She's Just Homeless, and There's no Help for That
By
Emily Minor
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 22, 2004
If only Joan Pace were an addict. Or a drunk. If only she had three small children, and a husband who beat her.
Then she might get help.
As it is, Pace, 52, is broke and in poor health. She's also homeless, with no help on the horizon.
This is her story, according to Pace and some of those who have met her the past 18 months. Pace has never been arrested, according to Florida records. She has never been held under the state's Baker Act, the provision that allows police to restrain the mentally ill and hold them for observation.
Indeed, until the late summer of 2002, when she became too ill to work, Pace held a job -- for a long time, with a major airline. She was one of those agents you see at the US Airways gate, taking your boarding pass, smiling, solving your problems.
"Three years ago, she was leading the normal American life," says Tim Kilby, pastor at the First Church of the Nazarene on Forest Hill Boulevard in suburban West Palm Beach. "She lived in Wellington; she had a good life."
In recent years, Pace was diagnosed with something called "low vital capacity," worsened by her emphysema. Kilby says Pace barely has the breath to cross a street, which is why she can't work.
After Pace's life disintegrated -- she says she lost her airline job in a corporate downsizing -- Pace took her cat and lived in her car, a sporty white Mustang. This went on for 18 months, until the car was recently repossessed. Now she uses part of her $500 monthly Social Security check for the occasional hotel room, which is no solution at all.
Joan Pace has no real place to sleep, no place to get mail, no place to do laundry.
"I have never been in a situation where I couldn't find some agency that could help an individual," Kilby says. "I have not been able to find housing for Joan, other than putting her in a cheap hotel."
Going down the list
Pace is the icon for America's homeless. In Palm Beach County, there are an estimated 2,500 single homeless people, but only about 80 beds for them. When I first talked to Pace, she impressed me with a list of places she'd called for help. Indeed, her tenacity is known from agency to agency.
This is about one-fourth of that list, and the responses she says she got:
The Red Cross: "I was told they help people in disaster, like when their house burns down."
St. Ann's Place: "They'll let you get a meal and a shower, but that's it."
Florida Resource Center for Women and Children: "They only do domestic violence."
West Palm Beach Housing Authority: "They told me they have waiting list" -- which is now closed.
The Lord's Place: "I was told they only take families with small children." Shelley Gottsagen, executive director of the Coalition for Independent Living Options, says Pace "used to spend every day sitting in our lobby, and we would give her a phone to use."
What they couldn't give her was a home.
"It's terrible, especially for women in her situation," Gottsagen said. "All the shelters that exist, you have to fit into certain categories."
Last year, when someone on Gottsagen's staff persuaded a local TV station to feature Pace on the news, the crew came out and taped Pace, and her car, and her cat. She got one phone call.
"One lady did call to say they'd help with vet bills or food, or whatever the cat needed," Pace said.
Maria Bello, with the Homeless Coalition of Palm Beach County, talked to Pace this month, and was forced to tell Pace what she already knew: The choices are very slim.
"We talked for a very long time, and she was very nice," Bello said. "I gave her some options, but she had already tried all those places. She had been very thorough."
Thorough, but homeless.
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A Long Quiet Night
By Stephen Hand
Don is trying to sleep on the old leather couch but after tossing and turning he picks up the book he has been reading, reads a bit and then goes out to the back porch for a cigarette. He's a sweet, tough old man; looks a little like an old seafarer of days gone by. He's in tonight because it's too cold, even for him. And Don can take a lot. He prefers to sleep on the stairs in an upright position against some old blankets, in an alley by an old bar. During the days when he refuses to come in we bring him sweaters, blankets, food, maybe a few pairs of socks, some gloves, and anything else we think he might be able to use or which he requests. He provides his own booze. I'm not certain what happened to Don's life, or what sad or tragic memories haunt him. I only know that he is said to have owned buildings once near the Charles River here in Massachusetts and that he is soft-spoken, always grateful for what we try to do to help him on a daily basis. He keeps his pain largely to himself. Maybe some day he will open up to us.
I seldom work overnights but sometimes I get called in when someone is sick or when staffing is short for other reasons. Otherwise it is days I work. In the cold New England winter weather we very often have 40 - 50 people at each meal, three times a day. People can stay all day, until 8 Pm, eat, watch a little TV, talk with staff, sleep in the big living room if they had a bad night, play checkers or chess, use the computer lab to check their email. In some ways it is a microcosm of the world here: People down on their luck, or sick, the mentally ill, the inexplicably dysfunctional, the lonely, some elders who simply want to spend meal time with others for a little talk, for a smile; there are the addicted, people sick with hepatitis and AIDS, and others who just seem lost in their own quiet thoughts, whom we try to draw out of themselves and into some conversation; and some sense that they are cared for.
