This story originally appeared in the Dec. 1, 2023 edition of the LINK Reader. To get stories like this first, subscribe to our weekly print newspaper here.
The Cold Shelter
The line stretched along the outside of the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky and into an adjacent alcove.
People laden with bags sat on nearby curbs, waiting to secure a place to sleep for the night. It was Nov. 1, the first day the shelter began offering its winter sheltering service. The evening was chilly but tolerable, not as cold as the night before, when snow flurries peppered children in Halloween costumes as they roamed the neighborhoods trick-or-treating. The forecast for the following week showed highs in the 70s, so the worst of the winter weather was yet to come.
“A person is three times as likely to die sleeping outside as they would be if they are sleeping inside a shelter,” said Kevin Finn, president and CEO of Cincinnati’s Strategies to End Homelessness. The figures he cited come from a study that looked at a cohort of 445 people experiencing homelessness in Boston over a 10-year period in the early 2000s. The study appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine, a medical journal published by the American Medical Association.
“And a person sleeping outside on the streets is 10 times as likely to die as people who are not homeless,” Finn said.
The self-described low-barrier shelter will celebrate its 15th anniversary this year. It offers 68 beds for overnight stays, along with laundry and shower facilities, storage lockers, phone-charging stations and an on-site medical clinic to people experiencing homelessness. It requires few prerequisites or tests, like a background check, to get a bed. It offers these services to male guests throughout the year, while also administering a work residence program for men to help them find gainful employment and longer-term shelter.
Between November and March, it opens its doors to men and women as an emergency shelter. When it was founded in 2008, this was its flagship service, and many in the community still refer to the organization as the cold shelter, even though it operates year-round.
Located in Covington’s Westside neighborhood on 13th Street across from the Linden Grove Historic Cemetery and Arboretum, the shelter is one of the few places in the region where a person experiencing homelessness can walk in and get a bed with few questions asked. Although there are other agencies offering services to unhoused people in the region, few are as large as the cold shelter, and no others operate on a low-barrier model.
Exact numbers are difficult to pin down, but there are data sources that shed some light onto the size of the homeless population in Kentucky. Almost 4,200 people in Kentucky received services at various kinds of shelters in 2022, according to the Kentucky Homeless Management Information System. That’s a 6.6% increase from the 3,941 who received shelter in 2021.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development, on the other hand, indicates there were 3,984 homeless people in various sheltering programs throughout the state of Kentucky in fiscal year 2022, based on point-in-time measures, which log the number of people staying in shelters during the last 10 days of January. Neither of these measures includes people who were unable to access shelter.
In addition, a recent study from the Northern Kentucky Area Development District looked at housing trends throughout the region and found that demand for small one- and two-bedroom houses, as well as low-cost rental properties, has outpaced the available supply in Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties.
This means that, at the most basic mathematical level, it’s extremely difficult for people with low incomes to access affordable permanent housing.
In short, homelessness isn’t going away. Arguably, it’s getting worse.
And yet, beginning in August, when a group of residents from Covington’s Westside publicly leveled grievances at the agency, the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky has become the focal point for both how the region ought to confront the problem of homelessness and how shelters and similar service agencies should operate.
To investigate the issue, LINK nky interviewed Westside residents, the shelter’s leadership, people experiencing homelessness, former employees of the shelter and experts on homelessness. Throughout the investigation, unresolved questions of security, service, labor and communal responsibility intermingled to create a complicated picture — one where simple solutions are elusive.
Life in the city
“We knew the shelter was coming,” said Aaron Wolpert, a longtime resident of Covington’s Westside neighborhood, referring to the shelter’s move from its original location on Scott Street in February of last year.
Two other Westside residents, Fritz Kuhlmann and Nicole Erwin, joined Wolpert when he first brought grievances about the shelter to the attention of Covington’s Board of Commissioners in August. In statements at commission meetings and in a press release, which Erwin penned and sent out to local news media, the neighbors described what they viewed as an uptick in criminal activity in the area around the shelter since its relocation.
