‘My grandchildren won’t be homeless’

On a Monday morning in October, Lisavida Johnson waited outside her rowhouse near Hollins Market for whoever would arrive first.

If it was someone from the property management company, she said, she could pay to halt the eviction process. But if it was a sheriff ’s deputy, she’d be put out.

Johnson, 37, had feared this day would come almost from the start, when she and her six children, ages 6 to 16, moved into the house on the first block of S. Carrollton Ave.

They had spent seven months in homeless shelters before a housing program helped the family move into the home. It rented for $1,000 a month.

Johnson does not have a job. She said her income, from the state’s Temporary Cash Assistance for needy families program, was less than $1,100 per month. But she was hopeful that her application for federal Supplemental Security Income benefits, for her mental health problems, would be approved.

For several months, the housing program helped Johnson pay her rent.

But the SSI benefits didn’t come through and by October, Johnson was behind several months’ worth of rent. With late fees and utility bills, she says she was never clear on how much she owed, and how much she could pay to forestall eviction for at least another month.

Over the weekend, she said she had scraped together $450 and taken a succession of buses to deliver it to the property management company in Baltimore County. But once there, she said she learned she needed another $80.

She arranged to have it on hand when the company sent a representative to her house on Monday. When he arrived, she says he told her she actually had to pay $90. She found the extra money, and was able to tell a sheriff’s deputy who arrived later in the morning that she was paid up.

In the small rowhouse, one of her children’s school projects, a three-panel posterboard display about “The Nervous System” sat on a table in the living room. Johnson had to convince her 11-year-old daughter to go to school that day. The girl wanted to stay home and somehow help if the eviction had gone through.

“It’s been a lot for the children, but I got good children,” Johnson said. “That’s what I invested in these last 15 years.”

She said she has put them in therapy for children of parents with mental illness, and has managed through the moves to keep her youngest kids at well-regarded Govans Elementary School on the opposite side of town.

Her dreams for her children’s future are shaped by her present. She points to her oldest daughter, the 11-year-old.

“She’s going to have a credit score of 740 and can buy a house,” Johnson said. “My grandchildren won’t be homeless.”

But as of the first of March, the whole family was homeless.

It was the culmination of months of living in a house she couldn’t afford, triggering a cycle of eviction notices and hearings in rent court. She arrived at one hearing last fall pulling a crumpled mess of bills, water shut-off warnings and eviction papers from her bag, trying to prove what she had paid.

In the hallway of the courthouse, the property manager told Johnson he couldn’t stand the thought of six kids being thrown out of the house in the coming winter. He dropped the rent by $200. But even then it was clear Johnson would never dig herself out of the hole.

She says her landlord gave her until March 1 to move out.

The day before the deadline, she trudged about a mile and a half from her home with a neighbor boy, at one point squeezing through a gap in a fence and over railroad tracks in an industrial section off Russell Street, to get to a storage facility.

She rented a unit to stash her belongings while she moved her family into a hotel and tried to find permanent lodgings.

The staff kindly gave a famished, tired Johnson a chilled bottle of water and some chips, but also some bad news: The cost to lease the unit was $76. She had just $40.

After a flurry of phone calls to find the extra money, a manager agreed to let her pay $36 and bring the rest when she returned with her stuff later in the day.

She left for the walk back with $4, which disappeared pretty quickly. She ran into someone she owed $3. Then she passed a place where she knew the soda machine had 50-cent drinks.

With her remaining dollar, she could treat both herself and the neighbor boy.

The machine was out of the 50-cent cans, so she sprang for a single 75-cent soda.

Back home, no one had started dinner, done the dishes or finished packing up their rooms. The puppy — a new addition, and the reason the family couldn’t go to a shelter — had pooped on the floor.

Johnson got her kids moving. She started working her phone, trying to raise money for both the storage unit and a hotel room.

She and her kids spent March and part of April first in a hotel, then a basement someone rented to them and, finally, a three-bedroom rowhouse on Lombard Street, just around the corner from her last