City’s homeless relearn life indoors after years on streets
Letting go of survival habits can be tough in transition to housing
Shari Wilson stared down the coffees stacked on the shelves in Randall’s and wondered how anyone could possibly deal with so many options.
There were plastic Folgers containers one on top of the other on one shelf (hazelnut, classic, “1/2 caff,” decaf, Colombian), blue Maxwell House below those (wake-up roast and morning boost) and, on the very top shelf, the McDonald’s blend that had somehow made its way into grocery stores. And she wasn’t even looking near the Starbucks bags.
“Oh wow. It’d just be easier to get the instant. Holy crap,” she muttered, one hand on her hip and the other on her chin.
This was Wilson’s third trip to the grocery store since getting into temporary supportive housing with Catholic Charities in December. Wilson, 58, had been homeless on-and-off for about four years — with short stays in friends’ apartments, in housing that didn’t work out and in jail after a DWI breaking up the time mostly spent in a tent. When she first confronted a coffeemaker in Catholic Charities’ kitchen, she realized she’d forgotten how to
use it.
“It is so weird,” she said “You go to the grocery store and you’re like — you’re used to buying things that are sealed or just one of something you can eat right then. I have a refrigerator and I buy one thing at a time.”
Wilson felt like an idiot until her caseworker told her that she’d seen others go through the same readjustment period. The “housing first” model is accepted by most policymakers and social workers as the standard for helping the homeless: Give people housing without any strings attached, such as mandatory sobriety programs. But that housing, experts say, should be accompa
nied by supportive caseworkers to help people make the transition from an experience as traumatic as homelessness.
“You have people say, ‘I offered someone housing and they didn’t take it the first night, so they don’t want housing.’ I understand it much more as an understandable response to the trauma of homelessness,” said Margot Kushel, director of the University of California, San Francisco’s Center for Vulnerable Populations. “When someone has leukemia, we don’t give them a week of treatment and say, ‘Oops you relapsed, you’re not going to get better.’ ”
‘Mental permanence’
Everyone’s experience is different: Some people who had lived on the streets get their keys and slip easily back into a housed routine. Others struggle.
“It’s part of the reason why we and people across the country try to make sure homelessness is brief — as brief as possible,” said Chad Wheeler, CEO of supportive housing organization Open Door in Lubbock. “One day in homelessness is traumatic.”
Some people experiencing homelessness encounter something called “mental permanence,” Wheeler said: A person in a highly stressful environment has to focus on survival rather than getting out of that situation. Habits formed trying to survive while homeless are hard to just turn off with an apartment.
Wilson still has habits she formed living in a tent. Her room is meticulously organized because in a tent, she had to grab for her things in the dark. One drawer of her mahogany dresser is stuffed with socks, which were among the most-valued items under the U.S. 59 overpass. She cannot throw them out. Most of her clothes are still in plastic bags. Amenities like the shower (“You can actually get up and walk right to bathroom — you don’t have to put clothes on.”) and the air conditioning (“It’s right beside the bed but I just get under another blanket if I get cold.”) are a marvel. She sometimes forgets about them.
She still carries her knife on her, even in the gated complex. If she’s in her first-floor apartment, she leaves the door open. When she moved in, she couldn’t deal with the quiet. She was out smoking a cigarette and sipping on her coffee (instant) one morning when one of the other women came up behind her and said a soft “hello.” Wilson jumped up and snarled “Jesus Christ.”
Feeling guilty
Wilson has a doctor’s note from early December diagnosing her with major depressive disorder. Sometimes she looks around and feels guilty: Why, she wonders, should she be housed when all her friends are still under the bridge?
At Randall’s, Wilson picked out hazelnut coffee for what she thought looked like a good price — she’s not quite sure what that is anymore. She grabbed one of three coffee filter choices (“Why are there so many kinds of coffee filters?”) and marveled at the many types of Special K cereals before turning down what she called new and undiscovered territory: the frozen food aisle.
Then she saw it: a frozen Red Baron “thin & crispy” pepperoni pizza for $5.49. She couldn’t remember when she’d last had pizza. She had to have it.
Wilson carried her three plastic bags — filled with pickles, butter, frozen french fries, mustard, the pizza, lettuce, ground beef, her favorite seasoning, the filters and the hazelnut coffee for $46 total, the most she’d ever bought — back to Catholic Charities on a bus. Maybe she’d screw up making the coffee. But she had three cups of instant left over to get her through, and either way, she had the pizza.
“It’s part of the reason why we try to make sure homelessness is brief — as brief as possible. One day in homelessness is traumatic.”
Chad Wheeler, CEO of Open Door in Lubbock