CHAPEL HILL — Anthony Mebane said he couldn’t afford $5 a night when the homeless shelter in Burlington started charging. So a shelter staff member gave him a ride to Chapel Hill.

“I just heard it was a nice place, the shelter was nice — not that I wanted to be there, but that was going to have to be my first place,” said Mebane, who said he hadn’t worked for a while.

Sitting outside Weaver Street Market in August, Mebane joked about the irony of arriving in Chapel Hill on April Fool’s Day.

He said he never thought that four years later he would still be eating at the Inter-Faith Council Community Kitchen and spending the night on the dining room floor when he can’t stay with friends.

Mebane and many other people in Orange County who have been homeless for more than a year say they find it tough to find steady, full-time work. Addiction, criminal records and lack of transportation keep some from getting back on their feet, they say.

Those who serve the homeless population say they also face challenges: not enough money, not enough space in detox programs and not enough shelter beds to keep people off the streets.

A community-wide coalition called the Partnership to End Homelessness is writing a 10-year plan to end homelessness in Orange County.

The plan will look at what’s working and what could work better.

Unsteady work

Mebane eats most meals at the Community Kitchen on the corner of Rosemary and Columbia streets in Chapel Hill.

Sometimes he closes his eyes behind his thin, black-rimmed glasses and bows his bald head into his folded hands to pray before he eats. His smile reveals that his bottom jaw only has two teeth.

Mebane, who turns 50 today, juggles part-time construction and demolition jobs with odd-jobs like moving furniture and handing out pizza coupons. Some days, some weeks, he says he has no work or very little.

Kristin Lavergne, IFC programs director, estimates 80 percent of the men at the shelter for more than two weeks work some time during their stay.

But many local jobs are seasonal, like with food service at the university.

“They contract with Marriott or Aramark, “Lavergne said. “They’ll give them 35 hours a week. They don’t have to pay them benefits. They don’t pay them leave time. And people are so desperate for work, they take it.”

Demand for services picks up during the university’s winter holiday and mid-summer when paychecks stop coming, she said.

“We have some people who only come once a year, and that’s the summer,” she said.

Substance abuse

At one time, Mebane said, he was on the right track.

After graduating from high school in High Point, he said, he earned a business administration degree and worked as a counselor for first-time offenders in Connecticut.

But a few years ago, he said, he moved home to High Point to care for his elderly mother. When she died, Mebane turned briefly to drugs to ease his grief.

“I just didn’t want to face reality,” he said.

Roughly half of those who have been homeless for a year or more abuse drugs or alcohol, according to a recent article published in the journal Medical Care by Dr. Daniel Bradford. Bradford is a psychiatrist who created a free psychiatric clinic at the IFC men’s shelter about 10 years ago.

On the streets, recovering substance abusers and addicts who want to go into recovery struggle to keep away from drugs.

Mebane rides the bus or finds a quiet room at Davis Library on campus to read or sleep or checks his e-mail at the Cybrary in Carrboro’s Century Center to get away from others.

Graham Cotton and Jackie Davis, a couple who say they have used crack and live on the Chapel Hill streets, prefer Borders Bookstore or Barnes & Noble.

Cotton, 33, says it’s not as hard for him to avoid drugs as it is for Davis.

Davis, her youthful face drawn into a pout, nods and turns her eyes to the ceiling in The Chapel Hill News conference room.

When the soft-spoken Cotton explains that Davis, 37, has been lost since her mother died in Durham a few years ago, she sobs.

Cotton has known grief, too. His brother and sister have died within the last five years. But he says he knows crack doesn’t help either of them.

“The cocaine, it hurts a lot of relationships because it puts more demonic spirits into each other,” he said.

But living on the streets, sleeping behind the University United Methodist Church on Franklin Street or in a tent behind the apartment of Davis’s aunt off Martin Luther Kind Jr. Boulevard, the couple struggles with the stress of their day-to-day existence.

Davis’s eyes pool with tears as she describes someone recently calling the police when she tried to use a restroom at a construction site and again when she asked a customer for money at Borders.

Stays too short

At IFC’s administrative office in Carrboro and the Thursday night clinic at the men’s shelter, a social worker makes referrals to recovery programs at UNC Hospitals and Freedom House off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

But Emily Seales, the clinical social worker, said the programs usually keep patients only five to seven days.

“In my eyes, it is hard. Somebody will go to Freedom House and they’re clean, then they’re back on the streets,” she said.

“In the grand scheme of getting off crack, you need more than five days.”

Earl Williams, 56, a short, wiry man with a mustache and a UNC ball cap, smiles broadly when he talks about his toddler granddaughter. He eats at the Community Kitchen most days before catching a bus to Durham, where he rents a room.

A former drug addict, Williams was homeless and facing felony drug charges before he got into a Durham program called Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers, better known as TROSA.

