Across West Virginia's three largest cities, homelessness is often treated like a crime

Despite their progressive reputations, Huntington, Charleston and Morgantown struggle to implement solutions in tackling homelessness.

Dominique Miller enters an abandoned building to find unsheltered people in Huntington, W. Va. on Monday, Jan. 18, 2021.

Jun. 10, 2022 • Written by Kyle Vass

Dominique Miller is trying to figure out how to enter an abandoned factory on an overcast December afternoon in Huntington. A cold snap has hit and the forecast calls for snow. The most obvious entrance, a giant barn door, is shut tight.

“A lot of times they’ll find a way to lock this door because the police have been cracking down on this property,” he says.

Miller is looking for unhoused people to give them food, clothing and an invitation to find housing.

Like many people experiencing homelessness in rural America, the people who stay here have two options – follow the hard and fast rules of the city’s one homeless shelter, or break the law by sleeping in an abandoned property to survive the winter. Many tried the first option, got kicked out and now resort to the second.

 He reaches through a gap between the frame and the door to undo a strap keeping it shut. “We’re in.

Over piles of rubble, he heads down a hallway that feels like it could give way at any moment. Miller says it’s safer to walk on the edges, closer to walls. Despite the structure, there are signs of life: a half-finished bottle of Squirt, playing cards spread out on the floor, and some age-worn pictures.

Thirty minutes in, he still hasn’t found what he came here for:  people.

“Our folks are always on the move because the police will run them out of bandos (abandoned buildings),” Miller says. 

Miller heads down a corridor, deeper into the building in Huntington, W. Va. on Monday, Jan. 18, 2021.

In a corner, he discovers something he’s never noticed in his many times exploring this building – a door hiding a makeshift bedroom.

“It looks like somebody has been here recently,” he says softly. He leaves some snacks, hand warmers and his card. Then, he sets off into the night to visit more buildings.

Miller is doing what’s called street outreach. From abandoned buildings in the city to hidden encampments in wooded areas, he’s checking on people, making sure they’re okay. Only then does he try to connect them with housing through his employer, Harmony House.   

In addition to street outreach, Harmony House also has a day shelter: a place for unsheltered people to go during the day. There they can get medical care, laundry services and supplies ranging from fresh socks to a hot cup of coffee and occasionally a warm meal. The organization’s main goal is connecting people with housing, either by getting them directly into an affordable apartment or letting them stay in transitional, temporary arrangements behind the day shelter.

Tony Lee serves chili to clients at Harmony House in Huntington, W. Va. on Thursday, Apr. 28, 2022.

Harmony House is partially funded by the City of Huntington, which also has a food bank and an overnight shelter. But most places in West Virginia lack this robust network of services and outreach workers.

While the governor’s office, serving as a flow-through for CARES funding, has released $7.2 million of federal money to go toward food pantries and homeless shelters, no proactive steps have been taken by the current administration to address the root cause of homelessness.

In fact, under Gov. Jim Justice, the Interagency Council on Homelessness — a working group that for three prior administrations brought stakeholders together from across the state to address the issue — was discontinued, as reported last year by Mountain State Spotlight. The initiative, which saw a 66 percent decrease in homelessness over ten years, disappeared overnight when Justice took office. Since his inauguration, the report says, while the number of people who don’t have a home has decreased by 3 percent, the number of people who are unsheltered – experiencing homelessness and living on the streets – has doubled.

But Huntington has a head start on addressing these needs. The city’s early adoption of street outreach and having a low-barrier day shelter are rarities among major cities in West Virginia. Charleston, the state’s capital, lacks such a day shelter. It also didn’t begin using street outreach until six years ago, according to Traci Strickland of the Kanawha Valley Collective.

“In 2016, the City of Charleston funded Prestera (a behavioral health organization) to hire a street outreach worker,” she says.

Other organizations followed suit and now there are six full-time outreach workers. Strickland says, “We’ve gone from zero street outreach to having at least one person out seven days a week. It’s gotten really big.”

Case managers work to connect clients with services at Kanawha Valley Collective on Friday, Apr. 1, 2022.

From her office in the basement of a church on Charleston’s East End, she speaks quietly about the history of services and what is being done to address gaps. Clients trickle in and out. In this office, people apply for housing assistance. Across the hall, they can visit a storage facility operated by the Religious Coalition for Community Renewal, a secure place to stash belongings.

According to Kevin Jones, president of RCCR, documents like birth certificates, social security cards and IDs are easily lost when someone is experiencing homelessness.

