DRIVING HOME: Sam Santiago at the wheel of Project H.O.M.E.’s outreach van. At right, Santiago leaving a homeless camp near Center City.
Riding along with the people who help Philly’s chronically homeless. 14 | P H I L A D E L P H I A C I T Y PA P E R |
J A N U A R Y 3 0 - F E B R U A R Y 5 , 2 0 1 4 | C I T Y PA P E R . N E T
WORDS BY RYAN BRIGGS • PHOTOS BY NEAL SANTOS
JAMES HAD RIDDEN A BUS for 30 hours, traveling to Philadelphia to find his longlost brother. He’d come to ask for money and a place to stay, but after four days, James had gotten no further than the waiting room of the Greyhound station in Chinatown. Venturing out into the streets during one of this winter’s brutally cold nights, the 62-year-old had slipped and fallen, breaking his shoulder. After treatment in a hospital, he floated back to the bus station, with only a few dollars and his brother’s outdated address in hand, to try to recuperate. I met James on a recent morning while I was shadowing Sam Santiago, an outreach coordinator for the homeless support agency Project H.O.M.E. James was slumped against a wall leading to the station’s men’s room, his wounded arm swollen. A bus depot manager, no stranger to people using his facility as a temporary home, had called Project H.O.M.E.’s outreach hot line after watching James’ last dollars slip from his pockets as he struggled to reach the restroom. It didn’t take much prying for James to open up. “I’ve come a long way from Reno to find my brother,” he blurts out at Santiago’s first question, before admitting, sadly, that he isn’t sure if his brother knows he’s in town. They haven’t seen each other in 40 years. Santiago has spent 14 years building relationships with people like James — chronically homeless individuals who often have had negative experiences with shelters and bureaucratic support systems. His expertise is in tracking and building trust with men and women who live on the city’s streets — a difficult process that can take years. Philadelphia is unusual for having a relatively small number of unsheltered people compared to many big cities, especially those in the West. Only one in 3,095 Philadelphians sleeps on the streets, compared to one in 254 in San Francisco. Some attribute this to a more effective shelter system and, perhaps equally, to