When the door slammed shut behind Susan Condrey, it was an audible reminder that her life’s downward spiral, three decades in the making, had now plunged to its lowest depth. With that sound, she had nowhere to go. No place to be. No one to turn to. And she didn’t care.
All the 47-year-old really cared about was getting high — smoking crack and shooting heroin. If she had any other concern, it was for Hanna and Sliprock, two mutts she’d rescued from a shelter when she still had a husband, parents, a house and a placid, financially comfortable life.
Condrey took her two dogs, leashes in hand, and walked away from the last real home she would know for more than 18 months. She wasn’t sure what would happen next. She only knew she needed a fix. And she didn’t know where she’d sleep that night.
Barry Webb didn’t know where to go the day he got out of Pasquotank Correctional Institution in eastern North Carolina.
He knew he didn’t want to go back to Lexington. He’d be distracted there by the ghosts of his old life, the one that handed him 17 months in prison on a felony weapons conviction.
Webb needed a change, so he bought a one-way Greyhound ticket to Charlotte and crossed his fingers, hoping for a better life. But finding it here wasn’t going to be easy with a criminal record, no money and no job. He wound up at the Uptown Men’s Shelter.
It wasn’t much, but it was a place to stay. And for that, Webb was grateful.
On paper, it may look as if the unlucky souls who find themselves homeless in Charlotte have lots of choices: two winter shelters, five year-round emergency shelters and 17 transitional housing programs to bridge the gap between the streets and a home. But when you figure that an estimated 5,000 people are homeless on any given night in Charlotte, that’s really not so many places after all. According to a 2004 US Conference of Mayors report, about 15 percent of homeless people can’t find a spot in a shelter, whether it’s because they don’t meet facility requirements, such as sobriety or curfew restrictions, or simply because the shelters are all full. So they scrape together money for a fleabag motel. Or they double up in apartments. Or they sleep in cars, on the streets or in one of the makeshift homeless camps that dot Mecklenburg County.
Susan Condrey and Barry Webb now consider themselves lucky. They were able to work their way up from the streets and into apartments and jobs. It wasn’t easy. They had to surrender a bit of their freedom, and they had to grapple with their addictions. But in return, both got help that they say they’ll never be able to pay back.
Both found refuge in programs providing housing that’s somewhere between a hot-and-a-cot shelter and a permanent home. Both were able to take a breather before having to worry about working a job and saving money — or where they would sleep at night.
Condrey was able to learn the computer skills that enabled her to get the job she has today as facility manager at the Charlotte Rescue Mission’s Dove’s Nest treatment program for women. “Really, I couldn’t move a mouse,” she says. “I didn’t know what ‘PC’ meant.”
Webb was able to save nearly $3,000 in five months while picking up yard-sale bargains for the apartment he wanted for himself and his teenage son. “Some people call it cheap,” he says. “But you know, I’m not trying to live above my means.”
The role of a homeless person wasn’t something either Condrey or Webb had ever planned. “If somebody’ve told me a couple years back that I would have lived in a shelter, I’d have laughed at them,” says Webb. “Not me — I’d always worked.”
In the past decade, transitional housing programs have lost some of their appeal as advocates for the homeless search for a solution to a problem that has shown little sign of abating. Though some shelters have been around for many decades — such as the Rebound program at Charlotte Rescue Mission, which opened in 1938 — street homelessness as we commonly think of it today didn’t exist on a large scale until the late 1970s and early 80s.
Economics, federal policies and changes in the mental health system — as well as housing shortages — were among the more prominent factors that created the homeless crisis on which Americans now spend $1 billion a year.
President Ronald Reagan took a lot of heat for not dealing adequately with the problem, in part because the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget was cut by three-quarters, from $32 billion in 1981 to $7.5 billion by 1988, on his watch. A comment he made on ABC’s Good Morning America in 1984 only fanned the flames. Reagan told host David Hartman that “one problem that we’ve had even in the best of times. . . is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, who are homeless you might say by choice.”
