‘That ain’t no life’

Southern Maryland’s homeless working to overcome circumstances

Friday, March 31, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Staff Photo by Dean Geiser Billy Goodwin stands in the ruins of a shack he lived in for two years in Great Mills. He now lives at Three Oaks shelter in Lexington Park and said he has his life back on track. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story

‘‘I found an empty house and basically crashed there,” Holland, 45, said.

He said he spent his time selling drugs, using others and dodging police patrols through the old neighborhood of Lexington Manor, known commonly as the Flattops. When he was there many of the homes were still occupied, but the development is now abandoned, and the buildings there soon will be demolished.

Holland is one of hundreds of people in similar circumstances in Southern Maryland. There were 1,644 people in the region documented as homeless in 2005, according to the Point In Time survey from last year. The survey counts the number of homeless on one particular day of the year and is used for federal statistics used to allocate funding. On the day of the count the vast majority of the homeless, 1,274, were listed as unsheltered.

With the economic boom of the last decade in Southern Maryland also came a huge increase in housing costs, both buying and renting. The lower margins are being pushed out of a place to live, said Lanny Lancaster, director of Three Oaks Center in Lexington Park.

Although there are not sidewalks with heated grates lined with homeless people in Southern Maryland, there is a growing population living in abandoned houses, shelters or crashing at friends’ and families’ homes.

‘‘As booming as [the economy] is, it is widening the gap and increasing the potential for homelessness in St. Mary’s County,” Lancaster said.

‘‘It’s only going to get worse, and I don’t know what they are going to do,” Bill Stanton, president of Project Echo in Calvert County, said of the lack of affordable housing in the region.

When he was younger, Holland led a normal life by most accounts. He graduated from high school and did a few years in the military. He got married and lived in a home in Baltimore.

In the 1980s he developed a drug problem, first with heroin. Then in 1989, ‘‘a friend introduced me to crack cocaine. ... By the time I got here everything just crashed and burned,” he said.

He moved back to St. Mary’s County, where he was born and lived the first few years of his life, hoping to get a fresh start. His father helped him a little and he did OK, but not for long. Soon he began to spiral into heavier drug use, eventually losing his job and the place he rented.

‘‘My homelessness started before St. Mary’s County recognized homelessness” more than a decade ago, Holland said. There are still some who ignore the problem and pretend it doesn’t exist or say that it is not becoming worse, he said.

Although he had family in the area, he hid from them, embarrassed, he said. ‘‘They were scared of me,” physically, mentally and spiritually.

‘‘What made me homeless was my drug addiction. That kept me out of [the shelter],” he said. It wasn’t until he was in jail, after being kicked out of the shelter a couple of times for breaking the no-drugs rule, that his life started to turn around.

The rehab program at the St. Mary’s County Adult Detention Center was what finally stuck. ‘‘The program kept me honest,” Holland said. He was required to attend different meetings and have regular drug tests.

He said there are programs to get people out of homelessness, if they want. The programs have grown and multiplied since he first needed them in the 1990s and now provide a continuum of care. From the departments of social services to Walden⁄Sierra to Pathways and shelters in each county, help is available.

However, that help is stretched thin, and with large numbers of homeless being turned away from the full shelters every month, the problem is only worsening.

Today, Holland has a good job, working at a mail company for the last five years. He’s been living on his own for about two years and been clean and sober for about five years.

He comes to Three Oaks Center, which he once called home, in Lexington Park once or twice a month and talks to homeless people about his experiences and about ways to get back on track.

‘‘It’s my way of giving back,” he said.

Holland tells the residents there are ways out of homelessness. ‘‘You see that look in their eyes. They’re only looking at that situation they’re in right now,” he said. ‘‘In the end I try to give them some sense of hope.”

Holland still runs into men who were homeless six years ago when he was. He isn’t surprised, noting the ‘‘revolving door” of homelessness.