Clients store belongings at the Religious Coalition for Community Renewal’s Transitional Storage Center in Charleston, W. Va. on Friday, Apr. 1, 2022.

“The whole goal is getting people rehoused,” he said.

But Strickland says a larger issue undermines these efforts: a widespread belief in Charleston that unsheltered people ought to be ridiculed, arrested or even attacked.

“In Charleston, it’s all about harassing people who are experiencing homelessness. There was a guy that walked in right before you got here. His picture is plastered on Facebook, multiple times a week. In the picture, he’s sitting on a park bench, not causing trouble. He’s just visible. And, if you’re experiencing homelessness and are visible, it’s treated like a crime,” Strickland says. “It puts a target on your back.”

For example, when RCCR applied for American Rescue Plan Act funding to develop a day shelter on Charleston’s West Side, local business owners wrote a six-page letter opposing the plan and calling on the city to deny the request.

The letter, which Jones says contained misinformation, gathered 36 signatures from business owners, employees and residents from the area. RCCR then held two public meetings to answer questions about the plan. Instead, citizens, business owners and city council members flooded them with criticisms — mostly variations on the need to protect children from unsheltered people and concern about property values.

Not long after the second meeting, RCCR pulled its application. Jones says they still plan to expand services on the West Side eventually but will hold off for now. 

Currently, Charleston does have some services for those who know how to find them. For outreach workers, that means walking the streets to meet and keep up with people who are not only on the move but may be unaware of, or unable to physically get to, organizations that could help them.

Kendra Preston, an outreach worker for KVC, doesn’t require much to get her job done: just a phone and a knack for problem solving. It’s not easy to keep up with how many people she helps in a four-hour window. 

She’s able to help one man figure out how much rent his landlord needs to keep from filing an eviction. Another is being denied entry to a shelter because he needs a COVID test. So, she takes him to MedExpress, where staff determine he is suffering from complications related to a stroke. He’s taken via ambulance to a hospital, something that would have never happened without Preston checking in on him. 

Kendra Preston finishes up after a day of doing street outreach behind St. Mark’s United Methodist Church on Thursday, Mar. 31, 2022.

One person she is determined to help before the end of the day is Vincent, who Preston has known for years. Vincent says he wants to quit using drugs but his residential treatment facility requires a chest X-ray. He listed tuberculosis on his intake form and, as such, they require proof of recovery. Preston explains treatment facilities often reject people with health conditions because of liability.

Moments later, four of us — Vincent’s friend decided to come along for a ride — pile into a car and head to a hospital to retrieve a copy of his X-ray. On the way, Preston tells Vincent’s friend she can help him replace his lost driver’s license. They exchange contact information. We return to the underpass that has become Preston’s makeshift war room for the day. As she carries on, determined to untie as many knots in people’s lives as she can, I speak with a man who tells me he’s chosen to camp miles outside of the city. He says both shelters are worse than living outside.

At one facility, he says he was made to attend a prayer service before every meal — which, he says he could tolerate. But the dealbreaker for him was being forced to clean toilets while staff made jokes.

“They kept talking about stickies,” he says, referring to fecal matter stuck to the toilet bowls. “One guy would laugh and say things like ‘I left some stickies in there for you!’ It was disgusting.”

At the other shelter, people having mental health crises would scream all night, keeping him from sleeping.

After finishing with Preston, Vincent approaches with a folded piece of paper. It’s a trespassing ticket he got last week for sitting on the sidewalk with his belongings. Preston says there’s been an uptick in citations for sitting outside. When I ask Vincent about shelter options, he says he can’t do shelters. Last time, he says, his things got stolen.

Being unsheltered in Charleston can also mean police harassment. Sometimes that means fines. Sometimes it means violence.

One particularly gruesome incident from 2018 came to light last year when a settlement came before Charleston City Council detailing a police officer unleashing a titanium-toothed K-9 on an unarmed man who was staying in an abandoned property.

According to a complaint filed in federal court, Charleston Police Officer Anthony Gaylor retrieved the dog from the back seat of his vehicle. The complaint alleges Gaylor ignored department policy, as the man hadn’t engaged in any sort of physical resistance, the policy requirement for deploying a dog on someone. The person had simply “resisted” by not immediately coming out of a makeshift crawlspace. 

According to body camera footage, Officer Gaylor, upon learning the man was hiding, shouted to him, “Come down or I’ll send the dog in and you’re going to get bit.” His colleague who was also on the scene, Officer McClure quipped, “She has titanium teeth. Crunch. Crunch.”

