Code Blue program shines light on Saratoga’s other side

After almost a decade on the streets, Lynnie Risch can’t see any clear path back to a normal, well-rooted life.

Her face is weathered and cracked from the elements and her struggle with alcoholism.

When the temperature is above 20 degrees, she struggles to find a place in the city to shelter herself from the cold. There are very few: behind the city’s visitor’s center; at the back dock of the Route 50 Price Chopper; or in the rear of a former warehouse building extending down West Circular Street. At 49 and now a grandmother, she knows she can’t endure the lifestyle much longer.

“I’ve just got to do the right thing,” she said, seated on a cot at the city’s Code Blue shelter Thursday as temperatures outside dropped into the low teens. “What I’m doing is not right. I can do better for myself.”

She tries. Risch does odd jobs for a city resident who befriended her and rings the bell for The Salvation Army. She’s applied for a job at the city library and hopes the staff there will see beyond her outward appearance to give her a chance.

“I’m a good girl,” she said. “I’m just in bad ways right now.

The alternative isn’t one that she or any of the 40-plus people staying at the shelter Thursday want to contemplate: the fate that befell Nancy Pitts, a 54-year-old homeless mother who froze to death huddled beneath the back eaves of the Saratoga Springs Senior Center just over a year ago.

Pitts’ well-publicized demise served as a call to action in the city, resulting in its first no-questions-asked shelter. The effort, started in late 2013 at the St. Peter’s auxiliary building, has since moved and expanded to the Salvation Army building in the heart of downtown Saratoga Springs — a change that has drawn praise from the volunteers and people who depend on the drop-in shelter.

Activated when temperatures dip below 20 degrees, Code Blue has sheltered an average of 32 people per night this season, since mid-November. About nine people on average stop in just for the evening meal.

Earlier this week, the shelter had a record 47 overnight visits. And on Thursday — the 11th consecutive Code Blue night — 18 people came in for dinner.

“When it got really, really cold, it jumped,” said Cheryl Ann Murphy-Parent, Code Blue’s coordinator and its only paid worker.

The people using the city’s Code Blue shelter are a mixture of the chronically homeless and those who slipped through the cracks of the county’s social service system. On Thursday they included a mother and her 4-year-old daughter seeking a hot meal; a man with cerebral palsy who was chased from his motel room as it was sprayed for bedbugs; an adolescent boy with nowhere else to turn after the heat in the apartment where he was staying was shut off; and a woman who fled an abusive relationship after a savage beating landed her a four-night stay at Saratoga Hospital.

Some are chronic alcoholics, some struggle with drug addiction. Others suffer from an array of mental health conditions: schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety and severe depression, to name a few.

“Everybody has a story,” said Joy King, a volunteer who staffs Code Blue’s supply room whenever the shelter is open. “Something happened in their lives, they got stuck and they can’t get past it.”

Pitts’ death on Dec. 12, 2013, brought to light a poverty issue often unseen in the Capital Region’s most affluent city. The city had at least one homeless person die from exposure in both the winter of 2011 and 2012, though neither garnered media attention.

Death from the elements was a common annual occurrence before Code Blue, says Don Petersimes, 53, a chronically homeless man and Risch’s longtime boyfriend. He recalls his friend Allen, a 60-something veteran who died behind Congress Plaza several years ago without public notice.

“He was a good guy, an ex-Marine,” Petersimes said.

Even Pitts’ death went unnoticed until a local reporter scanning the Saratoga Springs police blotter noticed an entry for an unattended death outside the senior center. Wearing boots and a hooded coat, Pitts had bedded down with a few blankets as the temperature dipped to 12 degrees; a companion found her dead the next morning.

Though Pitts was considered among the city’s chronically homeless, she hadn’t lived that way for long. For years, the married mother of two lived in a well-kept home in Greenfield, recalls Melissa Russo.

“We were room parents together,” she said during her shift supervising volunteers at the shelter. “She had a nice house, a nice husband and a nice life. And then — alcohol.”

Russo watched from afar as Pitts’ marriage dissolved and her life decayed. Soon she was on the streets.

One of their mutual friends put Pitts up for a week in a local motel and then offered to put her through rehab. At the end of the week, Pitts declined and went back to the streets.

King grew up with Pitts and knew her as an athletic girl with a sense of humor. She realized Pitts was struggling and used to stop to talk whenever she saw Pitts walking on the street.

“One day I remember her saying ‘Joy, the cold goes right through you,’ ” she said.

Today, a framed picture of Pitts stands on a table in the center of the basement supply room.