Volunteers are welcomed at the shelters to answer phones, talk to clients or monitor shelters, especially on nights and weekends. Also, volunteers are needed for mentoring programs for children at some shelters.

But there are many reasons why some homeless people choose not to come to a shelter, not the least of which is a sense of fear and paranoia, said Lancaster, director of Three Oaks shelter. ‘‘They do have options, but they’ve got to want to go” to the shelters, Lancaster said.

The chronically homeless make up between 10 and 16 percent of homeless people in Southern Maryland, he said. To be considered chronically homeless, a person has to be without a home for three or more times over a four-year period or continually homeless for longer than one year.

Others that count as homeless include people living in shelters or in transitional housing, including a number of townhouses throughout the region owned by the shelters and inexpensively rented to those who formerly had no regular plan to live.

Lancaster said the results of this year’s Point In Time survey from Feb. 24 are still being compiled, but preliminary results show about a 20 percent increase in the number of homeless in Southern Maryland, which could push the number close to 2,000.

In Calvert, 127 homeless were counted in last year’s survey. Charles reported 390. St. Mary’s had reported 1,127, which is the most accurate count of the three, Lancaster said.

‘‘People tend to think this is not a problem here, but it is,” Lancaster said. ‘‘If they don’t see it they don’t believe it.”

‘I don’t miss it much’

Billy Goodwin, 39, lived in the woods in Lexington Park for years until he finally kicked his alcohol habit 21 months ago.

‘‘I don’t miss it much. I really don’t miss it. That ain’t no life,” he said.

Since he cleaned up, Goodwin has lived at Three Oaks and is now waiting his turn in one of the program’s transitional housing units.

He knows the woods and knows the spots where a lot of homeless people live. He escorted social workers during the Point In Time survey on a search for those people, looking at some of the old spots where he used to live, including a shack in Great Mills.

‘‘You can say that place saved my life. It kept me out of the rain and snow” for two years, Goodwin said. Now that he’s living and working at Three Oaks, he’s looking forward to a regular life again with his own place to live.

The people who manage to get accepted in a program are provided with services, Lancaster said. Lots of resources, both in personnel and funding, are going into the homeless problem, but gaps still exist, especially in affordable housing and shelter space for women and children. ‘‘If I could fix the problem ... the three most important things I would address are affordable housing, day care for mothers and sheltering for women,” Lancaster said.

Day care for mothers is especially tight in the region. ‘‘We would like to provide day care to our clients. We can’t right now because we don’t have the resources,” Lancaster said. The women could move through the process much faster if day care were available, allowing them to find a job, save money and move into transitional housing.

Teresa, who did not wish to give her last name, is at Project Echo in Prince Frederick for the second time. The first time was ‘‘voluntary,” she said. ‘‘The job I had just wouldn’t pay the rent,” Teresa said.

Along with working on her GED and doing 40 hours of community service, as required by social services, Teresa is also raising her 2-year-old daughter, Cheyenne.

‘‘It affects her in a way; hopefully by the time she’s old enough to understand I’ll be out of here,” Teresa said.

She does not have any family nearby; both of her parents are dead. Although her sister in Texas knows about her homelessness, Teresa doesn’t want to ask for help because ‘‘I have too much pride.

‘‘One minute you’ve got it. The next minute you don’t. It can happen to anyone, it don’t matter how much money you have,” she said.

Teresa admits it’s not just the lack of affordable housing. ‘‘Also mistakes of life put you where you’re at,” she said. ‘‘I had a house and everything. I wound up losing that and my job, so I moved back here,” she said.

Linda, who also wished not to use her last name, bunks at Project Echo and watches Cheyenne during the day. She came to Project Echo via St. Mary’s Hospital after a serious breakdown due to her alcoholism.

‘‘Unfortunately the alcoholism got the best of me and I lost everything,” Linda said. ‘‘They had nowhere to put me over there ... I’m known as the county-less woman.”

She is going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings three times a week and has been sober for about three months since she was in the hospital.

