A laundry service for the homeless loses its home [nasty business?]

An unusual program to help homeless people do their wash is being booted from the Madison laundromat where it has been operating for the past six months.

Around 50 homeless people a month have been taking the bus to Laundry Land at 1131 N. Sherman Ave., where they get free detergent, coins for the machines and a temporary loan of clean clothes, since some people walk in with only the clothes on their backs, says Donna Asif, an advocate for the homeless.

She set up Project Bubbles to be a companion to a service providing showers for the homeless she established in the basement of the First United Methodist church downtown in 2007. Keeping clean is no little thing even for people who lack big things like food and shelter, she says. She has seen grown men bury their heads in their towels and cry after having their first shower in days and changing into a freshly laundered set of clothes.

Asif says she is "terribly disappointed" that management at Laundry Land is ending the program there Thursday, Dec. 29, but grateful they gave it a chance.

"They were resistant from the beginning, but willing to try," she says. "They were worried that people would just loiter, that other customers wouldn't be happy, that there would be drinking on the premises," she recalls of her initial conversations with laundromat managers.

None of those things happened, she says. But there were other behaviors some people found peculiar. One fellow, for example, spread all of his clean belongings out on a table into piles, folding and refolding them for a long time.

"His backpack was his closet," Asif says. She suspects he was enjoying the thrill of finally having his worldly possessions clean, organized and fragrant. But it made management uncomfortable.

Another time a homeless person suffering from incontinence put his soiled pants into the washer. Asif doesn't see how that is much different from parents who toss their toddlers' dirty clothes into the machines, but it was the final straw for management, she recalls.

Shortly before Christmas, she got a call from the owner. Thursday, Dec. 29 would be the last day the facility would accept the program's coupons.

A Laundry Land staffer reached on the phone said helping homeless customers ended up "taking too much time." This staffer would not give his name and talked only a few moments before hanging up.

"I'd love to do it but we can't anymore. It got to the point where helping them took away from our regular customers," he said.

It is one more loss, Asif says, in a year when "our homeless neighbors" have been shut out of former hang outs in the basement of the state Capitol and the downtown library (undergoing renovations).

The homeless get a bad rap for being unkempt, dirty and smelly. But it's usually not by choice.

"They want a hot shower and clean clothes just like you and me," she says. "They just don't have the access."

She knows homeless people who have washed their clothes in the lakes, in fountains, and in the sinks of city hall and the Capitol. Hot air grates make good dryers. "Some of that you can get ticketed for," she says.

She has found another place where people who are homeless can do their wash: Affiliated Laundries on East Johnson Street. It is within walking distance of downtown shelters.

But because the facility does not have in-house staff, Asif explains, volunteers are needed to hand out the clean clothes, the soap and coins, which means that hours for Project Bubbles will be limited for now to just Monday afternoons, noon to 4.

The only other place people who are homeless can go to do a free wash is the emergency shelter run by Porchlight at the downtown Grace Episcopal Church, where lines are long and the dryers don't work well, says Kelly, a 50-year-old former Marine and chef. He became homeless after being laid off from a job in Wausau, and is a regular user of the shower and laundry programs Asif runs.

"I'm keeping clean," he says. "You could never even tell I was homeless if you didn't see my bag."

He is alluding to the sleeping bag he carries with him, along with a backpack containing a few changes of clothes, a chess set, and a John Grisham novel -- another bag with his warm winter clothing was stolen last week, he says.

Nobody wants to look or smell like the stereotype of a homeless person, he says. "People think you're dirty, a drunk or a thief," he says. Or even worse, he says, invisible. "People don't look at you," he says. "They just walk right on past."

Asif is looking for another facility willing to host the laundry program and volunteers interested in helping out with the shower or laundry program. If interested, contact her at 608-609-8522.

... we think using cloth saved us a lot of money.

My mathematically-inclined sister wanted to verify the claims that disposable diapers would save money over cloth. The source of the data she was pointed to included the cost of a brand new washer and dryer as part of the cost. Of course, those two items amounted to about 90% of the overall cost of using cloth diapers.

I doubt if the cost included the number of hours spent actually doing the washing and drying, but the cost of a set of cloth diapers + water + detergent + bleach is nothing compared to the cost of disposables.

Back in the ‘70s, they began to deinstitutionalize care for string out and crazy people. This was the start of the whole homeless people thing. Before, you only had the drifters who worked for a while in a place and then moved on.

There were times when dunking a diaper seemed like it just wasn’t worth it but after pricing disposables “one more time”, we just kept on doing it. We figured they weren’t going to be in diapers forever and we were right. Rolling up a yucky disposable and tossing it does seem easier but there’s that whole biohazard thing of human waste in a landfill people forget about. I don’t think home-laundered diapers for one baby are that labor intensive; at least they weren’t for us. Plus, we already had a washer and dryer (been married since 1982) so we didn’t have to invest in that. Also, when babies are no longer wearing the diapers, those cotton things are great for other uses around the house. It may not be practical for everyone but we still think we made the right choice.

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