Janice Tyler had no choice but to put her name on that waiting list — and countless others. In 2014, she was renting a well-tended duplex with a garage and backyard in the bustling Laurel District near Mills College for $1,000 a month. Then she moved to Stockton with her mother for 10 months to take care of her dying sister. When they returned, rents they encountered had doubled to $2,000, the same amount she had been taking home each month as a substitute school receptionist and clerk
The moment it hit her — the direness of her situation — still chokes her up.
“I stood on the corner of High Street and East 14th,” she said, “and realized I had nowhere to go. All I could do was cry.”
For the next five years, this woman in her 50s, this Oakland native who grew up with a fear of cramped spaces, lived in her younger brother’s old brown minivan. She shared it first with her mother, who was showing signs of dementia, then with her brother. Each night, they took turns sleeping on the bench seat in back, and each morning they took showers at a fitness center — the employees would let them in if they got there early.
She never told her coworkers she was homeless.
“It’s embarrassing,” she said. “I have pride.”
Tyler had plenty of company. Over the past two years, Oakland’s homeless population grew by 47 percent to 4,000.
In this neighborhood best known as the site of the fatal Ghost Ship warehouse fire where 36 young people died in 2016, gun violence and unemployment are dropping. At the nearby Fruitvale BART station, the subject of a Hollywood movie about the fatal police shooting of unarmed Oscar Grant, a new transit village has become a national model. But despite promises and plans to build more affordable housing, homelessness still plagues the area, as it does much of Oakland’s flatlands.
In desperation, both Tyler the receptionist and Lopez the janitor appealed for help to The Unity Council, the organization where Emmanuel Sanchez works.
But there was little the housing advocate could do for Lopez, who needed an immediate alternative to his apartment above the bar, which had been tagged by graffiti so many times that the wood siding had been repainted several shades of yellow.
Ultimately, Lopez got a reprieve after his roommate sought legal help and the landlord agreed to add a third tenant and charge each of them $600 a month. It was the best Lopez could hope for.
Tyler, meanwhile, suffered on the streets for years, making about $18 an hour at a new school job. She applied to nearly three dozen housing complexes on her own, adding her name to thousands of others on waiting lists. Sanchez helped her apply to a dozen more, but it all seemed futile.
And then something happened, a miracle, a fluke. In September — after five years of hauling a toothbrush and a change of clothes in bags with her everywhere she went — Tyler received a call from a woman at a subsidized senior living building off Bancroft Avenue.
“She was the first person in five years who didn’t tell me ‘No.’ ” Tyler said. The one-bedroom apartment had no furniture — no chair, no dresser, no table, no bed. But for Tyler, it was perfect. Sanchez, who had seen so little success lately, joined her when she received the key and opened the door.
“I just laid in the center of the floor and listened to the sounds around me, without anything, no cover or nothing,” Tyler said. “It was mine. It was somewhere I could call my own.”
"House" - Google News
December 08, 2019 at 10:22PM
https://ift.tt/2PpgrFZ
HOUSE POOR: How price hikes hurt the most vulnerable - Milpitas Post
"House" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2q5ay8k
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "HOUSE POOR: How price hikes hurt the most vulnerable - Milpitas Post"
Post a Comment