Despite their complaints, the trio said they knew what they were getting into when they decided to live in Covington.
“We’re urban people,” Kuhlmann said.
The neighbors said that they had attempted to bring their issues to the shelter itself first and only appealed to the city after the shelter failed to resolve their concerns directly; appealing to the city was a last resort, they said. Moreover, Wolpert and Kuhlmann have lived in Covington since the mid-2010s, and they said homelessness is an inevitable part of city life — one they know and accept.
“If we had some sort of baseline aversion to the unhoused, we wouldn’t live in Covington,” Wolpert said.
As such, they reject the idea that their issues are a case of “NIMBY-ism,” as Erwin put it. NIMBY is an acronym for Not In My Backyard and refers to people who are against something perceived as unpleasant in the area where they live but aren’t against it being located elsewhere. Often the label NIMBY is attached to wealthy neighborhoods’ attempts to stop the establishment of service providers, like homeless shelters, and affordable housing developments in their areas.
“When, on face value, you hear a group of people who are upset with a shelter, it’s, ‘Oh, they don’t want it there,’” Erwin said. “We’re … grateful for the services being provided. But if they are not being run correctly, it is a disservice to everyone.”
The neighbors’ initial statements highlighted problems with littering and ostensible drug behavior either in the Linden Grove Cemetery, located across the street from the shelter, or the area around it, as well as alleged instances of harassment.
Kim Webb, the shelter’s executive director, said that there were about 17,000 bed nights provided by the shelter last year; those nights were offered to about 1,400 different people, a sizable chunk of whom were over the age of 55. About two-thirds of the guests who came in during the winter stayed in the shelter for less than 14 bed nights, meaning that most guests do not stay long-term.
The shelter held a listening session with the Residents of Westside neighborhood association on Aug. 31 in response to the press release. Following the meeting, the shelter set up a hotline, where neighborhood residents could submit complaints directly to the shelter.
Webb viewed the establishment of the hotline as an olive branch to the neighborhood — as another way to demonstrate that they wanted to “be good neighbors,” she said.
Wolpert told LINK he wasn’t happy with the results of the listening session and hotline, and Erwin expressed skepticism that a hotline administered by the agency about which complaints were being made was effective for accountability.
Still, there were Westside residents who spoke with LINK nky who came to the shelter’s defense.
“I guess I’m just a little perplexed,” said Hali Greene, another Westside resident. “To me, it seems like an issue of perspective.”
Greene works in service organizations across the river and attended the listening session. She said she personally hasn’t experienced any negative interactions with shelter guests.
“I’m just not seeing what some of these outspoken neighbors have said,” Greene said. “To those individuals who have been most vocal in their opposition to the shelter, to be good neighbors, we need to show compassion.”
Another Westside resident, Peter Nerone, said most of the problems around the shelter, especially drug dealing, predate its relocation. Nerone also sits on the shelter’s board of directors and on the board of overseers for Linden Grove Historic Cemetery and Arboretum. He said that, overall, the neighborhood’s perspective on the shelter has been mixed.
Most residents, Nerone said, do express concerns about homelessness in the area, but they are also appreciative of the few providers that are working to address the problem.
“I would put it on a bell curve,” Nerone said. “And I would say the three most vocal, the ones that were authors of that press release, are on one extreme of the bell curve.”
“There were a lot of concerns in that neighborhood before the shelter moved in,” Nerone also said. “I don’t think suddenly scapegoating in the shelter for all those long-standing problems is doing anything towards addressing those problems.”
Still, Wolpert made a second statement to the city commission on Sept. 26, in which he said that “the situation has worsened.”
He talked about an incident that occurred on Sept. 9, in which Floyd Lee, a registered sex offender who lists the shelter as his address on the Kentucky Sex Offender Registry, exposed himself to a woman who was sitting in the cemetery. Police reports indicate that Lee was charged with indecent exposure, something Lee later admitted, according to the report.