‘‘I’m trying to get into a program in St. Mary’s through the Pathways,” Linda said. If she were accepted, she would live in a transitional home with two other women recovering from alcoholism.

Linda still has hope, though it was put to the test one week last month. All of her possessions were auctioned off after she fell too far behind on her storage unit bill. A few days later, her dog died. ‘‘After that, I never ask what could go wrong next,” Linda said.

She finds solace by talking to others who live or work at the shelter. ‘‘I talk to people who’ve been here. They say hang on because you’re going to get out of this,” she said. ‘‘You learn a lot from the other people that stay here about different programs and how you can help yourself.”

Linda once rented her own home, had a good job and lived a fairly normal life. She said it’s hard for some people to comprehend who the homeless are. ‘‘It’s people who have had a succession of bad luck, bad things, and this is where you end up. And thank God for places like this,” Linda said of Project Echo.

‘‘It’s a place to get a new start and Lori [Hony, the director] helps you as much as she can. She’s great,” Teresa said.

The outreach programs at each include offering help with job training. Most of the homeless want a job, Lancaster said, but it is just a manner of not having the qualifications.

The shelters address four angles: outreach and prevention, those who are mentally ill or addicted to a substance and are not ready to come in, emergency situations where shelter and food are provided and transitional housing.

‘‘That’s basically how all of us ... tend to look at the homeless situation, through one of those four lenses,” Lancaster said.

Three Oaks offers eight beds for emergency clients. They can stay up to 90 days. There are 12 beds for transitional clients who can stay up to two years. The center also uses 10 townhouses for transitional families and helps clients lease homes through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s transitional and permanent supportive housing programs.

The men’s shelter can place women in either hotel rooms or arrange for them to stay at Angel’s Watch shelter for women and children in Hughesville.

The center also offers counseling, dealing with 10 or more clients on any given day who have some level of mental illness. The center must institutionalize severely mentally ill clients, those who are a danger to others or themselves.

‘‘We’ve had more than our share of suicides,” Lancaster said. These often come as a shock, and word spreads quickly through the network of homeless people and Three Oaks staff.

There are success stories, too. Lancaster recalled the case of a high-level government worker whose wife was mentally ill. Caring for his wife sent the man into a downward spin through a series of bad events, leaving the couple living out of their car.

‘‘He came to me in a catatonic state, barely able to talk,” Lancaster said. ‘‘We couldn’t address him until we were able to get the wife help and stabilize her. It was just a matter of picking up the pieces for him.”

After about one year, he was back on his feet. The man has since moved away but has kept in touch and is doing very well now, Lancaster said.

Homelessness is often the result of some domino effect such as this.

‘Everybody’s in the same boat’

Project Echo had to turn away 154 requests during a period of nine months last year, mostly because there was no space available.

Problems also arise when there is a woman with an older son or a father with a daughter. There are no rooms that can accommodate a mix like this.

‘‘We just tell them to call back,” said Stanton, the shelter’s president. ‘‘I don’t know what happens to those folks” who are turned away. The staff tries to work with other shelters and programs in the region, but there is a real lack of shelter space, he said. Some may end up living in tents or out of cars in woods, often behind grocery stores.

Project Echo has six beds for men in the basement of the building and accommodations for 20 women or children. ‘‘The six beds [for men] are always filled, and they have been for the last year or more,” he said. People can stay for up to 90 days and request an extension for more days. They must be working, going to school or show evidence that they are trying to work.

Project Echo keeps two transitional houses for families behind the main building, located on Main Street in Prince Frederick. Families can stay for up to two years; at any time there are 10 to 15 families waiting for one of the two small homes to open up.

Project Echo is hoping to raze the old house and build a new shelter twice as large. It would have flexible rooms, allowing the staff to reconfigure for different family situations. It would accommodate 35 to 40 people with 10 to 12 beds just for men.