I am blessed to work with wonderful people. People who care, I mean who really care about those we serve, who bless us in return by their own service here. While we do have to weed out some bad eggs and rascals until they can get serious, we try not to judge even these. Most of the people here are simply down on their luck, little or no family support, few friends... we try to discern what is keeping a particular person down or back, or in pain---or in existential paralysis. Sometimes we seem to succeed. Sometimes the "success" is simply realizing that people now have a frame and place of reference, a place of acceptance. Sometimes it can only be letting them know we are here for them.
It's a wonderful thing to see the people we serve taking pride in the work they do here. Voluntary work. No one is required to do anything. But many volunteer their services in return for what they receive. There are the endless rides to detox centers, trips to the stores for donated foods, for purchases of gallons and gallons of milk from the supermarket, dishes to do, carpets to vacuum, and all the things that go into keeping a facility like this----a shelter from the storms, we call it---open. Actually it's not a shelter strictly speaking, though we do have beds for about 14 residents who we try to get into section 8 housing, a federally subsidized housing program which assists persons in paying a percentage of their rent. Those certificates are few and precious these days, with long waiting lists, and too often landlords do not want them. Most of our friends who come here come from other overnight shelters or from the streets (you may or not be shocked to know how many people sleep outside in their cars or in abandoned buildings to avoid the shelters). We try to assist in job search and training, medical help, and in other ways also, according to the needs of each individual.
Many people blame the poor for their own plight. But how do you blame those who were born into poverty, or abused from childhood, who might suffer from severe depression, bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia and a host of other crippling maladies? Even those addicted to drugs are so often, according to our experience, really self-medicating hidden disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks, etc. Relatively few ever really wanted to become junkies or alcoholics. How many times we have seen them weep over their seeming unremitting plight of ups and downs. We urge them to take advantage of psychiatric services and Twelve Step programs. Many do. But there are also those whose addictions or mental illness have been their lot for so long it sometimes seems hopeless, especially for the middle-aged and older ones. For these we do the best we can.
The other day a woman wept as she told me that after many years of drug abuse, originally begun due to severe protracted depression, she was just diagnosed with brain tumor. She clung to her husband and us as she expressed her terror at the thought of the operation she must undergo in January "at the latest," according to the Doctors at Brigham's and Women's hospital in Boston. She is so afraid. Afraid of the operation, afraid of the possibility of dying as her mother did of the same thing. We tried to comfort her, to tell her that she was blessed to have such a warning as her mother did not have. But she could only weep and shake. "We all face illness," one staff person told her, "if not today, then tomorrow...you have good doctors...please try not to be afraid. God, not death, is our future."
With such friends I have learned that theology is so much more than words. That in our neighborhoods, in our apartment buildings, or at work, there is always someone we can smile at, pray for, visit with a loaf of homemade bread. We do not need such facilities as I am blessed to work in to do the works of mercy. Many are the outcasts who are in that state because they have harbored poor self-images, they did not match up to what the culture calls attractiveness and success. We can go to them as Jesus did.
We can try to incarnate our theology wherever we are. There is always something to do. Even the sick can offer up their sufferings, in and through Him, for those in need and for the Poor Souls in Purgatory. Love has no limits. Faith without works is a dead thing...
~~
It's almost 6 AM. Bob and Don have had a bout of insomnia it seems. Bob listens to his police radio. Don is still reading his book in the shadows of the large living room. I check my email, write down these thoughts, see that someone has called me a nut because I have "crassly" sided with the pope (and Cardinal Ratzinger) who so loves the poor, and who gives our spiritually hungry and hurting world the Word of Life, the word that God loves us, even the least of us, and that our pain is not meaningless... I know many, so many, who need to hear precisely that Good News.
http://tcrnews2.com/
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Fewer Homeless, Greater Need
Overall tally down, but 43% are kids and majority are in suburbs
By David Olinger
Denver Post Staff Writer
Children represent a growing percentage of the homeless people living in motels, emergency shelters or other temporary arrangements in metro Denver, according to a survey released Monday, April 12, 2004. The annual count also found a growing problem of homelessness in the suburbs. This year, 60 percent of all those classified as homeless in the metropolitan area lived outside of Denver. But overall, metro-Denver homeless numbers are down by more than 1,000 people in a one-day snapshot taken Jan. 19, compared to a similar count last year. "The good news," Metropolitan Denver Homeless Initiative president Tom Luehrs said, "is there are fewer people that we were able to count this year who are homeless. "The bad news is there are 8,668 people who are homeless, (and) 43 percent are under the age of 21," he said. "That's appalling. That's sad."