Lee is one of three registered sex offenders who list the shelter as their address in the Kentucky Sex Offender Registry. The other two are Raymond Wilder and Amador Guzman.
The shelter allows guests to use the shelter’s street address to receive mail, apply for government documents, register to vote and apply for jobs, staff said, in hopes that it will enable them to become more independent over time. In order to protect their guests’ privacy, they said they could not share if and when Lee — or anyone else for that matter — was staying at the shelter. The police report also redacted Lee’s address information, meaning that LINK nky could not with certainty confirm if Lee had been consistently staying at the shelter at the time of his arrest, in spite of the information on the sex offender registry.
On Sept. 26, Wolpert made the case that the shelter shared responsibility for any bad behavior committed by former guests in and around the shelter, citing a provision within the city’s ordinance that states “the service provider shall have a plan to minimize disruption or damage caused by clients’ behavior on properties located within two blocks of the facility.”
But Webb and others made the opposite case.
“If any adult is off this property, whether they shelter with us or not, they are an adult and they’re held accountable to those actions to the extent of the law,” Webb said.
Joe McGee, a former lawyer and nurse who has volunteered at the shelter, agreed.
“The shelter cannot control people’s lives,” McGee said. “They do not belong to the shelter. The shelter is not their parents. They’re adults. They’re responsible for their own actions.”
Driven by a deep sense of Christian mission to help others, McGee said he spends many of his days with the region’s homeless population, helping out as he can. People refer to him as “this preacher man,” he said, although he pointed out that he’s not actually ordained.
Webb and McGee both said that anyone committing a crime in the area should be subject to normal policing like everyone else.
The police department actually flagged the cemetery for special area checks following complaints early in the year, meaning that officers would dedicate extra patrols to the area in hopes of heading off anything dangerous or illegal happening. None of these checks ever yielded any evidence of criminal activity. The most recent special area check occurred in August. Police records show that there were 22 police incidents at the cemetery from January 2023 to the beginning of September, including the incident of indecent exposure on Sept. 9. This is a reduction from the 58 police incidents, including special area checks, that occurred at the cemetery in 2022 and an increase of the eight incidents that occurred in 2021.
Running a service agency in Northern Kentucky
The state system to fund shelters like the emergency shelter often leaves Northern Kentucky on an island, experts told LINK nky.
“Northern Kentucky has very little control over the resources that are available to help people, because they’re a part of this statewide structure that is not really intended for urban or urban-like areas,” said Finn of Strategies to End Homelessness, referring to the way the state of Kentucky determines which service providers get funded and which don’t.
Moreover, Finn said, the region itself has done a very poor job of collecting and analyzing the data surrounding homelessness, deriding the state’s homelessness data management as outdated and inefficient. If the region came together to form its own standards and practices on the issue, it would be in a much better position to disburse funding and centralize data collection, rather than relying on an obsolete, statewide system that was “really intended for rural communities,” Finn said.
“Northern Kentucky doesn’t have a clue because they’re not bringing their data together in any way,” Finn said.
Even Nerone, who works with the shelter, didn’t paint an optimistic picture of how institutions throughout the region were tackling the problem of homelessness.
“In Northern Kentucky, there just is no coordination at all,” Nerone said, although he also said that might be changing; he pointed to efforts in Campbell County, for instance, and added that he would be open to forming a group of community stakeholders — such as elected officials, businesses, residents and service providers — to holistically and systematically understand the issue of homelessness.
Finn said he believed the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky is “the most data-driven homeless service agency in Northern Kentucky,” in contrast to the rest of the region.
Covington’s local ordinance requires shelters in the city to report their occupancy data to the Northern Kentucky Homelessness Information Management System. However, Webb said that Kentucky’s system is onerous and not ideal for the night-by-night type of services the shelter offered. Instead, it uses the same system as Strategies to End Homelessness, which sends the shelter’s data to Kentucky on a regular basis. Finn confirmed this process was in place.