During Reagan’s two terms, the number of emergency shelters expanded exponentially, but the so-called hot-and-a-cot shelter approach did little to stave the problem. Advocates devised methods intended to give homeless people temporary shelter while they dealt with their problems. The transitional housing approach grew under President Clinton, whose administration poured dollars into such programs, but the number of people living on the streets continued to grow.
“We ended up putting together a system that’s based on getting people ready for housing,” says Karen Montaperto, executive director of Charlotte Emergency Housing. “Our system is set up where we try to fix. . .problems before we get them a home.”
Many advocates turned their eyes to Pathways, a program begun in New York City in 1992 on the idea of giving the homeless housing first and then starting treatment. Pathways worked with groups thought to be the most difficult to house — people with substance abuse problems or mental illnesses. Its success rate of 85 percent — nearly unheard of in the field — attracted attention.
Once someone was moved in to a home of their own, he or she could begin receiving help for other problems, such as mental health issues, substance abuse or lack of job skills. The idea, which spread across the country under the name Housing First, was that a long-term home shouldn’t be held out as an award or graduation present for getting sober or seeking help.
Kirsten Sikkelee, of the YWCA’s transitional housing program, says Housing First initiatives address an important concern, which is that too many programs for homeless people require participants to jump through daunting hoops that discourage people from getting the help they need. “What none of us wants is for people to languish in a shelter system and for there to be a logjam without any affordable housing on the other end,” Sikkelee says.
But Charlotte needs a variety of responses to homelessness, she adds. The YWCA’s data show a rare 87 percent success rate among women who exit the program for permanent housing. A year later, 91 percent of those women still have homes.
About 20 percent of women who finish the program find subsidized housing, while another 75 percent find apartments. A few women, including a graduate who closed on a Habitat for Humanity home on her 50th birthday, move out as homeowners.
“The feedback we get from the women who go through our program is that this transitional, intensely supportive space was what they needed before they moved on into permanent housing,” Sikkelee says.
Advocates for the homeless aren’t likely to dismiss transitional housing methods completely, particularly for substance abusers or domestic violence victims. But Housing First initiatives are expected to play a larger role in how Charlotte-Mecklenburg and communities across the nation address homelessness.
Chris Wolf, director of A Way Home, an advocacy group created in response to a 2002 report from the Mecklenburg County Task Force on Homelessness, counts himself among the Housing First converts.
“It doesn’t mean the shelters aren’t needed,” says Wolf, who’s playing a leading role in drafting a local ten-year plan for ending homelessness. “But (shelters) need to be treated as an emergency room, not as a permanent solution.”
Wolf says the ten-year plan will focus on specifics, such as possibly creating a 20-unit Housing First program for families or hiring an outreach worker to help homeless men and women who have mental illnesses or addictions.
Since the National Alliance to End Homelessness in 2000 began touting such ten-year plans, nearly 150 communities across the nation have adopted them or are planning them, according to the alliance’s Web site. In North Carolina, Wake and Buncombe counties already have adopted plans and several other communities, including Winston-Salem, Gastonia and Fayetteville-Cumberland County, are planning them, says Martha Are, homeless policy specialist for the NC Department of Health and Human Services.
For the people who have been homeless, what seems most important is that they got help at all, that someone made the effort to make sure a fellow human being had a bed, got a haircut and could find a job — all without the crushing strain of having to worry about where to sleep each night.
“It’s people from all walks of life that wind up homeless,” Webb says. “Some people just lost their jobs, couldn’t find another jobs. A lot of people are a paycheck away from being homeless. It just depends on the situation. You’ve gotta have your money saved up.”
The US Conference of Mayors compiles annual data on hunger and homelessness in larger US cities. Chris Wolf, director of A Way Home, plays a role in gathering Charlotte’s data, included below from the 2004 report. Wolf says the information is a handy guide, but that the numbers may not be completely accurate. “Would I bet my life on it? No,” Wolf says. “There’s nobody raising their hand, going, ‘I’m homeless! Look at me!'”
The homeless population in Charlotte
45 percent are families
29 percent are single men
23 percent are single women
65 percent are black
23 percent are white
7 percent are Hispanic
2.5 percent are Asian
2.5 percent are Native American
28 percent are mentally ill
55 percent are substance abusers
32 percent are employed
25 percent are veterans
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.
