New Haven Independent

“You OK?” Sgt. Martin Tchakirides asked.

As temperatures dropped to the low teens last week, Tchakirides paid visits to homeless shantytowns to convince people living there to come in from the cold.

Joe told the sergeant he was fine where he was. “The last time I went to a shelter, someone stole my shoes.” People didn’t always treat him with respect. Parked in the bushes on an embankment between Interstates 91 and 95, Joe has been squatting in the hidden shantytown for about four months.

Other structures around him — a couple tents, and shacks pieced together from aluminum, painted wood and plastic scraps — have been empty for a while, says Joe. His friend Bob, who squats beside him in a blue tent, has been missing for a few days —“I think he checked himself in” to a mental hospital.

Joe, who’s 34, says he isn’t worried about his health — he reckons he’s better off than when he lived in a shelter last year and came down with the flu.

Smoking a home-rolled cigarette and bracing himself against the at-times painful wind Friday, he spoke of how ended up on the streets. Working as a roofer on top of a client’s home, he took a 24-foot fall. He couldn’t go back to work, and things spiraled down from there.

An outreach worker from the Hill Health Center brought him blankets Friday. A local restaurant gave him a liquid candle, which he lights inside a tin can for heat.

As Tchakirides makes the rounds to known encampments, he says most people, like Joe, are hard to convince to budge. “Usually, their bodies convince them when it’s time to go.”

Tchakirides started checking on people a few years back, working the midnight shift. He discovered a few shantytowns and got to know the people there.

A 2004 survey counted 1,113 homeless people in New Haven, many of whom suffer from drug dependency or mental illness.

As the city suffers a brutal artic front this month, shelters — the Immanuel Baptist Shelter on Grand Avenue, Columbus House on the Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, and the overflow shelter on Cedar Street — report being filled to over capacity.

The city spends $1.4 million dollars per year serving the homeless, paid for almost exclusively with local tax revenue, said City Hall Spokesman Derek Slap. That’s more than every other city and town in Connecticut combined, he said.

Even if he can’t convince the homeless to check in at a shelter, Tchakirides makes sure the people he meets, especially the elderly, are able to survive. “I’ll detox them if I have to… They go kicking and screaming but at least they have a bed to sleep in that night… They may not be happy, but they are warm.”

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