In Duluth, a safe place to sleep for people living in cars

At 8 p.m. every evening on the steep hillside above Duluth’s downtown, an otherwise nondescript parking lot outside an old red brick building transforms into overnight affordable housing.

A line of minivans, pickups, SUVs and Toyota Priuses pull into numbered parking spots. People hop out and begin preparing for the night.

Mike Lane opened the back door of his 2005 Ford Escape, which doubles, for now, as his home. Inside are his clothes, a TV, some prescription medication and other odds and ends.

To sleep, he reclines the driver’s seat back as far as it will go. He spreads towels over the windows to block the glare from an overhead streetlight.

“Because that light really bores into my brain, even with my eyes closed,” he said. The towels also offer a semblance of privacy.

A retired long-haul truck driver, Lane is 65. He’s been sleeping in this parking lot since it opened for the season in June, after he left the single room apartment he rented across the bridge in Superior, Wis.

The rent was only $400 a month, but it had a shared bathroom and common area. After four and a half years, he said the communal living became unbearable.

“It was just like a prison cell to me,” he said. “I’d rather be out here in the fresh air.”

Now he’s taking the money he saves on rent to pay down debt while he looks for a new affordable apartment. He supplements his monthly retirement check with work conducting political polls on his cell phone for $10 an hour.

Lane moved to Duluth 35 years ago from Florida. He has two adult children who live in Duluth, and six grandkids. He has dinner with them most Sundays. But he’s kept his living situation a secret.

“If they knew that I was in this situation, they’d want me come back and live with them,” he explained. “And I don’t want to interrupt their household. I don’t want them to worry about Grandpa. Because I’m a pretty tough old guy, really.”

Instead Lane came to Safe Bay next to the Damiano Center in Duluth, which provides free meals and offers a host of other services to people in need.

Lane said he feels secure here because it’s staffed throughout the night. He has a place to wash up in a mobile trailer with showers and restrooms. And he values the sense of community.

As the evening progresses people sit in a circle, drinking coffee and chatting.

Sitting in a lawn chair to check in with them is Natasha Lindberg, 28, a support staffer at Safe Bay who has experienced homelessness herself. She lived out of a tent for a time in Duluth, and also couch-surfed.

“I’ve been through all of it, you know, and it’s nice to be able to work with the people around here to give back and let them know that they’re not alone.”

Lindberg said it’s important for people to have a safe place like this to go.

“Where you can come take a shower and relax and get some good rest, and not have to worry about cops knocking on your window, or people coming up to you, creeping you out, and all that kind of stuff. It’s nice. I guarantee it helps a lot of people,” she said.

A coalition of service providers in Duluth opened up Safe Bay last year. It’s part of a growing nationwide trend as the homelessness crisis has deepened. Dozens of sanctioned parking lots have popped up on the West Coast. But there are only a handful in the Midwest.

Records show 241 different people used Safe Bay during its initial pilot season. This year it’s been even busier. Many work during the day, and sleep there at night.

There are parents with kids, even multi-generational families living in several vehicles.

“Everybody’s story is unique,” said project organizer Joel Kilgour, who said he gets at least two calls a month from people in other cities interested in starting a similar safe parking program.

They may be leaving a bad or unsafe relationship, he said. They may have been forced to relocate for work and couldn’t secure housing in Duluth.

Sitting inside his 2007 Dodge Caravan, 70-year old John Amren said this is his second summer sleeping at Safe Bay since he sold the house he used to own in Duluth in 2022.

For years Amren ran a kayaking business in Grand Marais. He drove his van to Central America last winter. He’s rigged up a small bed with a 4-inch piece of memory foam in the back.

He came back to Duluth this summer for medical care. But he plans to return to Costa Rica and apply for residency after he leaves Safe Bay. He hopes to retire there.

“I want to climb volcanoes and such. Even though I’m 70, I still want to do some things,” he said.

Stepping on Up

Many of the people who park and sleep at Safe Bay have never used homeless services before. Many wouldn’t feel comfortable going into a shelter, Kilgour said. Some may not even consider themselves homeless.

By providing those people a safe, centralized place to sleep, it also gives service providers an important opportunity to build relationships with them.

“And those relationships are key, because that’s how you get them connected to services,” said John Cole, executive director of CHUM, which operates the largest emergency shelter in Duluth and is one of the partners in Safe Bay.

Everyone who checks in to Safe Bay meets with a caseworker. Kilgour said last year they helped move several people into permanent housing.

“We’ve seen some pretty high rates of success here as compared to shelters,” Kilgour said.

Safe Bay is one component of a broader effort spearheaded by 13 service providers in Duluth called Stepping on Up that aims to develop a new response to address chronic homelessness.

Shelters in Duluth are maxed out, often overflowing. Encampments have become more prevalent. The situation came to a head in Duluth this summer during a divisive debate over whether to make camping on city land a misdemeanor crime.

There are several ongoing efforts in Duluth to build permanent lower-cost housing throughout the city.

In the meantime, the focus of the Stepping on Up effort is to address the immediate, emergency need for shelter. Two years ago Duluth opened its first-ever permanent warming center. Over 1,100 people used the facility last winter.

Groups are working to establish a triage center in Duluth. The city council recently set aside an additional $500,000 for that effort. Plans are also in the works for additional shelter space, including the addition of a second floor at CHUM, which would double the shelter’s capacity.

Cole said that project is now in the design phase. He hopes to break ground next year.

Kilgour anticipates a sanctioned outdoor camping space will also open next spring, where there’s staffing, security, access to resources for people sleeping in tents, similar to how Safe Bay operates.

The goal is to “create a pathway from street homelessness to stability,” Kilgour said, so people don’t get stuck in a bottleneck in which they sometimes wait up to three years for affordable housing.

Mike Lane is confident he won’t have much of a wait.

“I’ll be back in housing before long,” he said. “I’m a veteran, and I’ve got things in the pipeline to get in a home before it gets cold.”

But Safe Bay closes for the season at the end of October. If he doesn’t have housing lined up by then, he said, he’d likely have to go to the warming center.

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