It’s home at last for couple after years on street OTIS R. TAYLOR JR.
When Sarah Smith and Zack Minjarez moved into Berkeley’s first Navigation Center for homeless people in July, they told me they were exhausted from years living in tents on streets and under highway overpasses.
They wanted a home that opened with a doorknob and not a zipper.
After three months living at the Navigation Center, they’re getting one.
Soon they’ll move into a studio apartment in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood. They found out the night before I went to hang out with them early last week.
“Just to have a key and to be able to open your door and know that everything is the same as you left it, I’m ecstatic right now,” Minjarez, 32, said. “I don’t have words to describe it. It’s a new start.”
“It’s so cute,” Smith, 36, said of the apartment as the couple’s two dogs played at her
feet. “The oven is real. I could fit a turkey in there.”
Berkeley’s Navigation Center opened in July on the site of a former sprawling tent encampment. It can house up to 45 people at one time in a pair of air-conditioned trailers, and residents can stay for up to six months.
Bay Area Community Services, a nonprofit homeless outreach organization, runs the site, and social workers help residents find jobs, health services and permanent places to live.
Unlike homeless shelters, which make people leave each morning, the Navigation Center trailers are open 24 hours a day. Residents can bring pets and some of their belongings. There they get access to addiction treatment and job assistance. The site has showers and restrooms, and three washing machines and three dryers.
Berkeley is spending $2.45 million a year on the center, including money for residents to spend on rent and utilities when they’re ready to move into a place of their own.
But helping the homeless isn’t just about finding housing. It’s about restoring people emotionally, mentally and physically. It’s about treating people with dignity and respect by acknowledging they need to be helped and nurtured more than those of us with homes.
“It’s something as simple as greeting someone by their name, which society has forgotten to do with the population that we’re aiming to serve,” Christian Munoz, the site’s program coordinator, said. “They’ve been ignored for many years.”
And it’s crucial to maintain a support system for a population that has been transient for so many years. Munoz said Bay Area Community Services works with clients even after they’ve been housed.
In 2017, Alameda County’s homeless count reported about 1,000 transients living in Berkeley, a 17 percent increase from 2015. According to the city, 56 people have lived at the Navigation Center at some point since it opened. Seven people have moved to permanent homes — five people moved into rental housing, and two moved back in with family.
Now Smith and Minjarez can be added to the list.
“I didn’t believe it was going to be possible,” said Minjarez, a Berkeley native who told me he’s been homeless on and off since he was 16. “But it’s working out.”
Renting the studio, which costs $1,550 per month, was made possible by a loan program funded through Alameda County Behavioral Health Care that supports individuals who have mental health challenges and are eligible for Supplemental Security Income, but who need help navigating the laborious process for obtaining benefits.
The program will pay the rent every month until Smith starts receiving her payments. To repay the loan, a percentage will be taken out of her checks until it is fully repaid.
While I was at the Navigation Center last week, I met Gloria McCoy as she pushed a rolling walker up and down the pavement, as if exercising. Two book bags dangled from the handlebars, as if she didn’t want to leave her belongings in a trailer.
“When I first was homeless, everything was fine, because everybody helped everybody,” said McCoy, 68, who is known as Mama Gloria. “But right now, it ain’t too good.”
She told me she’d been homeless for 10 years before moving into the Navigation Center.
“I did the footwork getting here, and by them helping me by housing me until I can get housing, I appreciate that,” she said.
As we talked, a man, who walked past combing his wet, stringy hair, said the Navigation Center was “a living hell.” He declined to elaborate. That’s when Mama Gloria reminded me that transitioning isn’t always simple. On the street, there are drug addicts, drug dealers and thieves thriving while people with mental illnesses and other health problems don’t get the treatment they need.
But living at the Navigation Center provided respite for Smith and Minjarez.
“Just to know that you can come back and you have a clean bed,” Smith said of the center.
“You can take a shower,” she said. “And use the toilet.”
And you can do other simple things that the housed take for granted, like charging a phone.