“You cannot run a good homeless services system and really understand the issue of homelessness in your community without good data,” Finn said.
When Webb spoke with LINK nky, she responded to many of the neighbors’ initial complaints, one of which was that recent fundraising efforts the shelter carried out did not seem to be contributing to increased services.
Public tax documents for the shelter indicate that the organization’s assets grew from about $3 million at the beginning of 2021, the last year for which documentation was publicly available, to about $5.5 million at the end of 2021. Most of the funds raised in 2021 came in during the organization’s capital campaign, which garnered about $1.7 million for the shelter.
Operating expenses, on the other hand, grew from $520,890 in 2020 to $986,069 in 2021.
Both of those figures include worker salaries. Webb’s salary in 2021 was $81,868. That compensation level is, in fact, somewhat lower than directors at other shelter institutions in the city: The director of Fairhaven Rescue Mission’s salary in 2019 was $111,769, and the director of Welcome House’s salary was $110,682 in 2019. The median pay for community and social service managers nationwide was $74,240 in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The shelter building itself was worth about $2 million as of the end of 2021.
Webb said that the shelter’s finances were all in compliance with legal standards and that its accounting is subject to independent audits.
The money raised from recent fundraising efforts, on the other hand, “gave us the ability to bonus our staff for the hard work they do. It also paid for our utilities to stay open,” Webb said, in reference to the organization’s new building, which is considerably larger than its former facility on Scott Street.
Plus, Webb said, the move to a new building came with a host of new expenses.
“We had a 75% increase in our program expenses because we doubled our square footage, tripled our staff to provide those services and provide a year-round health care clinic,” Webb said.
“Our insurance went up,” she said. “Our utilities went up. We go through a lot of water. I would love to have someone coming in and pay my water bill for the amount of showers we do for those basic necessities.”
Despite the perspective given by Webb’s comments, as well as the broader systemic constraints on agency funding, the neighbors aren’t the only ones that have raised concerns.
Working in the shelter
Anne Alig said she remembers when she decided to leave her job as an outreach advocate at the shelter.
“I happened to be doing my paperwork in a closed office, and I heard someone yelling,” she said.
Peeking out of the office, she saw another staff member and one of the shelter’s guests, Lewis Thompson, standing in the main area. Alig said the staff member had her arms crossed and was telling Thompson to leave because he had broken the rules.
Next, Alig said, Chris Vier, the operations manager, tried to intervene, “yelling and flailing his arms, as well.” Thompson shouted back, which finally prompted Alig to leave the office.
“I screamed and said, ‘Enough!’” Alig told LINK nky. “And that’s when he pulled a knife from a bag.”
Alig said that Thompson — whom police reports indicate stands at just over 6 feet tall and weighs 270 pounds — then threatened to kill everyone in the shelter before setting about destroying the interior, carving things on the wall with the knife, smashing windows and breaking a large TV set in the central room.
Alig and the remaining staff members and guests fled into the back area of the shelter. Alig said that Vier exited through the front. Someone called the police, and reports indicate Thompson was eventually taken into custody at around 11:45 p.m. on April 4.
The police report corroborates the broad strokes of Alig’s account. Police communications from the night of the incident indicate that the knife Thompson used was a box cutter and that he had, in fact, threatened to kill people. Communications also suggest Thompson hit one of the employees at the shelter, but they do not say whom. According to the incident report, Thompson had locked himself in the bathroom by the time the police arrived. When it was all said and done, the damages totaled about $5,000.
Alig told LINK nky that she believed Thompson was experiencing some kind of episode related to his mental health. In spite of the traumatic nature of the incident, she said it wasn’t the event itself that made her consider leaving. Rather, it was the staff’s response.
Alig said that the shelter brought in a therapist to debrief the staff for about an hour, but that was the extent of management’s response.
“The following day at noon, I kept coming into the shelter and seeing all of the damage that hadn’t been fixed, and I was really traumatized,” Alig said. “And I asked if I could leave to go home that day, and (Vier) said, ‘What do you need to go home for?’ And I was really just disgusted at that point, that it was like nothing had happened. So that was it for me at the shelter.”
