In normal economic times, The Salvation Army Orlando says it would be charging people to stay in its shelter — a practice that may come as a surprise: Homeless shelters that charge for overnight services have been widespread nationally for years.

But it’s not about money, The Salvation Army Orlando says.

“If we did not have this policy, we would be enabling people to have no ambition or desire to move forward with their lives, and we would become a flophouse and a toxic charity,” Capt. Ken Chapman, co-area commander of the Salvation Army of Orange and Osceola counties, told Spectrum News last month.

Chapman says his Central Florida organization normally provides three free nights of shelter, then charges $10 a night for emergency services. It says it suspended that policy in March 2020 upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic but that it plans to discuss late this year the possibility of reinstating it.

Nationally, the practice of charging fees for shelter services, for whatever the reason, has met criticism and efforts to end the practice.

In Minnesota, officials in Hennepin County, the state’s most populous, seek ways to tackle affordable housing and homelessness, including elimination of a small fee that shelters charge for overnight services, the Star Tribune reported.

In the meantime, Minneapolis-based People Serving People says it’s about to launch a pilot program that will give homeless families a choice.

Instead of paying for shelter services, families will have the option to participate in a program that includes a “financial empowerment curriculum” and establishment of bank accounts for families that don’t have them, said Rinal Ray, CEO of People Serving People. The organization then will provide matching funds up to a certain amount in residents’ accounts, she said.

Ray said the program aims to build “financial power with families experiencing homelessness.”

“This is really an opportunity to prove a concept and to test our theory” — that when families have enough money, “their stay in shelter is going to be shorter, and the likelihood of them returning to shelter gets lower,” she said.

She said her organization rejects the “prevailing narrative that homelessness is something that someone does to themselves, (that) it is a moral failing.”

“We know that bad things can happen to anyone,” she said. “Some people just have safety nets that they can fall into that others don’t, and the folks who predominantly don’t, at least in our experience, are African American and Native American.”

Shelters that apply fees sometimes do with a premise of personal responsibility or, in the case of the Orlando facility, a belief that suggests poor people won't work and get their own homes if they can get by on handouts.

Ten years ago, Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles started charging $7 for an overnight stay amid a drop in funding, an increase demand and a belief by the organization’s leader that homeless people should learn self-sufficiency, NBC News reported at the time.

Andrew Bales, Union Rescue Mission’s CEO, told Spectrum News in an email recently that his organization no longer charges for emergency shelter services but asks residents in its Gateway program, designed for those who have income, to pay $5 a day and thereby “invest in their own recovery.”

The shelter also asks but doesn’t require residents to save $2 a day, he said.

The latter appears to be a form of a growing trend among homeless shelters to help families transition to permanent housing. Samantha Levine, director of communications for the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, said her organization has noticed more homeless shelters that encourage savings and financial literacy.

The 'First Step' approach

First Step Shelter in Daytona Beach says it requires residents who have income to give half of it to the organization to hold until they “transition into their housing,” said Caron Delancy, First Step’s director of operations.

“We want to make sure that these individuals are now getting in the mindset to be able to do what they need to do in order to be successful when they transition into housing,” she said.

Delancy said the shelter makes no such monetary requirement of people who don’t have income. “How can you give us 50% of nothing?” she said.

She said First Step has found the policy “powerful” for people “because when they leave, they end up with all of this money — money that they would have never been able to save.”

Ray, of Minnesota’s People Serving People, said families for years had criticized the policy of charging for shelter services, calling it “a barrier for them to exit shelter and to build assets and a safety net for once they do exit shelter.”

She said Minnesota’s Hennepin County about two decades ago started requiring county-contracted shelters to charge the fee. Feedback from residents inspired People Serving People and the county to work on the pilot program that gives families an option that avoids fees, she said.

Officials in Hennepin County couldn’t be reached to explain the fees structure.

“Some folks thought (the fees policy) was good because it would encourage families to get out of here faster,” Ray said.  “But the reality was that they couldn’t build the assets to get out of here faster, so they were here longer.”

She said the causes of homelessness include “a whole host of interconnected factors and structural racism... and we’re trying to keep in mind that whole big picture as we’re making these decisions around program and policy.”

The Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, which coordinates funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to the region’s providers of homeless services, “doesn’t encourage charging those experiencing homelessness for shelter,” spokeswoman Levine said.

“These folks are vulnerable individuals without disposable income, and they sometimes don't have the money and yet still need a place to say,” Levine told Spectrum News.

Other than The Salvation Army Orlando, she said she knows of no Central Florida shelters that typically charge.

The Orlando-based Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida says it currently doesn’t charge for use of its shelter, although it previously charged a “nominal” fee that “toward the end became more optional if people were in position” to pay, said Meredith Bekemeyer, the coalition’s director of development.

“We have not collected guest fees for well over a year now in any sense,” she said.

Once a 'barrier' to services

Yet shelters in the U.S. have been charging residents for at least the better part of two decades, even as most appear to maintain a free-of-charge safety net.

Shelters typically charged about $10 a night more than 15 years ago, said Holly Harmon, social services director at The Salvation Army St. Petersburg.

“It was kind of more of a barrier where if you didn't pay it, you couldn't stay,” she told Spectrum News.

