Homeless living at airport — and one man found in a parked plane — underscore the wreckage of COVID-19

Southwest Airlines personnel were preparing a plane at Gate E17 for a flight from Philadelphia International Airport to Tampa, Fla., at 5:20 a.m. Saturday when they made a startling discovery: a man inside one of the bathrooms.

He had no ticket, and an airport security crew who then swept the aircraft with a K-9 unit did not specify how long he’d been there or how he’d gotten aboard, according to a security report obtained by The Inquirer.

Officials surmised that the man, identified by Philadelphia police as Jeremiah Meade, 36, of Lexington, Ky., may have been part of a growing group of about 100 homeless people who’ve occupied the largely empty airport since the coronavirus appeared. Meade was arrested for criminal trespassing and released on unsecured bail. Airport officials had been allowing people to stay in Terminal A-East, homeless advocates said.

A different plane at another gate was used for the Tampa flight later Saturday. While passengers likely never knew what happened, city officials along with homeless providers and advocates were left to confront yet another troublesome incident in the predicament of Philadelphia’s homeless — a population estimated at 5,500 in shelters and 1,000 on the streets — during the pandemic.

For nearly two months, tensions have been rising between the city and those who serve and house the homeless. On Sunday, The Inquirer reported the first known death of a homeless person in a shelter.

On Monday and Tuesday, providers and advocates exchanged letters with Mayor Jim Kenney that expressed widely varying views on the subject.

And on Wednesday, a group of protesters chanting “Shelters equal death” gathered outside Managing Director Brian Abernathy’s home in Mount Airy, demanding the city move homeless individuals out of shelters and into safer locations such as hotel rooms.

Of the airport situation, Abernathy said Wednesday, “What is happening there is inappropriate. We’re going to have to make changes, but we also have to make sure that we do that in a humane and just fashion so that people have somewhere to go.”

Sister Mary Scullion, president and executive director of Project HOME, the homeless advocacy group, said it’s not unusual for 15 to 25 people to live at the airport year-round. “But,” she added, “numbers have never been this high. It’s a whole new reality since COVID-19.”

As shelters take in fewer people in an attempt to make conditions safer, homeless people are saying they’ve drifted to the airport. The problem, advocates say, is lack of services to help those who’ve gathered there. Many are suffering more from mental health disabilities than from addiction issues, Scullion said.

She added that quite a few come from Delaware County and other suburban locales.

Agreeing with Scullion, a Philadelphia city official said, “People get dumped by other counties at the airport. They’re literally pushed to go there. It’s infuriating.”

Officials from Delaware County did not return calls for comment.

On Wednesday, Abernathy said that he shared some of the concerns of the protesters outside his home, but that the city is doing “everything we can for our unsheltered population.”

While shelters have had to “de-densify” as a precaution against the virus’ spread, Abernathy said as many shelter beds are available today in the city as there were a year ago.

The written exchange this week between Mayor Kenney and 14 service providers and advocates exposed a chasm in the way experts believe the homeless should be served during the pandemic.

In their letter, sent Monday, the group expressed concern with the “pace and breadth with which the city has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic” among the homeless, saying that “utmost urgency” and “increased transparency” were warranted.

On Tuesday, Kenney answered. The group, he wrote, should “be assured that the points you raise will be given serious consideration.” He acknowledged the “on-the-ground” support they provide to ensure that homeless individuals are safe. He cited increased numbers of public restrooms and hand-washing stations in Kensington and Center City for the homeless.

That the group’s letter was six pages long and Kenney’s response was 2½ did little to convince providers and advocates that they were being heard.

“We want to thank the mayor and his team for their quick response,” said Michael Hinson, president and COO of SELF, the largest provider of emergency housing in the city. “But we are not completely satisfied with his answers. We didn’t view his response as representing the urgency we need to have.”

One advocate, who requested anonymity, decried Kenney’s letter as “the city phoning it in,” calling it “pat and condescending.”

In one point of contention, the providers and advocates wrote that the city “must continue to provide more non-congregate housing for the elderly and/or infirm, with fewer restrictions on entry and duration of stay, and it must do so quickly to save lives.”

Kenney responded that the city is “constantly monitoring this question to determine if additional sites must be secured ... and will be ... if needed.”

The city has announced that it will allow shelter residents who are older than 65, with underlying conditions, and who have been exposed to the virus but are not yet sick, to live in 250 rooms of the Holiday Inn Express and the Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott in Center City.

Advocates and providers applaud the decision but say young people with underlying conditions, or elderly who have not been exposed, should automatically be removed from tight quarters in shelters to prevent a catastrophic sweep of the virus through the population.

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The only person who has succumbed to the coronavirus while living in a shelter was a 46-year-old man from Puerto Rico with undisclosed underlying conditions, who died on April 2 after an outbreak of the disease infected more than three dozen people at the facility Our Brother’s Place in Center City.

Michael Dahl, executive director of Broad Street Ministry and a signatory of the letter, said that the winter shelter program he runs ended last Thursday. Afterward, as many as 60 homeless people no longer had a place to sleep. “But because of restrictions on where people can go,” they weren’t permitted to enter the “COVID hotels,” he said.

An advocate said not putting these people into a safe space “will lead to disaster.”

Providers and advocates asked the city for more protective masks for the homeless, who are denied access to pharmacies and food sites without them. Both sides agreed that more testing is needed.

Expressing frustration, advocates and providers said that they don’t believe their concerns are registering with the city. Kenney said he believes mechanisms to take up their worries are in place.

David Fair, who serves on SELF’s board of directors and was deputy commissioner for the city’s AIDS program in the 1980s, said that’s not the case.

“The contention that providers are consulted in the city’s planning is disingenuous,” he said, adding that weekly calls between city officials and 100 advocates and providers cannot be “represented as a mutual process of debate.”

Both sides say they expect to keep talking through the crisis.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the city’s push toward economic justice. See all of our reporting at brokeinphilly.org.