Alig resigned the following month after having worked there for about a year-and-a-half.
Another former shelter employee, Deborah Zepf, said she left the shelter on good terms after about three years as an employee, but that safety was among the factors that contributed to her decision to leave.
“It’s not safe,” Zepf told LINK nky.
Zepf and Alig said guests would at times try to sneak weapons, including guns, into the shelter, and although there are security checks upon entry, they were often inconsistently applied. Zepf also described the hand-held metal detectors used in the security checks as cheap and unreliable.
If there were problems or a lack of beds, Zepf said, guests would often refuse to leave. Drug activity was also an ongoing problem, she said.
Police records indicate that there were 249 police incidents at the shelter from the beginning of 2023 to the beginning of October, including numerous cases of stalking, guests refusing to leave and incidents categorized as a guest having an “emotional crisis.” The incidents resulted from calls made by both shelter staff and guests.
This incident number is high compared with the other shelters in the city. Welcome House’s two locations have made 54 calls to police in 2023. Fairhaven Rescue Mission made 20, and Homeward Bound made 51, as of Oct. 23, 2023. It’s difficult to make direct comparisons, though, as each organization handles different numbers of people and offers different services to different populations.
Moreover, Justin Bradbury, Covington Police Department’s public information officer, said that the shelter was generally helpful, especially as it related to helping the police department manage sheltering the homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic, when sheltering space was limited due to lockdowns.
Likewise, the fact that the shelter frequently deals with people who have addiction and mental health problems may skew the data a bit, he said.
Incidents like the one Alig describes present a question about homelessness services: Is a lack of safety an inevitable part of working in a low-barrier shelter, especially when dealing with populations with outsized rates of addiction and mental illness?
“It’s a complicated situation,” Bradbury said.
Most of the night workers at the shelter are women, but almost all of the guests are men outside of the emergency winter sheltering hours. The one male supervisor, Zepf and Alig said, often left early in the night, leaving the mostly female staff alone with as many as 68 men without any dedicated security staff.
In spite of these worries, others who spoke to LINK nky said that there is a level of danger one has to accept if they’re going to engage in this kind of work.
“I’m not sure there’s any way to make it 100% safe if you’re going to serve that clientele,” McGee said.
Even the shelter itself admitted the work carried risks.
“Working with people who are in crisis is demanding and can be stressful work,” a spokesperson from the shelter said. “We encourage staff to leave work behind each day. The most important strategy is self-care. Not everyone is suited for this work.”
Others who spoke with LINK nky talked about the dangers of living outside, which explains the prevalence of weapons among the shelter’s population.
Former shelter resident Jess Sissom, who’s still dealing with homelessness, said he carries a large knife on his belt wherever he goes.
“When you’re out here sleeping on the ground, you’re susceptible to everything, whether it’s man or beast,” Sissom said.
That means people need to have something to defend themselves with, Sissom said.
“There’s a reason people that are homeless would carry a weapon,” said Brian Sergent, former operations manager of the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky.
Sergent joined the shelter’s team as operations manager in 2021 before its move to the new location. He said he was involved in the planning for the location change but left the organization before the new building opened in February 2022. He has nearly 30 years of experience working in homeless, disability, addiction and mental health services, including at the Welcome House, another homelessness service provider in Covington. He’s also a veteran.
Sergent understands the broader complexities of homelessness, but he said that doesn’t mean that there weren’t things he would have liked to have seen done better at the shelter.
“There wasn’t as much of an emphasis that should have been put, from my perspective, on training and developing staff,” Sergent said. “It was mostly about, you know, just making sure bodies were there and people and schedules were filled.”
He also said he would have liked to have seen the staff trained in trauma-informed care, a widely used methodology for service providers that helps them humanely account for their clientele’s trauma, which often has wide-ranging effects on behavior and social skills.
