House of Charity helps homeless stay warm, clean

Once you leave the House of Charity’s sleeping quarters, your hair smells for hours of a cloyingly sweet sanitizer.

I toured this building on Pacific and Browne one morning last week. There I was blasted by bleach and disinfectants and came out cleansed – and seeing the light.

The place is an architectural wonder, so full of skylight, soft white walls and glass that my own house felt grimy in comparison. And yet it struck me as a generous, well-managed Band-Aid on a wound our society just can’t seem to heal.

According to director Ed McCarron, 85 percent of the people there suffer with mental illness – depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia. They wander the streets during the day – often medicating their inner chaos with alcohol or drugs – and search for a place to sleep at night.

During winter months, especially on cold nights like the ones we had last week, the House of Charity’s beds fill up.

The men line up by 8:30 in the evening to take a required shower and pull on fresh pajamas. Then they climb into narrow single beds with clean sheets and cotton blankets and big, whirring fans overhead.

One room holds 86 men. Another, nicknamed “the snoring room,” sleeps 18.

Late in the morning, a lone worker made his way up and down through the rows. The place looked amazingly clean, except for a plastic bottle on the floor beneath one bed. It was filled with dark yellow urine.

Washing machines churn some days from 8 a.m. to midnight, sudsing the sheets, towels, pajamas and clothing of the homeless men. A 55-gallon drum stands in the laundry room. It holds a disinfectant strong enough to kill blood-borne pathogens many of these men carry, such as those that cause hepatitis C and AIDS.

During the day, around 150 people line up for lunch, men and women both. Seniors go through the line first. Last week I joined them for a high-calorie tray of salmon-macaroni casserole, cauliflower, green salad, white bread and butter, and a Valentine cupcake.

Afterward, I talked to Mike Johnson, a 49-year-old former carpenter who sleeps at the shelter most nights and takes medication for schizophrenia during his days.

A polite man with a thatch of short, dark hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, Johnson told me that in the summertime he likes to bike to Colville and stay in campgrounds along the way.

His blue-green eyes looked as lucid and focused as any other bicyclist I’ve met.

But he sees a psychiatrist who calls the disruptions in his life “episodes,” and he talks about the loss and destruction that stem from them. Heroin, he says, almost killed him.

Today he wears layers – long underwear, a cotton shirt, worn, pale blue jeans and a long red overcoat.

People don’t realize, he says, just how scary it feels to be homeless.

“Sometimes,” Johnson says, “it’s insulting when people look at you and you’re not clean and you might look scary to them.”

Before 1970, most of the men here would have lived in mental hospitals. When politicians decided to empty them, the mentally ill wound up living on the streets and sleeping under bridges and highway underpasses.

In the years since, programs such as this one sponsored by Catholic Charities have expanded to serve their basic needs.

Sometimes McCarron hears people ask, “Why aren’t they working?”

He laughs as he contemplates his answer: “Why don’t you hire them? You’ll find out why.”

This shelter treats these men with dignity and even style. A blue banner by local artist Louise Kodis hangs above the beds upstairs – a memorial to a young Fordham student who volunteered here. In the stunning light-filled chapel downstairs, a homeless man plays the piano.

In the House of Charity’s clinic, a physician sorts medicine donated by Sacred Heart. Case workers, counselors and volunteers move seamlessly through the dayroom. They stop to talk with the unkempt man with missing teeth and the bearded paranoid schizophrenic with the shy, curious smile.

There must be better ways to keep the nation’s mentally ill safe and warm and dry at night. Spokane’s approach – campgrounds in the summer and shelter beds in the winter – doesn’t strike me as the gold standard.

But the House of Charity, on this cold, snowy morning, manages to wash away my stereotypes about Spokane’s homeless and wipe clean my vision of their shelters.