Gilroy
– More than 700 homeless people took advantage of the beds this
year at Gilroy’s Cold Weather Shelter, and 41 families who spent
the winter at the Arturo Ochoa Migrant Center now have permanent
housing.
Gilroy – More than 700 homeless people took advantage of the beds this year at Gilroy’s Cold Weather Shelter, and 41 families who spent the winter at the Arturo Ochoa Migrant Center now have permanent housing.
The seasonal shelter that operates at the National Guard Armory on Wren Avenue closed its doors for the year Thursday morning. All told, 13,000 visitors slept in the shelter’s 125 beds between Nov. 29 and March 31.
Hilary Barroga, of EHC Lifebuilders, said cold and rainy weather caused the shelter to fill up earlier than normal this year.
The Sobrato Transitional Housing Center, a year-round shelter on Monterey Road, is scheduled to open in 2007.
A total of 62 families with 132 children spent the winter at Ochoa, a service of St. Joseph’s Family Center that provides educational and counseling services and helps families find permanent housing. Program Manager Lilieth Armenta said the numbers were comparable to the previous year, when 46 of 65 families left the camp for permanent housing.
“The goal of the program is to help people become self-sufficient,” Armenta said. “Most of them have a better situation when they leave than when they came in.”
The county’s exhaustive street-by-street count of its homeless population in December found 401 people living on Gilroy’s streets and in the city’s shelters, and 7,121 homeless people across the county.
Of Gilroy’s 401 homeless, 152 were on the street, with 249 in shelters. Morgan Hill had 21 people on the street and nine in shelters, and San Martin had nine street homeless and 96 people spending the night in a shelter.