Some of the homeless children "live in cars at night. Some are in shelters. Some of them are in schools, but they don't know if they're going to be at the same school the next day," he said. The previous annual survey found 9,725 homeless people in the Denver area. "Our programs are working. Housing is being built," Luehrs said, but housing costs and unemployment remain the leading causes of homelessness. The latest numbers were announced at the Gathering Place, a Denver day center for homeless women and children that serves an average of 200 to 250 people per day. Among those in attendance was Richard Dodge, a white-bearded man in gray suit and striped tie who resides at a homeless shelter in Jefferson County. Dodge, 56, said he had worked as an equipment safety inspector, but lost his job after two heart attacks, and "it doesn't take long to end up homeless if you don't have a family support system." He said he had sold his car and was living in a motel before he finally turned to Jeffco Action Center, a shelter that provides three meals and a bed to homeless people seeking jobs or in job training programs. The problem, said Julie Brown, the center's manager of emergency services, is that it can accommodate only about 20 people and is one of two shelters in a county whose population exceeds the state of Wyoming. "We're turning people away just about every day," she said. Bridget Williams, a mother of six, said she has been living with all of them in an Arapahoe County motel with a kitchenette and two beds "off and on since December." She said she lost a housekeeping job, got evicted in November and has had trouble finding housing or employment because she has a criminal record. In the meantime, she has been using state assistance checks, plus help from her church, to cover a $160 weekly motel bill for her and her children, who range from 3 to 14 years old. In the past, "I just picked a lot of bad relationships," she said. "Now it's just me and my kids. I just want to survive." Sandra Davis, 43, said she has no idea where she will live when a seasonal emergency shelter in Denver closes this month. She is on a waiting list for housing, but "my name is way down," she said. Among the results, the survey classifies 2,442 people in "transitional housing," where they may remain for six months to two years, according to Luehrs, as well as 2,707 people staying temporarily with family members or friends. Others were in emergency shelters or motels; 427 had last slept in locations listed as "not fit for habitation," such as a car or under a bridge. Jessica Varley, a supervisor at Samaritan House in Denver, said that while the overall count of homeless people may be lower, their requests for help from homeless women and families are not. "We've seen our numbers double," she said. "It's just incredible."
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A Subway Philosopher Who Was Homeless but Not Friendless
By DAVID GONZALEZ, NY Times
When one person is kind to many strangers, people make a big deal of it, heaping praise and talking about canonizing the do-gooder. But when many strangers are kind to one person - a homeless one who lugs his life in two bulging plastic bags on the subway - the upshot is a quick shrug of disbelief, and not the admiring kind.
Yet in his 53 years on earth, a chunk of it spent riding the rails, Tony Butler, the homeless man, brought around him a random clan who gave him food, money and friendship. The motormen and car cleaners who keep the subways running were a large part of that circle. But so, too, were riders who befriended him at the Broadway-Lafayette station, where he had taken it upon himself to announce system delays or route changes as a "volunteer transit associate."
They knew him as a subway philosopher and chess fiend in dark glasses, a big man who loved to read the newspaper and who could remember all sorts of sports trivia. He did not beg or badger. Some said he chose to be homeless, others said homelessness chose him. Whatever the case, their lives came together and stayed that way until he died last month from what doctors said was an overwhelming infection.
A half dozen of his friends, most of them strangers to each other, gathered in the East Village on Friday night to hoist a beer or soda in his name. Tony paid for the drinks, thanks to a paper bag full of money he had given a friend before entering the hospital in February.
"When you go outside, most people stay in their socioeconomic circle, their own racial circle," said Torin Reid, a motorman who knew Tony for more than 15 years. "When you go outside that circle, you're taking a chance. You can have rejection. Or you can be enlightened."
The lack of a Bodhi tree anywhere near the Broadway-Lafayette station didn't stop Steve Zeitlin from befriending the man he considered a Transit Buddha who dispensed wisdom about the system and its passengers. They met seven years ago, after striking up a conversation about a service change.