Alig said such training was minimal.
She said she received some brief training on administering naloxone spray and a one-time training on active shooters, but nothing that would help the workers deal with the ongoing issues that many people experiencing homelessness have to face on a daily basis.
Employees received “no de-escalation training,” or other training on how to deal with fights and aggression, Alig said. “No mental health training, addiction, you know? You’ve got mental health and addiction in there.”
The shelter denies this.
“Training includes de-escalation, CPR/ First Aid/AED, Universal Precautions, Covid guidelines, mask wearing, Emergency Responses for fire, lockdown, weather and Naloxone,” reads a statement the shelter sent to LINK nky. “Additional training includes active shooter training, mental health first aid, peer support, boundaries, harm reduction, DEI, LGBTQ+ and any other additional training throughout the year.”
“Our guests know that if they break the rules, they must leave the shelter and they have nowhere to go,” a shelter representative said in another email. “This helps with compliance.”
When it comes to pay, Zepf and Alig described it as low – they made $13 per hour when first hired. Furthermore, they said turnover was very high.
Multiple sources attested to the low wages that accompany service jobs of this kind, even among people who have specialized training, such as social workers.
Workers employed in organizations that help people find permanent housing are, on average, “paid $42,912 and the average emergency shelter employee is paid $27,830 (per year),” according to a September report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness. This falls roughly in line with what Alig and Zepf reported to be their starting pay rates.
“They would require salary increases of 15 and 77 percent respectively to afford the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment,” the report goes on to say.
Service workers range from basic administrative staff to advocates like Alig to professionals with more specialized training, such as licensed social workers. Even those professionals with graduate-level training can end up on the lower end of the wage scale.
Kevin Lotz, a professor of social work at Northern Kentucky University who ran a shelter in New York for 16 years, described the treatment of social workers in particular as “pure exploitation.”
“Every social worker (in New York) is abused and exploited and underpaid,” Lotz said, adding that many of the social workers he’s worked with over the years often had to work other jobs to make ends meet, in spite of the years of training and study they put in.
Then there was the way former employees and guests described how people staying at the shelter were treated.
Alig said the workers at the shelter frequently mistreated the guests. Shouting and arguing were common. One of the most common comparisons the guests made about the staff, Alig said, were corrections officers in a prison. Dean Raney, another former resident of the shelter who’s still dealing with homelessness, said directly that the staff “ran it like a jail.”
Guests were allowed to submit written grievances about their treatment to staff members, who would then slide them under the managers’ doors for review. Alig said that grievances would pile up quickly.
The management’s relationship with lower-level staff was also questionable, the former employees said. Sergent, Zepf and Alig all stated that Webb, for example, had a habit of berating both the other managers and the lower-level staff for small infractions.
“I witnessed her screaming at managers multiple times,” Alig said.
Alig said this led to a “hostile” culture where people were afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation.
“The morale and the work environment is toxic there,” Alig said.
Sergent agreed.
“Any time that you have a negative culture like that, problems breed,” he said.
Webb did not respond to these accusations directly, but Andrew Schierberg, an attorney and former police chief who serves as president of the shelter’s board of directors, said that these descriptions did not comport with interactions he’d had with current staff members, saying that Webb had the “full confidence of the Board of Directors.”
“Based on what I’ve heard from current staff, what I’ve experienced in interactions with (Webb), what they described is not consistent with Kim Webb’s management style,” Schierberg said.
Furthermore, Schierberg said, the move from the Scott Street location as well as the expanded services in the current shelter are all the result of Webb’s efforts.
“This would not have happened without her,” Schierberg said. “She’s the one that worked the relationship with St. Elizabeth (and) Kenton County to get that property to where it was. (She) spearheaded the fundraising.”
In addition, the on-site medical clinic, Schierberg said, is “something that’s come under Kim’s leadership”
By the end of his tenure, Sergent said that some of the staff had approached him in hopes of relaying their complaints to the board of directors.
