GAINESVILLE - Christmas weekend's cold and snow just made it tougher for homeless people who live under Gainesville's railroad bridges, but a local lay minister hopes to get them shelter from the cold at least during the winter.
There is a place in Gainesville for those who have no place. It is dirty and dusty; in the winter there is no heat, in summer it is not cool. The people who live under the city's railroad bridges say the bridge is their roof, and when it rains that's when they have water.
A donated Christmas tree with red and silver bulbs stood out recently in contrast to the rock ballast piled under the Queen City Parkway Bridge.
A battered 55-gallon drum served as a hearth where wood burned to fend off the continuing chill, and the people with nowhere else to go huddled around it, held their hands over it, seeking its warmth. A CSX train roared loudly by a few yards from a small city of fold-up tents; overlooking the fireplace, the Christmas tree and the tents, makeshift blanket shelters crowded the underside of the bridge. In front of the tents there was a handmade cross cloaked in blue cloth.
On this morning, three days after the Christmas weekend, about six or seven people were there, but by nightfall there would be more, many more, when those who slept behind the blankets and in the tents returned at nightfall.
"It's cold," said Deborah Randolph, who said she's been homeless for 30 years. "We stayed here Christmas. I opened two cans of chicken broth, had a little turkey and I put six boiled potatoes in there and that's what we had for Christmas."
Those who were under the bridge Christmas weekend were invited to stay in a local motel, but Randolph chose not to go. She said she wants a place of her own.
"I'm so sick of going by people's rules and regulations I don't know what to do," she said. "I want my own place."
Barry Smith said he lost his wallet and his identification and without it he has no way to get a new job and with no money he has nowhere else to go.
"I've been down here about three weeks," Smith said. "I hope I get my identification by the end of next week and then I'm gone. I'm going somewhere."
Smith said he was laid off and was looking for a job when he lost his wallet and his ID three weeks ago.
Denese Humphries said she wants to go to Jacksonville, Florida, and hopes to get rehired, but she said the real problem for her is not food or money, it's transportation.
"It's about getting bus passes to go here and there," Humphries said, adding that you can't get ID cards or Social Security assistance or a job unless you have a way to get there to get them. "We don't have money to get up to the labor department because they moved the labor department. I guess bus tickets would be really nice."
"No one wakes up in the morning and says I want to be homeless," said Richard "Rico" Bell, who comes to visit the bridge people and seeks to help them through his ministry, Feed the Need. "Right now they don't have a choice, they don't have anywhere to go, this is the roof over their heads."
Bell said alcohol and drug addiction is the problem with many and some of them are former convicts and no one wants them around because of those problems. They need counseling and help but the most immediate need is to get them out of the winter weather.
Gainesville's homeless shelters are full.
"Most of the time they are all full up," according to Bell. "When we help get two or three out, we move four or five in. Ninety percent of them would work if they had a job, but most of them don't have I.D., no Social Security Card, some of them don't even have birth certificates."
Bell believes people have been staying under the Queen City Parkway Bridge, the bridge on Athens Highway, and at make shift campgrounds around town for years.
"This just didn't occur overnight but it's time now to get the word out that these people need help," he said. "There have been times when they've been told to leave by the police department but as soon as the police leave they come back under here because they don't have anywhere else to go except off in the woods or under another bridge."
Bell said his goal is to find a vacant heated building, a building someone would lease, perhaps. He dreads what he may find under the bridge one day soon.
"I may come up under here one day and find some of them dead where they've been frozen to death or dead from starvation, especially this time of year," he said. "I would love to have some kind of building just to put them in there four months out of the year, the winter months, that would be a big help."
Bell said he gets help from local churches and organizations including local grocery stores that donate food, but he fears more and more people who will become bridge people in the months ahead.
Bell said some of the bridge people have been there so long, they believe it is all they have. He knows of one man who has lived under the bridge ten years and is now dying of cirrhosis of the liver from chronic alcoholism.
"Some of them feel like, this is it," Bell observed. "I've had a couple of them tell me, I'll probably die here and they will unless we do something to get them out from under here."
Sunday
May 19th, 2024
8:51AM