Mr. Zeitlin, who directs City Lore, an urban folklore organization, immediately took to him, slowly coaxing the details of his life out of him.
Tony - most people learned his last name only after he died - never knew his father. When he was 18, he witnessed his mother's death during a robbery. He played chess well enough to earn his living at it in city parks, while his friend Homeboy Ralphie gave him a place to live. He lost it when the police raided Homeboy Ralphie's to root out prostitutes and drugs.
He told Mr. Zeitlin and others that he preferred to live on the subways than take a chance in shelters. He knew where he could wash up or watch football games. He had no boss or tax collector to worry about. Tony reminded Mr. Zeitlin of the idiosyncratic street performers he had come to know well in his day job.
"He saw himself as a beacon of freedom," Mr. Zeitlin said. "Someone once described street performers as instilling a homesickness for freedom in the lives of ordinary men. Tony prided himself on living in total freedom."
He may not have had a job, but he did keep to a schedule. Monday and Friday mornings he would rendezvous with Mr. Zeitlin, who gave him money and food. Other people had other days. He did not like to miss out on connecting with his friends.
And while he did not envy their schedules, he looked out for his subway worker friends, especially when bosses where on the prowl.
"He knew when the supervisors got on the train," said Anthony Smith, a train operator. "You wouldn't know, but he would. He'd warn you."
Some of Tony's friends tried to warn him about the risks and ravages of life underground, where rats, steel dust and dirt conspire to shave years off lives. He would dismiss their pleas, saying there were no good programs for single men like him.
Marlon Dubose thought that stubborn refusal was odd for someone like Tony, whom he considered to be intelligent and not beset by drugs, drink or mental illness. Mr. Dubose, a train operator, was a regular chess opponent, trying without luck to beat him for years.
Mr. Dubose knew some people looked askance at him when they would see the two of them talking or playing chess. But, like many of those who knew him, he saw past the homelessness and was taken by the man's wit and mind.
"I don't know what happened to him to make him homeless," Mr. Dubose said. "He was a very intelligent guy. You know, living that way is a stretch. I guess intelligence has nothing to do with it."
So what does? Andy Rawlinson, a car cleaner who brought Tony lunch every Tuesday and Friday, is still perplexed over that. After all, Tony helped him as much as he helped Tony.
"I tend to have social anxiety but, believe it or not, he gave me advice about life sometimes," Mr. Rawlinson said. "He'd say not to worry, to enjoy life. It helped, because I saw how happy he was, despite his circumstances."
Tony followed Mr. Rawlinson to three different stations over the years. For the last eight months, Tony would ride twice a week to Far Rockaway, where the worn streets are home to stores that sell gaudy jewelry, where yards are packed with cars under repair and where New Beginnings is only the name of a taxi service. Mr. Rawlinson noted every meeting in a tiny datebook.
"It made me sad, because he was a kind, intelligent person," Mr. Rawlinson said. "Some would say he made his choice and he was happy. He was. But that is a sign of some problem, to choose to live like that. No one makes a choice to be homeless."
On Friday night, he and several other of Tony's friends gathered in the office of City Lore for a farewell. Mr. Zeitlin, who took Tony to the hospital in February when he was too ill to haul his bags anymore, welcomed the group with food and drinks. Mr. Zeitlin had posted signs for the service at crew rooms around the subway system. He admitted that dozens of passengers who knew Tony had yet to learn of his death.
They sat in a semicircle and smiled at the old stories. Mr. Zeitlin played a tape-recorded interview he did three years ago with Tony for a public radio program. At the sound of his clear, friendly voice, they nodded.
Then the room got serious.
"Wrong is what makes the world go around," Tony said on the recording. "Wrong dominates. The world is actually geared to go wrong."
Inside the small room, the guests would later lift their glasses, their murmured good wishes blending together. Strangers who refused to forget a homeless friend made things right, if only for a final few minutes.
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Man Finds Humanity in Life on Streets
HOMELESSNESS: Selfless gestures and friendliness
fill the Texas professor's
eight months
living with street people.
BY DAVID CASSTEVENS
FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
FORT WORTH, Texas - Dressed in the fragrant rags he had worn for days, Jeff
Ferrell pedaled a bicycle he had rescued from a Dumpster.
He met an elderly couple rummaging through trash along the curb.