Schierberg said that there was an established process whereby staff could make complaints against the executive director, but that no one had begun the process since his tenure began in 2019.
LINK nky was not permitted to interview current employees at the emergency shelter.
All things considered
Many of the issues present at the shelter have appeared at similar institutions in the commonwealth. As reported by the Courier Journal in April 2019, a low-barrier shelter in Louisville called Wayside Christian Mission experienced similar instances with security and crowding following the clearing out of homeless encampments throughout the city.
Noel Langdon Sr., one of the shelter’s residents, described it as “a real trying experience.”
The Courier Journal reported that because the shelter didn’t get as much money from the city as it requested on a monthly basis, providing security has been one of its biggest challenges.
When Wayside signed on to open the shelter, the Courier Journal reported, it counted on more support from the police, particularly off-duty officers to serve as security guards. Instead, people living in the shelter take rotating shifts acting as security in the gymnasium. They wear ball caps that say “security.”
Back in Covington, the neighbors maintain that funding for the emergency shelter isn’t an issue, given their recent fundraising efforts, and Westside resident Wolpert has since stepped up his efforts to redress the neighbors’ concerns, meeting with city commissioners to make his case.
At the Covington Commission meeting on Oct. 10 after meeting with some Westside residents, Covington City Commissioner Ron Washington publicly stated that he wanted to explore new enforcement mechanisms for the city’s shelter ordinance in the face of neighborhood grievances.
“I also want to express on the record that (at) the meeting with the residents, at no time did any of the residents tell me they wanted the cold shelter to close,” Washington said. “They didn’t. Actually, they said, ‘We want to work with them.’”
City staff and the directors of all of the shelters in Covington met during the week of Thanksgiving to discuss how to best revise the city’s ordinance. Washington told LINK nky the city hoped to revise the ordinance with an eye to making it more enforceable.
Even the people who were the most critical of the shelter recognized that it filled a need.
“We need the shelter,” Zepf said, “but things have to be changed.”
How much change is necessary — or even possible?
With only one institution providing low-barrier, emergency services, the risk is that too many constraints could further restrict the number of services available to people without housing.
“Some places make everybody blow the Breathalyzer, but then you’re not a low-barrier anymore,” McGee said.
If anything, McGee said, there needs to be more shelters like the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky, adding that for every person who gets shelter, there are many more who don’t.
“It’s a great program,” McGee said. “They get people from homelessness to independence, but what about all the people who are still on the street and are not sheltered? All the shelters are full; all the affordable housing that they get vouchers for have waiting lists.”
Shortly after the shelter began its winter program, McGee said that “people are very grateful and glad to be out of the cold,” based on his observations as a volunteer.
Nerone said the shelter’s operations on the whole do more good than harm, even if there are problems.
“There are definitely problems,” Nerone said. “But … I think it’s contributing to the solution and not creating the problem.”
When asked if the shelter’s board of directors would be willing to consider investments in security for the shelter, such as hiring of full-time security personnel, he said he would pitch the idea to the other board members at their next meeting.
“I want them to be successful,” Sergent said. A place where unhoused people can show up and get a bed with few questions asked “is rare, and so the fact that the shelter does that is huge.”
Still, Sergent said, the systemic constraints placed upon shelters ought not be used as rationalization not to do due diligence.
“The emergency shelter was dealing with people that a lot of other places weren’t going to deal with or had been kicked out of other places,” Sergent said. “But now that I tell you that, that’s all the more reason why you need really good training and really good procedures in place.”
Alig agreed, adding that without adequate training, the shelter wouldn’t be able to aid the people they are tasked with helping.
“That’s just the sad truth, and if you don’t pay your staff accordingly, you’re going to get what you pay for,” Alig said. “You’re going to get employees that don’t care, that aren’t trained, that don’t have the knowledge to deal with this population.
“And the biggest thing is that you’re re-traumatizing this population by being untrained,” Alig concluded.
