePaul is ministry of Saint Edward Church in Ashland that, among other services, provides funds to people in need to receive temporary shelter at hotels.
The PIT number for Ashland County does not include people who are considered “couch surfers,” which is how social workers describe the hidden nature of homelessness in the area.
Cathy Thiemens, program director at Ashland Church Community Emergency Shelter Services, or ACCESS, helped out with Tuesday’s PIT count in Loudonville.
Thiemens has her own acronym for the effort to locate homeless people. She calls it the “Waste in Time” count.
“Yeah. Remember, this is all coming from HUD. Their culture is of the mindset of urban areas. But we have to do it. So it is what it is,” Thiemens said.
Thiemens said she didn’t find anyone experiencing homelessness. She said she checked with a hotel in Loudonville and called the police to see if they had any information and came up empty-handed.
ACCESS does not receive federal grant money for its services. However, the organization received $73,000 from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act in July 2020. ACCESS can use the money for its services through June 2022, Thiemens said.
“Then we’re done,” she said, adding the organization will continue to focus on local fundraising efforts instead.
Lester doesn’t necessarily think the PIT counts are a waste.
“But they’re not an accurate representation of true homeless numbers out there,” she said, pointing to homeless numbers more broadly.
She said this is because sometimes there are people who are truly homeless that aren’t located on those PIT count nights. If they can’t be located, they can’t be counted.
In Ashland County, the majority of homeless people that count toward PIT numbers are from Safe Haven or ACCESS shelters.
“So it just depends on whether they’re full or not. Sometimes you have large families there. So it depends on who’s there in that night that we’re allowed to count,” she said.
This could explain why Ashland County’s PIT numbers over recent years have varied so much.
There were 16 homeless people counted in 2018. That number jumped to 31 in 2019 and dipped to 15 in 2020. It then climbed up to 25 in 2021, according to Appleseed Community Mental Health Center, the agency in charge of the county’s point-in-time counts.
The last time Lester led the county’s PIT count was in 2020, when HUD determined where social workers could search for people experiencing homelessness.
“We could search downtown Ashland and Jeromesville, which eventually took us to the middle of a wooded field. It was ridiculous. I knew there was nobody there,” she said of the 2020 count.
This year, HUD allowed agencies to determine where to search. The deadline to submit those areas was in December. Typically, PIT counts happen in late January. It was pushed back to Feb. 22 this year because of a rising number in COVID-19 cases.
“So by the time we get to these places to look, they’re gone,” Lester said, driving in an empty parking lot behind Mr. Tire off Claremont Avenue.
This year, Lester and her coworkers searched downtown city lots, Foundation Plaza, the library’s parking lot, Mr. Tire, under the bridge at CVS, Jake’s parking lot, Goasis, Wendy’s and McDonald’s along U.S. 250, Cahn Grove Park and Safe Haven, the domestic violence shelter for women.
The PIT count is mandatory for agencies that receive funding from the federal program.
Appleseed received $315,000 in rental assistance grants for the 2021-22 period, according to Lester.
Appleseed does not provide emergency shelter. Instead, it provides rental assistance to those who qualify. The agency served 203 people last year.
Although the temperature hovered around 60 on Tuesday night, rain fell. Lester said most people find cover indoors somewhere when the weather is bad.
She said a person was reported to have been sleeping a tent outside of a family member’s house. But that person became housed around two weeks ago.
Another person, this one located outside of Ashland’s Walmart, was approached weeks prior. But the person refused to receive help.
Lester and her coworkers spotted a man walking across Walmart’s parking lot on Tuesday night. One of the staff rolled down her window, identified herself as a social services worker and then asked the man if he was homeless.
“Nope,” he said, heading toward a restaurant.
