Homeless strain to keep a roof over their stuff

Anthony Humphrey works two jobs. Still, he sleeps without a pillow on the floor of a homeless drop-in center downtown.

This roof over his head is free.

He can't afford an apartment, he says, because his bills devour his income.

One of his big-ticket items is the dough he regularly hands over to a self-storage facility to let him squirrel away his girlfriend's stuff -- clothing and kitchen wares.

The cost of housing those holdings is $119.95 a month.

His girlfriend, Linda, he says, lives in a studio apartment on Huntington Avenue, too small to fit all her valuables -- including Humphrey, he adds.

She would like to get a bigger place to share with him, he says.

Then she could have all her goodies with her -- including Humphrey. And he wouldn't have to pay over $1,400 a year in storage fees.

But that's not possible, he says. Even together, they don't have enough money. Partly, Humphrey says, that's because he's forking over so much cash to that storage company in Dorchester.

And so it goes for Humphrey, who does custodian work and unloads trucks on back-to-back shifts, yet remains mired in the chasing-your-tail cycle of homelessness.

"If I didn't have to pay storage, I could get me a place," says Humphrey, 48, who carries his work clothes on his back, and prefers the drop-in floor to a shelter bed because it is closer to his first job of the day, which starts before dawn.

Increasingly, advocates for the homeless are citing these dollar-draining storage fees -- on top of well-known issues such as mental illness, substance abuse, unemployment and low-paying jobs, and the high cost of housing -- as a major impediment to men and women getting off the street.

"People tend to see homelessness as a single, homogeneous, simple problem," says Dr. George Sigel , program director of the South Boston Behavioral Health Program , run by Tufts-New England Medical Center . "There are a lot of factors once you've fallen into the pit that seem to keep you there. Storage fees seem to be a factor that just make it harder for people to get out."

Sigel knows a middle-age woman, formerly homeless, who was ambushed by the bottom line. When she finally did the math, she was shocked to realize that in paying $150 a month over four years from her disability check to store the furniture and clothing from a life she once had, she had shelled out over $7,000. That would have been enough, she figured, to move into her own place and out of an antiseptic group home more quickly than she did.

For some who can't even afford a storage hut, the price of holding on to their possessions can be even higher.

One man who pushed around a shopping cart filled with his life's possessions almost froze to death on the city's streets this winter before he was rescued by outreach workers, according to Kathy Kim, an advocate for the homeless.

The man knew he couldn't fit all his gear in a shelter locker, Kim said, and didn't have the money for storage.

But he didn't want to be apart from his precious paraphernalia, which included his church suit and Bible.

"This is one of our biggest problems: People don't want to separate from their belongings," says Kim, a founder and pro-bono coordinator of the Dudley Square Outreach Initiative, which launched in April to provide services to street people. "It's one of the main reasons people are sleeping outside."

From the conventional eye, it may look like a bunch of clutter that homeless people load in carts or lug around in bags or store in bins.

But for people without a permanent address, even the smallest items can swell with purpose.

"By the time you're homeless, you've lost your home, often your job and your ties to your community," says Pat Maher , a nurse practitioner with the Cambridge and Somerville Health Care for the Homeless Program . "Homelessness just feels like a state of grief, so much loss. The loss of possessions can sometimes feel like the final loss."

There are furniture and family photos from bygone days that, street people believe, will eventually find their way into the homes they'll have again someday.

There are birth certificates and Social Security cards that can help bring them benefits to survive their slide, and provide the paperwork for the anticipated tenancies of tomorrow.

Maher knows a homeless woman who paid and paid to have her family photographs and furniture and documents stored.

But when she lost her part-time jobs, she fell behind in her remittances. And storage companies can assess late fees and sell off contents to recoup their money.

As time passed, the woman moved, and Maher is unsure how the situation resolved. But the woman, Maher says, was heartsick even to think she might lose touch with her personal effects.

"It's a huge issue," says Maher. "Possessions are important, no matter what they are. There's hope in having possessions."

At the Pine Street Inn, a shelter based in the South End with satellite locations, there's a waiting list of 30 to 50 for storage lockers that rent for $2 a month. Beyond that, staff has enough trouble finding room to house people, let alone an accumulation of property, an official says.

"We're providing shelter for over 700 people a night," says Shepley Metcalf , a spokeswoman for Pine Street. "We would need expansive amounts of space to have people bring in more than a small amount of clothing."

As an alternative, some advocates say, they'd like to see a publicly run facility at which homeless men and women could store their goods at a nominal, or no, cost.

"It would provide the dignity of having your possessions well cared for," says Maher.

After talking so much about his storage conundrum, Anthony Humphrey feels he has do something to stop the siphoning of his money, though he's not sure what.

He catches a smoke, hoists his red backpack, and prepares to walk across town from South Boston to spend time with Linda.

But before he goes, he again settles into a mood of general annoyance. "Man, I gotta get rid of that storage," he says.

Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com