Harmon said that rather than turn people away, more financially pinched shelters today are seeking grants, including from HUD, to help cover the cost of overnight stays.

“But there still is definitely a ‘positive’ to asking someone to contribute to their care, especially if they have income,” she said.

Teaching 'how to budget'

She said The Salvation Army St. Petersburg asks people to pay generally 30% of their income to stay at its shelter. That aligns with a rent-paying standard that the U.S. government established decades ago. 

Harmon said the money helps offset the cost of lodging, hygiene products, three meals a day, case-management services and more.

The shelter establishes “individualized service plans,” then considers a client’s income, she said.

“Most don’t have income when they come in,” Harmon said. “And therefore if you have no income, you have no obligation to pay any kind of program fee.”

If clients start making money, she said, “we have them start practicing what it is to pay 30%, no more than 30%, of their income for housing costs.”

About 40% of the shelter’s clients receive income and pay a portion of it to stay in the shelter, she said, and “most of them are very happy to do so because they're grateful for the services that we help them with.”

Residents won’t get kicked out or turned away for refusing or failing to do so, Harmon said, “but it does help them learn how to budget... so they can do that when they move into permanent housing once they leave us.”

Teaching 'some responsibility'

The Salvation Army touts itself as a “Christian organization and part of the universal Christian church.” Lay members are soldiers, and officers carry military-style ranks based on service, character, devotion to duty, and more, the organization says.

The organization took in about $3.3 billion in global revenue in 2019, according to its 2020 Annual Report. That included about $1.96 billion, or 59%, from direct public support; $393 million, or about 12%, from government funding; and $165 million, or about 5%, from program service fees. Expenses totaled $3.7 billion, including $388 million for residential and institutional services and $1.1 billion for other social services.

The report also included about $15.75 billion in assets, including $7.85 billion in investments.

The Salvation Army remains among the most recognizable in the U.S. when it comes to helping the needy and disadvantaged, with food pantries, disaster relief and ubiquitous red kettles that ring in every holiday season with requests for donations.

Central Florida knows it as the organization that gives away turkeys and thousands of free meals on Thanksgiving.

Chapman, the co-area commander for the Salvation Army of Orange and Osceola counties, said people who put money in the red kettle “would be probably be surprised to hear that after three nights, in a normal situation we would be charging $10 a night.”

“’Why am I giving money to them?’” he said, quoting a hypothetical giver.

“Well,” Chapman said, “it literally costs us $47 a night to house someone when you add our cost matrix of everything involved: staffing, utilities, everything.”

Yet he added that “the only reason” the Orlando location charges is “to try to teach some responsibility and help them get their lives together.”

Homeless-advocacy groups point out that homeless people find it more difficult to find jobs because of, among other things, a lack of a permanent address or access to showers and transportation.

Pandemic's effect on policy

Chapman said the pandemic prompted the shelter to indefinitely suspend the policy because “we know that everyone is struggling through the pandemic and the shutdown and all the economic rebound and all of the recovering that we have to go through.”

In normal conditions, he said, the shelter considers each client on an individual basis and provides leniency on fees, for example, in cases of mental illness, domestic abuse or sudden unemployment or homelessness.

Chapman said the shelter wouldn’t charge if a resident enrolled in a Salvation Army rehabilitation program. Its Adult Rehabilitation Center touts “spiritual, social, and emotional assistance for men who have lost the ability to cope with their problems and caught in addiction.”

Also, Chapman said, organizations including churches and businesses sometimes sponsor free nights for “for people who are in difficult situations.”

“But there’s a big part of the population that just wants a free ride,” Chapman said. “If we allowed that, we are nothing but a toxic charity. We’re perpetuating the same cycle over and over.”

A City of Orlando spokeswoman told Spectrum News in an email that the city invests “nearly $3.5 million each year to nearly 20 partner agencies to support programs that provide emergency shelter, bridge and permanent housing, supportive services and ongoing case management to those who are experiencing homelessness.”

She added that the city wasn’t able to “speak directly” to practices of specific shelters.

An Orange County spokeswoman said the county doesn’t fund shelters and referred Spectrum News to the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida.

“Putting a barrier to shelter is not always the most helpful intervention,” said the Homeless Services Network’s Levine.

Questions about the way forward

Chapman said The Salvation Army Orlando doesn’t expect to discuss until after Christmas when to reinstate its policy of charging for services. He cited uncertainty about a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moratorium that prevents the eviction of tenants unable to make rental payments.

The CDC last month extended the moratorium through July, after which homeless shelters say they’re bracing for a surge in need for services.

The timing of reinstatement of fees would depend on “the emergency situation” in a “post-COVID world,” Chapman said.

Salvation Army USA did not respond to messages from Spectrum News on the practice of and reasons for charging for services.

Harmon, of The Salvation Army St. Petersburg, said local units receive general messaging from Salvation Army USA but that “at the local level there is still an amount of autonomy... as far as the different kind of philosophy approaches.”

Other St. Petersburg shelters also charge so-called program fees, she said.

“So it’s not an uncommon thing,” Harmon said. “But I think it is more common now to make sure that it’s not something that turns (people) away.”

Spectrum News digital reporter Scott Harrell contributed to this report.