King said Pitts was “sanctioned” by the county Department of Social Services, which means she could no longer receive aid. And ultimately, she said, her friend had nowhere to turn.

“This is my pet peeve, because that never should have happened,” she said.

Code Blue is run by a group of dedicated volunteers resolved to prevent another death like Pitts. Hours at the shelter are long and often monotonous, since there’s not a lot to do other than ensure visitors are comfortable and under control.

Hot meals are brought to the site daily, with a different restaurant or organization scheduled for specific days of the week when the shelter is activated. Others drop off food or donations at random, meaning there’s usually enough to go around.

Most visitors quietly enter when the doors open at 7 p.m., take a lid for the cot-side plastic containers to stow belongings and then either grab a bite to eat or tuck in for the night. Others wait to use the downstairs shower, where they’re allotted 20 minutes, or visit the basement supply room overseen by King for basic necessities such as clothing.

The shelter is split between the quiet area upstairs near the kitchen and the downstairs accommodations, usually reserved for more raucous visitors. Each area has televisions, which remain on until midnight.

Though visitors are accepted in various states of inebriation, no alcohol is allowed in the shelter, and volunteers enforce the rule by sifting through any bag brought to the shelter and removing any alcohol or open container found. That doesn’t mean some visitors don’t try elaborate schemes to sneak bottles in.

Once they are foiled, however, Murphy-Parent is anything but forgiving. Seized alcohol is immediately dumped, even if the visitor offers to leave; repeat offenders and persistent troublemakers can face a ban from the shelter, though only a handful have been doled out since the first Code Blue night in December 2013.

The vast majority of visitors — “guests” as the Code Blue volunteers call them — are respectful of the shelter’s rules and of Murphy-Parent, the motherly figure charged with enforcing them. On Code Blue nights, she’s at the shelter for anywhere between 12 and 16 hours.

“You get to know everybody and their personalities,” she said, “what works and what doesn’t work.”

Code Blue can be organized chaos, a place where there’s always someone milling about or asking for help, whether it be for a better-fitting pair of pants or a pair of earplugs to drown out the omnipresent sound of snoring. Visitors filter in and out of the building at all hours of the night, which means volunteers need to be attentive.

But nearly every visitor holds a reverence for the effort that has grown from a handful of volunteers to a constant flow of manpower and donations.

“These people make you feel normal,” says an elderly man as he settled into one of the 30-plus cots lining the upstairs of the building.

The shelter is a respite from the elements and time spent moving from one warm spot to the next, nursing a cup of coffee at McDonald’s, nodding in and out of sleep at the city library, huddled by a building until being chased away by police.

“All you can do is bundle up,” said Brian Bennett, 42, homeless for what he figured to be at least 15 years. “You’ve got to keep warm.”

Bennett, a veteran who is married with two children, said he once made $15 an hour installing hardwood floors. Now with a criminal record and no form of identification, he sees no other option than panhandling to make money, which often supports his propensity for vodka.

The city’s homeless population stands in stark contrast to the prosperity of much of Saratoga Springs, where pricey hotels and multimillion-dollar condominiums are replacing the vacant lots where some once lived virtually unseen.

“It seems like we’re running out of places to hide,” said Petersimes, who has lived on the streets for roughly seven years. “It’s not good. We have to fight our way through.”

Code Blue isn’t by any means a cure-all, nor is it the only option for the homeless and low-income people trying to make ends meet. Shelters of Saratoga offers 30-plus beds of transitional living for sober individuals willing to make a long-term commitment to self-improvement.

The county’s Department of Social Services also offers assistance to struggling families and individuals, sometimes providing temporary housing at low-end motels throughout the city.

Part of Code Blue’s mission is to give the chronically underserved homeless population a place where they can find help they might not ordinarily seek elsewhere — a point its coordinator likes to stress among volunteers. Murphy-Parent uses the trust she gains with shelter visitors to help them find available help.

“That’s the biggest work we do — the really important human interaction,” she said.

And it’s an interaction some believe should continue throughout the year, not just between November and March. Mayor Joanne Yepsen said the progress Code Blue volunteers make with the city’s homeless and impoverished population in winter stops once spring comes.

“What we find come March is the contact and the progress made is lost until the following November,” said Yepsen, who was instrumental in organizing Code Blue in 2013.

Yepsen and the Code Blue steering committee have been talking about having a nonprofit organization adopt Code Blue so there’s continuity for those relying on its services.

“We just want to ensure a long-term success here and increase continuum of care and employment opportunities, while maintaining the coalition that has been built between organizations helping with Code Blue,” Yepsen said.

Categories: News