Because he completed the program, his charges were reduced to misdemeanors, he said, and he was able to get a full-time job with UNC Housekeeping, which he has held for two years.

But it didn’t come easy.

“Most of the jobs around here are mostly for students,” he said.

Although he escaped the felony, Williams says more people with felonies in their pasts should get the opportunity he did.

“I look at it this way, everybody deserves a second chance,” he said. Lavergne agrees.

A recovering drug addict came to Lavergne this summer, frustrated because she couldn’t get a job. She had worked at a convenience store before her drug problem escalated but found she couldn’t get hired again with her criminal background.

“If she can’t get that job, what chance does she have to be a productive citizen engaging in the community versus going back to her old habits?” Lavergne asked.

Mental illness

Discharging mental health patients to homeless shelters contributes to chronic homelessness, according to the National Alliance to End Homeless.

Sometimes a bus or taxi drops off a discharged patient from UNC Hospitals or John Umstead just outside the IFC shelter, said Lavergne.

But shelters, where men sleep on rows of bunk beds, are not suited to those suffering from a severe mental illness, Lavergne said.

“A lot of them are really paranoid and don’t like being with everybody else,” she said.

They frequently give up on the shelter after a night or two.

Mentally ill people make up only 3 percent to 5 percent of the homeless population that the police encounter, estimated Jim Huegerich with the crisis unit. Bradford’s article estimated about 20 percent of the chronically homeless suffer a severe psychiatric disorder.

Seales, the IFC’s psychiatric social worker, fills some of that gap in services, but says it can take six weeks to see a psychiatrist at Northside Clinic. Northside is part of the Orange-Person-Chatham mental health services provider network.

“Somebody will get discharged from the hospital with, say, 30 days of their medication,” Seales explained. “One of two things happens: They don’t make their OPC appointment, and it’s not like OPC knows who they are and goes out looking for them. [Or] if they have 30 days of medication and can’t see a psychiatrist for six weeks, [they run out of medication before the appointment].”

In July, Matt Sullivan, a social worker with the Chapel Hill Police Department’s crisis unit, responded to a situation where a homeless man with a hand gun seemed to have intentions of harming himself.

“I committed him on a Friday [to UNC Hospitals] and encountered him again Monday. He was still psychotic, in my book. He was really presenting some big risk to himself,” Sullivan said.

Limited space and hours

UNC’s Davis Library, the walls and benches along Franklin Street or even Weaver Street Market, are among the only sleeping choices for homeless people who work third shift.

The wake-up call at the men’s shelter comes at 6 a.m., with everyone out of the bunk rooms by 7.

Even for those who don’t work at night, the shelter is not always an option. On hot, cold or rainy nights, not only do the 30 beds fill up, so does the floor. One muggy night in August, 17 men were waiting to sleep on the dining room floor by 9 p.m. The women’s shelter fills up, too.

“If it’s a single woman or single man and the inn is full and there’s no weather issue, they’re going to sleep on the street,” said Chapel Hill Police’s Sullivan.

“And the street is a dangerous place. If you’re a homeless woman on the street, you’ve got a tough row to hoe,” Sullivan added.

Teresa Conway learned that on her first night in Chapel Hill. The 69-year-old decided to spend the August night sitting on a bench in front of Kerr Drug on Franklin Street because she had no place to go.

Around 1 a.m., a man ripped her purse from the shoulder strap and ran into an alley, she said. Conway chased him until she fell.

“It’s awfully hard to protect your things when you’re homeless,” said Conway, who now wears a fanny pack on her hip with a thick nylon band.

She lost her monthly pension, which she had recently withdrawn from a bank in cash, along with her identification and Medicaid card.

Conway is a retired federal worker with a background in physics. On a recent evening, she mumbled to herself quietly during dinner. Large black sunglasses hid her eyes and a pink and white Muppets ballcap rested on her wavy gray-white hair. Conway thought it would be cheaper to live in the Triangle than in northern Virginia. So, she left her belongings in storage and took an Amtrak train to Raleigh.

In Raleigh, she said, she found she could only spend one night in the Helen Wright Center for Women, a transitional housing program.

Now she has an emergency bed at IFC’s Project Homestart, a group of three transitional and emergency shelter homes with multiple bedrooms shared by women and children.

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On a bench outside Weaver Street Market, with dark clouds moving in, Mebane tried to answer why he hasn’t caught a ride an hour west to visit friends and family in High Point or try his luck again in his hometown after four unsuccessful years in Chapel Hill.

He has been telling himself lately that it’s time to contact his son, now nearly 22. But that’s part of what keeps him here.

“What if he says, ‘Dad, I want to go back to Chapel Hill with you’?” Mebane said. “Where am I going to take him?”

Thunder boomed, and the first fat raindrops splashed on his head, arms, and knees.

Mebane took the newspaper out of his black satchel to hold over his head.

As the sky opened up, he hooked his satchel over his arm and took off toward the Cybrary across the street for shelter.