Coronavirus virtually halted homeless services at Las Vegas’ shelter

As the temperature creeped into triple digits, Denise Lankford busted open one of the Clean The World mobile shower doors and stepped outside, her damp hair shining in the morning sun.

“Ah, it feels better than sex,” she said Thursday, referring to one of the few showers she’d had in nearly two months.

Until this week, the 43-year-old had to use baby wipes to clean herself, washed her curly hair with water from a bottle and shaved her legs while sitting on the curb.

While its direct impact on the homeless population is still unclear, the coronavirus pandemic has made life on the streets of Las Vegas harder in many ways.

The Clean The World mobile shower trucks, for example, visited the city-run Courtyard Homeless Resource Center near downtown Las Vegas twice a week before temporarily halting operations in March.

But the nonprofit suffered a drop in donations around that time due to COVID-19 and wanted “to make sure that we had the right operations in place that would make the showers safe for both our staff and the people using them,” said Christina Flores, the organization’s marketing director.

Clean The World resumed its visits to the Courtyard on Tuesday and will now provide about 50 showers a day, five days a week through the end of June, when it expects to revert to the twice-a-week schedule.

Demand for the showers was running high Thursday. By 10 a.m., there was a four hour wait to get into one of the four bathroom stalls installed in a semi-tractor-trailer.

‘It’s really a necessity’

“They say it’s a luxury, but it’s really a necessity,” said the truck’s operator, Kevin Williams, who said hundreds of homeless at the open-air shelter told him they’d just gone without showers during the time when the truck wasn’t coming.

Clean The World is one of a dozen social service providers that stopped donating services to the Courtyard in mid-March due to the virus.

Among the services that vanished around that time were employment and job training, behavioral health and psychiatric counseling and assistance registering for Social Security or other governmental benefits.

The lapse in services was especially hard for women staying at the Courtyard, as there are fewer beds for them at other shelters and therefore they can’t always check in to shower.

Two shelters in the so-called Corridor Of Hope, The Shade Tree and the Las Vegas Rescue Mission, have only accepted clients on a limited basis since March 18, city emails show. That has worsened the shortage of beds available to homeless women.

Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada also temporarily closed March 26, after a staff member and client tested positive and is now operating at half capacity.

The Salvation Army, which has experienced a budget shortfall due to the coronavirus, was nearly forced to close its shelter. The nonprofit eventually was able to add 50 beds and stay open through an agreement with Clark County, Henderson and the cities of Las Vegas and North Las Vegas that allowed it to add 50 beds.

‘At full capacity’

“There’s always a need for donations to help us continue to serve, and we came to a point that we needed to reevaluate,” said Juan Salinas, The Salvation Army’s director of social services.

“If we don’t get money for the shelter, we can’t run it. But luckily everything worked out, and we’re at full capacity right now.”

Shelter wasn’t the only thing in demand.

The city of Las Vegas community services director, Kathi Thomas-Gibson, says at times her staff has been forced to engage in bidding wars with other cities for necessary resources, including showers for the city and county’s $8 million ISO-Q (Isolation and Quarantine) Complex at Cashman Center.

That meant prices for necessary resources were driven higher, sometimes to more than double the original cost.

“We’ve been really leveraging limited resources so that we can have alignment in our response,” Thomas-Gibson said.

“There has been some price gouging. … We did report those folks to the state attorney general because that is not ethical and, you know, we’re in a crisis here.”