Every evening, dozens of families trudge toward a squat brick office on the corner of Walton Avenue and 151st Street, pushing carts piled with their belongings or carrying a few sacks of clothes, looking for shelter.
"I don't have anywhere else to go," said Sharon Dujoy, who arrived eight months' pregnant.
Dujoy is one of hundreds of people who pass through the Bronx Emergency Assistance Unit every week to apply for temporary housing. Although the facility is not supposed to function as a shelter, it does, because of the shortage of low-income housing. As a result, families often stay for days, until they can be transferred to assessment centers, where they stay for weeks before being passed on to a real shelter.
"It's a terrible situation," said Anna Lou Dehavenon, an anthropologist who has been studying the unit since 1987. "Now, shelters are considered housing and EAUs are considered shelters."
After being hit by $5 million in fines for its handling of homeless families, the city agreed on Feb. 1 to allow a court-appointed monitor to oversee changes which would allow families to move through the system more quickly.
A third of the way through the city's six-month grace period, during which it is freed from paying fines, the city is "trying very hard," said Barbara Cutler, the court-appointed special monitor in charge of day-to-day operations. "But there's very little money that can be allocated toward permanent housing right now, which is the real solution to all this."
At the Walton Ave. unit, the only place in the city where homeless families can go for shelter after business hours, people are clustered in makeshift camps to wait out the days and nights before placement. The lucky ones have grabbed a couple of vinyl couches and scooted them together to make a bed. Others have pushed sets of a dozen plastic chairs together, two by two, and padded them with as many blankets as they can get their hands on. The newcomers often have to spend their first night on the floor.
The city doesn't plan to order beds for the facility, because, if it is to comply with the February agreement, families will no longer spend so much time waiting for a placement. As it stands, the average stay is four days.
At best, the situation at the center is uncomfortable; at worst, it is debilitating.
"It's freezing in here at night," said Georgina Stewart, who has been at the unit for four days with her husband and 4-month-old twins. "Now the children are sick. I'm sick. It feels like we're living outside."
The borough unit does provide many basic amenities -- showers and cribs, from its days as a shelter; personal care kits, including everything from soap to petroleum jelly; towels, sheets and blankets; baby formula, bottles and diapers; hot meals, sandwiches and fruit. It also has nurses on site 24 hours a day. Serious medical problems are handled elsewhere.
Life inside the unit, even with all its problems, seems better than being on the street. But before families are allowed in, they first must obtain a referral proving they are really homeless.
Even on a recent April night, 16 degrees with the wind chill, applicants were forced to use one of the two pay phones outside the building to call the hot line set up in November to screen applicants and encourage them to stay elsewhere if at all possible.
"If I had somewhere else to go, believe me, I would not be here," said Kimberly Smith, who came to the center with her 18-year-old daughter and 1-year-old grandchild. "Last time we were here, we stayed six days. Hard days. This is nowhere to be with your kids."