Rob Hicks, 37, is living at Project Echo, again. He agreed that the building needs to be bigger. ‘‘They’d be able to help more people and maybe stay longer,” he said. He would also like to see more services available, such as better job placement opportunities and cash assistance to help with buying clothing and hygiene items as well as transportation, like taxi or bus fare.

Hicks just got released from jail for failure to pay child support and found he didn’t have a place to stay. He moved into Project Echo and he’s looking for a job, probably in construction. And he thinks he’ll be able to find a room to rent, or maybe a small apartment, as soon as he gets a job.

‘‘I hope to make all my changes within four to six weeks,” he said. ‘‘Without the money you can’t do a whole lot,” he said. He said the men get along pretty well at Project Echo. ‘‘Everybody’s in the same boat and everybody’s trying to paddle up the stream to a better landing,” he said.

There is no one reason why people end up in a shelter or homeless. Many of the people grew up in the county, though some are transplants from other places. ‘‘As many people as there are homeless there are as many reasons why they are homeless. I think affordable housing in this area is a factor. It’s difficult to find a place to live ... if you don’t make a lot of money.”

In the back yard of Three Oaks lie the remains of the Flattops. The government has relocated the tenants from the property, but some of the homeless still find shelter there. ‘‘You’ve got people that are going to use them and take advantage of them because they’re desperate,” Lancaster said. Women living with children, even babies, are living in the Flattops now, though Lancaster can’t say how many. He said Three Oaks has reached out to the women every way they can.

A homeless woman’s situation is often completely different from a man’s, Lancaster said. With children a whole new dynamic is added. Also, women who end up homeless often have even less education and job experience than their male counterparts.

An extended family can help keep women and children out of homelessness for short periods, but often invitations are worn out.

Rachel Burdick of Waldorf was in and out of Angel’s Watch shelter over a year with her 2-year-old son, Chris. She said she left her home because of domestic violence and moved into a motel for about a week. Someone suggested she look at Catholic Charities for help and she discovered the shelter.

While there, she mostly kept to herself. Her son ‘‘had a real hard time adjusting to it,” she said. However, she did become friends with two of the clients and some of the employees. She eventually roomed with one of the other woman who was at the shelter, a combination that helped both of them get back on their feet.

Angel’s Watch Executive Director Beth Flynn said the shelter denied 923 requests for stays last fiscal year for lack of space. Although the same women made many of the requests multiple times, it still shows a large gap in services available, she said.

‘‘It’s increased, too,” she said. There were about 680 denied requests the year before. ‘‘I’m not sure if we capture all of them ... there’s probably even more than we know we have.”

The shelter holds a maximum of 41 people, with an average stay of 67 days. Flynn said they could easily double the space and still keep the shelter full every day. Ideally, she would like to be able to serve up to 100 women and children at once.

With a long waiting list, Flynn and a counselor must make a decision on who gets to move in when a room opens. They prioritize the list this way: First come domestic violence cases, then families, then single women.

‘‘It’s a little bit like a college dorm,” Flynn said. Meals are served in a small dining room at set times and there are curfews and other rules the women must follow to stay at the shelter.

All of the homeless shelters in the region have some degree of security to help keep their clients safe. Angel’s Watch is particularly vigilant since some of the women, about 20 percent, come there from abusive homes.

‘‘A lot of these women don’t want people to know they’re here,” Flynn said. There have been a few problems with men from former relationships coming to the shelter looking for a woman, but it is not too often, she said.

‘‘These women are often victims of circumstance as opposed to victims of neglect,” program manager Jacqui Hamilton said.

When women come to the shelter, the immediate priority is getting them the basics — food and shelter. Often, Lancaster and Flynn said, counselors cannot really address the domestic violence issues for weeks or even months.

Burdick has visited the shelter a few times since she left there five years ago. ‘‘I tell them to stop old habits because old habits keep you going in the wrong direction,” she said.

E-mail Jesse Yeatman at jyeatman@somdnews.com.