Activists demonstrate the need for better shelter for AIDS homeless

Philadelphia's homeless-shelter system is an especially dangerous place for patients with HIV or AIDS, activists said yesterday during a demonstration at City Hall.

Their immune systems already weakened, AIDS sufferers are exposed in the shelters to "dangerous diseases, fleas and bedbugs," poor nutrition and lack of access to medication, members of ACT UP, an AIDS activist group, said during the demonstration.

Some demonstrators lay on the sidewalk outside City Hall; others outlined their bodies with white chalk and wrote inside the outlines, "Dying for a home."

They said that 8,000 HIV-positive Philadelphians need housing. As many as 60 demonstrators voiced their anger after meeting Monday with Mayor Nutter and urging him to do away with the city's waiting list for permanent homes for those with HIV-AIDS.

They want the city to contribute $4 million to the mostly federally funded aid program which now finances housing here for HIV and AIDS patients.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1,400 Philadelphians contract HIV each year, a rate more than five times the national average, according to a study by graduate students from Penn's Urban Studies Program and medical school.

ACT UP spokesman Max Ray said that in the meeting, Nutter was struck by the stories of AIDS sufferers like Cliff Williams, who had to live apart from his wife, an AIDS sufferer dying of cancer, because she was in a women's shelter while he was in a men's shelter. He said that he got scarlet fever while there.

At the meeting, Nutter told ACT UP representatives that he couldn't make any immediate commitment, Ray said.

"The mayor was very sympathetic and supportive of the issues that they're raising but had to make clear some of the fiscal realities," said his spokesman, Mark McDonald.

"We're only just beginning the budget process" for the next fiscal year in hard financial times, McDonald said.

Paul Chrystie, director of communications at Office of Housing and Community Development, said the city is doing as much as it can with the money it has. He said that 105 vouchers for permanent AIDS housing had been created in the past two years and that there are more than 800 available for AIDS sufferers.

But the waiting list is two years long and 134 individuals and families were on it as of September, according to the Penn study. In 2009, at least six people died while on the waiting list, the study said.