Pictures of Officer Anthony Gaylor’s titanium-toothed K9 were submitted as part of a federal lawsuit in Charleston, W. Va. on Monday, Aug. 2, 2021.

By the time Gaylor issued his “last warning” to come out, to which the man in hiding exclaimed, “I’m coming out,” Gaylor had already let the leash go. For the next two minutes, audio from the camera is a chaotic blend of screaming and Gaylor unsuccessfully commanding the dog to let go. After having his right leg mauled, Barker was taken to the hospital for a “baseball-size wound,” according to court documents.

Court documents also note that, while he stayed at the hospital for 20 days undergoing multiple procedures prior to discharge, he was unable to return for follow-up surgery because he had no way of getting there.

Another violent incident occurred in May 2021, six months after the murder of George Floyd sparked a global movement. Charleston officers shot a Black man in the back who was attempting to walk back to the abandoned house where he was staying.

 In addition to private citizens and law enforcement, politicians at all levels of government in Charleston — from members of the city council up to the Governor himself — have increasingly lobbied for restricting access to services for unsheltered people.

In 2021, Charleston City Council proposed an ordinance that would’ve made it a crime to sleep outside in public. Not only was the measure supported by a few council members, the director of an overnight shelter wrote an opinion piece supporting it. The bill, along with one that would’ve made panhandling illegal, failed to pass following an out-cry from ACLU-WV and its supporters.

Efforts to criminalize homelessness in Charleston have also targeted organizations offering services to unhoused people. One week after RCCR pulled its request for ARPA funding amid community backlash, House Minority Leader Doug Skaff, a Democrat representing Charleston in the State Legislature, proposed a bill prohibiting feeding programs from operating within 1,500 feet of a school or childcare center. 

ACLU-WV requested a public hearing on the bill. The turnout saw business owners and parents from a downtown private school pitted against clergy and advocates. Ultimately the bill, which would have shuttered service providers across the state, failed.

Service providers that work with unsheltered people must be able to connect with them. That’s the power of street outreach, according to Strickland, who tries to “meet people where they are at: physically, mentally and spiritually.”

Charleston has seen an increase in street outreach in recent years. But as service providers there move closer toward best practices, the state’s third-largest city tried something different: moving the services miles away from its unsheltered population.

Last year, Bartlett House, Morgantown’s only shelter, moved four miles away from downtown into a building atop a high hill that had to be annexed into the city ahead of the move.

The old location was an easy walk for people who rely on feeding programs and the town’s free health clinic. But, being that close to services requires a centralized location. Enter the familiar ire of business owners.

Bartlett House’s former building sits abandoned in Morgantown, W. Va. on Wednesday, Apr. 20, 2022.

In a 2019 Morgantown Magazine article, “Compassion & Commerce: Can Morgantown do both?” a coffee shop owner said he considered hiring a bouncer to deal with the issue. The owner of an adjacent comic book shop stuck to name calling: “junkies” and “bums” were, in part, why he moved his business out of downtown.

The article revealed that relocating services was the brainchild of the Hazel Ruby McQuain charitable trust, a multi-million dollar charity, and Mark Nesselroad, a commercial developer. Bartlett House’s old location, after all, was located 500 feet from a $4.1 million park — the Hazel Ruby McQuain Park, to be exact.

One local TV news report from the time referred to the park as “somewhat of a hot spot for the homeless.” The same report included then-city manager, Paul Brake, assuring citizens that an added police presence would make it so “that type of element” wouldn’t want to be at the park.

When Nesselroad and the Hazel Ruby McQuain trust rolled out their plan last year to consolidate service providers into a single, albeit out-of-the-way, location, they had already purchased the new location for Bartlett House. Gov. Jim Justice approved $3.5 million in CARES funding for renovating the new location — a Ramada Inn that shuttered in 2017. Today, a for-sale sign featuring Nesselroad’s Black Diamond Realty hangs off the old building.

On a cold evening in April, four people, all visible from streets and alleys while walking through Morgantown, said they would sleep outside in freezing temperatures rather than catch the bus or walk to the new location. But distance was just one reason they refused to stay.

One woman, who asked to not be named, was standing under the awning of a closed business on Pleasant Street roughly 20 feet uphill from the old Bartlett House location. She said no one had approached her to talk about her situation in over a year of living on the streets — a comment echoed by every person I found tucked away in an awning or taking shelter under a bridge.