It’s not clear whose statements reflect the truth of the training at the shelter, given the fact that LINK nky was not allowed to interview current employees. However, Alig affirmed her statements even after the shelter responded to LINK’s inquiry about training.
In any case, not everyone buys this line of reasoning.
“Saying they should have better training for their staff is like saying to a starving child, ‘You’re too skinny,’” Finn said, especially given how difficult it can be for agencies to corral enough money to operate.
As far as concerns for security, “the vast majority of domestic violence, sexual abuse, physical violence occurs in people’s homes,” Lotz said. “So the fact that a homeless shelter should be exposed or relegated to such extreme scrutiny is … inequitable.”
For his part, Lotz said he admired the emergency shelter.
“That shelter, on a scale of one to 10, is like a nine,” Lotz said. “My shelter that I ran in New York was like a three.”
Schierberg echoed McGee’s worries about making the shelter too inaccessible when it came to expanded security.
“That’s not really consistent with the low-barrier model,” Schierberg said. “You don’t want intimidating factors to make people not want to come into shelter.”
Wherever one falls on the question of the shelter itself, the people farthest downstream from these discussions — the people who are experiencing homelessness — are the ones who are most affected by the community’s decisions.
When asked what a good institution for helping the homeless would look like, Sissom responded this way:
“I would say, if I had to give my opinion, what would be a good institution to help the homeless, it would be, first of all, people working there who care,” Sissom said. “They care about you. That’s No. 1. It’s all about care.”
“People are dying out here,” Sissom added.
McGee said that there’s no easy, singular solution to the problem, as its causes are manifold and solving it takes time and patience.
“Our society has produced this problem, and the result of it is what we see on the street,” said McGee.
“You have to have some proactive way of trying to help these people get off the street, get off drugs, get a job, get an apartment, but it’s long-term,” McGee said. “It’s person by person. … You can only help one individual at a time.
“There’s no easy fix.”
How to help
Here are some ways you can help people experiencing homelessness in the Northern Kentucky region:
Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky
What: Low-barrier shelter for men and, during cold months, women
Location: 436 W. 13th St., Covington
Phone: 859-291-4555
Website: emergencyshelternky.org
- The shelter welcomes volunteers to cook meals and/or serve guests. To sign up, go to bit.ly/46qkPtw
- To volunteer doing things like laundry, greeting guests, organizing donations and more, go to emergencyshelternky.org/help-out/volunteer/ and fill out the form at the bottom of the page; you can also email Britt Schroeder at britt.schroeder@esnky.net.
- To make a monetary donation to the shelter, go to to bit.ly/412F13X
- If you’d like to donate items, go to this website to find a list of items the shelter needs the most and how to drop them off: emergencyshelternky.org/help-out/wish-list/
- For any other questions about how to volunteer or donate, email info@esnky.net
Welcome House of Northern Kentucky
What: Shelter for single women over 18 with and without children
Location: 205 W. Pike St., Covington
Phone: 859-431-8717
Website: welcomehouseky.org
How to help:
- Donate a meal or give a monetary donation here: www.welcomehouseky.org/donate/
- To donate your time at Welcome House doing things like sorting donations or preparing shelter activities, go to www.welcomehouseky.org/about-us/volunteer-application-form/
- For more information about how to get involved at the Welcome House, go to welcomehouseky.org/get-involved
Fair Haven Rescue Mission
What: Shelter for men 18 or older who are experiencing homelessness. Must have a picture ID and pass a Breathalyzer test for admission.
Location: 260 Pike St., Covington
Phone: 859-491-1027
Website: fairhavenmission.org
How to help:
- To make a monetary donation, go to fairhavenmission.org/#donate
Homeward Bound Shelter
What: Shelter for homeless and runaway youth run by Brighton Center
Location: 13-15 E. 20th St., Covington
Phone: 859-581-1111
Website: brightoncenter.org
How to help:
- To learn how to volunteer with the Brighton Center, including donating or volunteering in person, go to brightoncenter.com/get_involved/volunteer