Scroungers have their own rules of etiquette. Those who stake their claim to
a garbage pile don't object if other urban prospectors want to join them,
but they expect to be asked, and the pleasant fellow on the bike politely
obliged:
"Mind if I take a look?"
It was late, and the husband wanted to leave or risk missing free soup at a
local shelter. His wife was searching for the mate to a red shoe and wasn't
ready to stop shopping. Leaning down, she picked up a sweater, and in a
grandmotherly fashion, held it to Ferrell's chest, eye-measuring the length
and shoulders.
"I think this would fit you," she said.
He still can see her upturned face and sweet smile.
If world-weary, if embittered, if beaten down by life, she didn't show it.
Ferrell will never forget the old lady's selfless gesture and the
perseverance of the community of homeless strangers and working poor that he
met during an eight-month tour of the streets.
"In the midst of all their needs, people were always asking what I could
use," he said. "Or they were putting things aside for me. What I found were
decent people eking out a living, surviving."
Ferrell, 49, isn't homeless. He lives near downtown Fort Worth. But he has
long been intrigued by those on the margins of society.
Ferrell and his wife, Karen, returned to his native Fort Worth in 2001. He
had resigned his tenured professorship at Northern Arizona University after
a disagreement about the terms of his sabbatical. He's now an associate
professor of criminal justice at Texas Christian University.
During the first eight months of 2002, while unemployed, Ferrell explored
America's consumer society from the perspective of those who have little or
nothing. How do the street people, the homeless, the poor, survive and meet
their basic needs in the world's wealthiest nation?
He spent afternoons in different areas of Fort Worth, rich and poor, looking
through refuse -- at times staying one block ahead of the rumbling garbage
trucks.
Ferrell lined up canned goods on the rims of Dumpsters, an invitation to the
hungry. He carried other scavenged food to shelters and food banks.
He befriended unforgettable people, characters he would not have met if he
hadn't stepped outside the insulated life of academia.
He met a man who picked up recyclable cans from his wheelchair. The
collector offered this advice: In the spring, watch out for honey bees.
Bees, he said, like the corn syrup in sodas.
He crossed paths several times with a delightful fellow on the north side of
downtown who customized his bicycle, welding on baskets and trays so he
could carry more finds.
One day, a woman and her daughter climbed out of a dilapidated car and began
digging through a curb-side trash pile. Ferrell joined them and uncovered a
cache of high-end makeup.
"Lancome!" the mother cried.
During his daily scrounging, Ferrell got suspicious looks from people. A few
threatened to call police. One homeowner who spotted Ferrell going through
trash in front of his house came striding out of the garage carrying a
.22-caliber rifle.
"How you doing?" Ferrell called out nervously.
"Just fine," came the friendly reply. The man had been cleaning out his
garage and was taking the firearm inside the house.
"Most people were gracious and, in fact, seemed to feel a kind of moral
obligation to help others get what they no longer needed. Many times people
found me in their trash piles and said, 'Hold on, I've got more stuff.' Or
'Did you see those shoes under there?' " he said.
A professor who earned a doctorate in sociology at the University of Texas
at Austin, Ferrell said he saw the interplay as encouraging.
"We think of the world as being increasingly mean-spirited and competitive,
but here were homeowners and small-business owners and homeless folks and
the poor cooperating in a way to redistribute useful materials."
He learned, to his surprise, that many of those he met on the streets had
put in a full day's work at minimum wage. Some, still wearing their
uniforms, appeared in the afternoons, looking for secondhand clothing for
their children or searching for lumber to rebuild a shed.
Last fall, Ferrell joined the department of sociology, criminal justice and
anthropology at Texas Christian University. He is writing a book about his
experiences on the streets.
Last year, he attended the American Society of Criminology conference in
Denver to present his research findings. He stood before his colleagues
wearing a smile, his brother's shoes and a muted gray plaid worsted wool
Henry Grethel suit,
which he had found, rolled up in a plastic garbage bag, near Camp Bowie
Boulevard in Fort Worth.
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Donated Storage Shed
Special thanks go out to: Pastor Elmer Wilhelm and Zion Congregational Church for donating the 10 x 12 storage shed kit, to the WCH Welcome Mat clients for digging and leveling the ground and to Ed Stone, Bob Woodward and Greg Wilson for building the shed. Now we will be able to store bicycles out of the weather.
Greg Wilson and Ed Stone, volunteer carpenters
Pastor Elmer Wilhelm, Zion Congregational Church
Bob Woodward, volunteer carpenter
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