US woman made her home inside a grocery store’s rooftop sign for a year, police say
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A woman was found living in the rooftop sign of this Family Fare supermarket in Michigan for about a year.
PHOTO: GOOGLE STREET VIEW
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MIDLAND, Michigan – A woman found living in the rooftop sign of a grocery store in Michigan had set up the small space to call home with flooring, a Keurig coffee maker and a computer, the authorities said.
The unidentified 34-year-old woman, who was not formally charged with anything, had been living there for about a year, Mr Brennon Warren, a spokesman for the Midland Police Department in Midland, Michigan, said in an e-mail.
Police were called by store staff members on April 23 at around 2pm after contractors who were working on the roof found her, Mr Warren said.
It is unclear how she was getting up and into the triangular sign on the rooftop of a Family Fare store, he said, estimating the building to be between 4.5m and 6m tall and the space where she had been living to be about 3m to 4.5m in length, 1.5m wide and approximately 1.8m to 2.4m “at its highest peak”.
She was told that she was not allowed to live there, and she left without incident, Mr Warren said. He noted that the “store was going to work with her on retrieving all of her property at a later time”.
In addition to the flooring, the Keurig and the computer, the woman also had a mini desk, a printer, a pantry and other miscellaneous items inside the sign, he said. He did not recall exactly what she had for bedding.
“I personally have never encountered a situation like this, and neither have my colleagues,” Mr Warren said.
The woman was provided with information on homeless services in the area, but “she did not wish for any of those”, he said.
SpartanNash, the company that operates Family Fare, said in a statement that it was “proud of our associates for responding to this situation with the utmost compassion and professionalism”.
The statement continued: “Ensuring there is ample safe, affordable housing continues to be a widespread issue nationwide that our community needs to partner in solving. Out of respect for (the) privacy for the individual involved, we will not be sharing further comments.”
Ms Saralyn Temple, executive director at Midland’s Open Door, a crisis shelter and soup kitchen, said her organisation has seen an increase in the number of people seeking help “in a variety of ways”.
Ms Temple said that in 2023, the organisation regularly saw about 40 people come in for lunch. “Now we’re seeing in the 50s every day for lunch,” she said.
“The reality of it is, people are living in very unique places,” Ms Temple said. “While the living in the Family Fare sign is a sensational thing, it’s not something that’s new to us who work with the homeless community.”
The organisation sees “people weekly who are living in tents in the woods, or who are living in their cars, or who are living in storage units”, she said. “So people are resorting to all sorts of things that are in no way safe.”
Midland is about 209km north-west of Detroit. The city had a population of about 42,500 in 2022, according to estimates from the US Census Bureau, and roughly 9 per cent of its residents were living in poverty.
Living below the poverty line often renders people “invisible”, Ms Temple said, and can mask the extent of the need for housing and food in the population. NYTIMES
