An open letter to a society with closed hearts

You’d remember her.
She was tiny, unimposing. But she was also a screamer.
She’d park her shopping cart on the pavement in front of my office and yell, hurling profanities and startling passers-by.

You might not believe me, but it’s true:
she wasn’t doing it to piss you off from the safety of your car or while you enjoyed dinner at the luxury restaurant next door.

Once, she asked me if I could kill the voices she heard. I wish I could have.

She was the sweetest, gentlest person. She only wanted to slay her voices because they told her she was unworthy, unlovable, irredeemable. She was one of the many, who, when we asked about the possibility of housing, demurred and said “someone else needs it more than I do.”

She couldn’t go to the shelters because her yelling would have kept others up at night; couldn’t go to the crisis center because she was — intermittently — either too much in crisis for admission or not enough; couldn’t go for mental health help because there is virtually NO residential treatment available in the state… and asking someone to address mental health while still forcing them to sleep on the trauma-compounding streets is (frankly) inhumane.

So on the streets she stayed. And she screamed at interlocuters only she could hear.

I don’t know how she changed her mind about housing, but I reckon it had something to do with John, an outreach worker who is admired by everyone he knows. He believed, and therefore she believed. She finally relented and told him she was ready to explore housing.

I’ve talked about this before, but just being ready for housing — no matter how desperate your situation might be — is not enough. Not by a long shot. When you say “ready,” you are ready to join the Coordinated Entry list of 700 people with varying degrees and unique types of need. You are ready to join the Section 8 list, which — as of today — has more than 3,800 people on it. Both lists place less than 10% of their total numbers in an average year.

She was lucky to be identified as one of those 10%, but being identified is also not enough. “Identification” precedes a mad scramble to complete, gather, and acquire vast amounts of paperwork; from personal documents like birth certificate, social security cards, identification cards, and bank statements to third-party verifications: of disability, of homelessness, of benefits conferred. If you’re lucky and you have an ambassador like John to help you through the process and your information is fairly easy to access, this phase of housing takes a couple of months. We’ve seen it take a year. We’ve seen people die with vouchers in their hands.

Once all the paperwork is complete, it needs to be verified by at least two parties, and if all goes smoothly, a voucher is issued. Then, the next phase can begin.

A person with a voucher is then tasked with finding an apartment that is both a.) under fair market rent, and b.) willing to take the voucher. Heaven forbid you have bad credit, or no credit, or a pet, or a past eviction, or any kind of criminal history, because then you are looking for a unicorn. We’ve seen this step in process take OVER a year.

Given the near-impossible task of finding a place that meets all these criteria, once someone does find a place, they cannot afford to ask whether or not the place is decent. Faulty plumbing, black mold, bugs, lead paint, doors that don’t fully lock, bad neighborhoods, unreliable maintenance. We’ve seen all these things, usually emerging after the mandatory inspection prior to move in.

Her place was in one of the worst areas of town, just by the highway.

After she moved in, we saw less of her. We knew she was adjusting to her new normal of being housed. Both by her account and the accounts of others, she was adapting reasonably well. But she was stuck, as many of our neighbors who are lucky enough to finally attain housing, in a substandard unit in a scary part of town. She regularly had friends stay with her, both because of her tender heart and generosity and because it made her feel safer.

Late last year, that relative safety was shattered when a random person, high on drugs, forced his way into her apartment and murdered one of her friends while he was sleeping.

Let me put a fine point on this.

She survived things that you can I can’t imagine. She then survived the grueling work of getting into housing so she could begin to address her greater well-being. And then she survived the murder of a friend in her only safe space — and continued to live there for lack of better options and because her PTSD prevented her from engaging in a search for a new place.

And she was supposed to be one of the “lucky” ones.

After the property management changed hands a couple of times (this happens with low-income buildings A LOT), it finally landed in the hands of new managers. If you’ve read any of my past musings here, you know that I regularly avoid putting any particular person or entity on blast. Today I depart from that historical precedent.

3Gen assumed ownership, pretty quickly sent this awful flyer to their residents, and then began the work of non-renewing every tenant they had on public assistance, in order that they could slap some paint on the walls and charge a whole lot more — in one of the shittiest neighborhoods in town.

To be honest, I lost sleep worrying over where all four of my people there were going to go. I also annoyed the hell out of my collaborators with my meddling and hand-wringing. Rehousing is an overlooked aspect of housing navigation and support. The housing first philosophy is just that: housing FIRST, and never, ever housing ONLY. Anyone you hear talking about how housing first doesn’t work is either the purveyor or recipient of housing only. Full stop. We relocate people ALL the time, and it’s hard work. It just doesn’t “count” because it’s not a new exit from homelessness.

I was worried about all my people at this property, but I was especially worried about her. Her case manager, Alisha, initially had a hard time connecting with her. But Alisha is fierce, and determined, and she doesn’t give up on people.

I’ll never fully understand how Alisha managed it, but she placed this neighbor in a newly renovated unit on the west side of town. She worked with her on her health stuff, her trauma, her dreams, and her goals.

The neighbor you’d remember no matter what, you might not so easily remember. She was becoming someone new: the person she deserved to be and wanted to be.

And then, she got a stomachache. At Alisha’s urging, she went to the hospital.

And she never left.

The injustices here are too colossal, too vast, to even consider. To talk about them would be like trying to look at the whole sky: too overwhelming.

As poet Adrienne Rich writes, “so why do I tell you anything?”
and answers “Because you still listen.”

I tell you this so you can understand how American systems fail people over and over again. So you might consider that every face you see, every scream you hear, belongs to a soul that has survived unspeakable things. There are no divisions into worthy and unworthy. I have yet to meet a person who is “just bad” or “just made bad choices.” I’ve met a lot of people who just HAD bad choices.

She was among them. And I have never met anyone who “needed help more” or deserved help more than her. Who the fuck are we, as a nation, a society, and a community, if this is how we take care of our most vulnerable?

This, too, keeps me up at night.

I remember her. Both as the screamer and as the woman coming into her own, excited about what her future might hold. As one of the kindest people I ever knew.

“No daylight to separate us.

Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion