Dwight Smith, who runs the Catholic Worker homeless shelter in Santa Ana, couldn't believe it last week when he saw that a homeless woman in a wheelchair had been dropped off on his front walkway.
"I hope you don't think you're staying here," he said, pointing to the steps that must be climbed to get into the house.
Donna Tangeman, who had just $3 in her pocket, said her heart dropped. She said she had been steered to the Catholic Worker by a Garden Grove nonprofit agency dedicated to the disabled.
Knowing she had nowhere to turn, Smith paid for Tangeman, 54, and her female caregiver, who also is homeless, and their dog and cat to stay in a local motel for a week. He also brings them food, but doesn't know how long the arrangement will last.
In the meantime, he said he was angry that a nonprofit agency would "dump" a handicapped person at a shelter ill-equipped to serve the disabled.
"To be completely abandoned seems so wrong," Smith said. "We have this expectation that a woman this vulnerable will have a place to go. She doesn't."
Tangeman's plight is an indication of how few resources are available to the Orange County homeless, particularly the disabled.
Several studies estimate the homeless population in Orange County at 7,000 to 11,000 people on a given night, but there are only about 3,000 beds in shelters available. One county count last year found 36 homeless people in wheelchairs over a year.
Debbie Groendal, operations manager at 2-1-1-Orange County, a county social services hotline, said most shelters are not equipped to help the disabled. "There are not many shelters able to take homeless people in a wheelchair," she said. "It's very difficult."
Deby Harwell, program supervisor at Colette's Children's Home, a Huntington Beach sober-living facility, agreed.
Shelters "are hard enough to find for people who aren't in a wheelchair," she said. "It's hard for the homeless to see where there are resources. They are in a desperate situation where it's hard to
Mary Bishop, the homeless coordinator with the county, provided a list of emergency shelters that might help Tangeman, but most were either not open to the disabled or offered services for specific problems, like drug addiction.
The Salvation Army has a shelter, but Tangeman would have to leave each morning until it reopened in the afternoon, difficult when recuperating from surgery.