When I asked what she needed the most right now, she said a blanket. When I asked her if she had ever stayed at the shelter she began crying. Struggling to get speak through her tears she said a single word: “Mean.”

Two others, who also asked their names not be used, recalled experiences with abusive staff members at the shelter and being ridiculed after their belongings went missing. They also said they were unable to sleep comfortably out of fear that others might harm them — a fear amplified by a recent stabbing at the shelter.

Bartlett House, which also operates an on-site warming shelter during cold months, has come up in public meetings for years. Activists and advocates have publicly called for an investigation.

Mollie Kennedy, ACLU-WV community outreach director, has attended Morgantown City Council meetings religiously, in addition to working with numerous other stakeholders to address homelessness there.

“In Morgantown we have a compounded problem,” she told council at a March 22 meeting. “Unsheltered people do not trust and are afraid of the only shelter they have available to them. That left a lot of people literally out in the cold and freezing temperatures this winter and that problem has been exacerbated by the city’s decisions related to how you handle encounters and policy related to unsheltered individuals.”

The absence of a centrally located shelter in Morgantown puts a strain on service providers who try to keep track of the people they serve. Complicating matters, there is currently only one full-time outreach worker in Morgantown who deals exclusively with unsheltered people. 

Ryan Fieldman, the outreach worker, is often the first point of contact for police when they try to assist people in getting housed. Fieldman also responds to non-police complaints from residents regarding homelessness and connects with an ever-shifting population of homeless people. And, he’s responsible for five counties.

During the day, many of his clients hang out at the Friendship Room in downtown Morgantown. Unlike Charleston, Morgantown has a day shelter where people are allowed to simply exist. Here, staff connect clients with various housing and healthcare services. They convene as early as 8 a.m. to get inside from a night spent in the cold and warm up while drinking coffee and chatting.

The Friendship Room shuts down midday for lunch in Morgantown, W. Va. on Wednesday, Apr. 20, 2022.

The Friendship Room is a place Fieldman can consistently find some of the people he serves, but its future hangs in the balance. Milan Puskar Health Right, the organization that oversees the day shelter and operates a free health clinic next door, has been offered a large sum of COVID relief money to leave downtown and move next to the new Bartlett House location. A decision on where the Friendship Room will move has not been made.

Moving the health clinic and the day shelter will consume $800,000 of the $1.4 million earmarked for serving unhoused  people from the city’s American Rescue Plan Act funding. Charleston’s plan for ARPA spending on programs for homelessness (not including the grants that were pulled due to community pushback) is currently $2.24 million. Huntington plans to spend $2.44 million from ARPA’s HOPE program on such programs.

If 2021 was the year of flouting expert advice on harm reduction across the state, 2022 has been the year of backwards thinking on homelessness. Even Huntington, a city that has garnered a reputation for embracing progress and evidence-based solutions to systemic problems like the overdose crisis, recently passed a bill to tackle the alleged issue of people being discharged into the streets when kicked out of sober living homes and adding to the city’s unsheltered population. Despite no evidence to support this allegation, it has made for a concise election year talking point. The council vote to pass the ordinance was unanimous. A statewide version of the bill (which was later revealed to have been modeled after Huntington’s proposed legislation) made headway in the 2022 Legislative Session in both the House of Delegates and Senate but ultimately failed.

As for legislation aimed at helping people experiencing homelessness, four bills (including a proposal to give IDs to unsheltered people) were introduced. None advanced through even a single house.

Perhaps the most notable statement to come out of the statehouse on homelessness over the past year was Gov. Justice using his COVID briefing to insult Charleston Mayor Amy Goodwin for requesting a special legislative session to deal with homelessness. Justice made headlines not only for publicly denying her request but for referring to her as “Amy Baby,” adding the sexist, diminutive phrase to an ever-growing list of Jutice-isms.

Just as the state has failed to address the ongoing HIV epidemic, it lacks a coordinated plan on homelessness. Beyond having no plan, West Virginia is the setting for countless incidents of harassment facing homeless people.   

In 2020, ACLU-WV filed suit in federal court against the City of Wheeling after the city destroyed at least one encampment where unhoused people were staying.

Threatening to destroy more encampments at the height of a global pandemic, ACLU-WV intervened on behalf of the unsheltered community.

In sitting idly by as the number of people living on the streets continues to rise, the state is failing all West Virginians, housed and unhoused alike. Until people experiencing homelessness are housed or, at the very least, kept free from harassment, the issue of homelessness in the state will only continue to grow.