by Sarah Gerard
I ask him the primary reason he became homeless. He has lost his job. Or has alcohol or drug problems. He’s turned twenty-one and is forced to leave foster care. He’s left to escape abuse. Or is a recent immigrant. He has lost his home through foreclosure. He has mental health or emotional problems. Medical problems. He has a criminal history. He’s been evicted. He is running away from foster care. There was a family break-up. A disaster, natural or otherwise. He doesn’t know. He refuses to answer.
I give him the bus pass. I thank him for his time.
We get back in the sedan and drive to the Mirror Lake Library. We park under a banyan tree and run through the rain up the front steps to the third-floor computer room. I approach each person sitting at a computer and ask in a whisper if he or she is currently experiencing homelessness. I recognize two people from the Saturday breakfasts. I meet a man who didn’t sleep last night because he spent the whole night walking around the city—he’s been homeless for a day. I meet a dreadlocked kid who quit his “corporate” job in Rhode Island to busk on the streets of St. Petersburg. I kneel next to a woman who yells at me to leave her alone and continues yelling even as I move on to the next person. I meet a woman who is living in a domestic violence shelter with four children. Downstairs, I see a woman I know from the breakfasts. Her face is red and she’s missing a front tooth. Her eyes are perpetually half closed, and she’s always half smiling to herself, a smile that disappears if she sees you looking.
In addition to numbers gathered during the street survey, the Homeless Leadership Board gathers numbers from emergency shelters, the school board, and the Pinellas County jail. However, not all those numbers are reported to HUD. In 2015, there were an additional 388 individuals in the street survey, 408 in the jail data, and 2,670 in the school data that did not meet HUD criteria for homelessness.89 Whereas the Homeless Leadership Board counted 6,853 homeless individuals that year, only 3,387 were reported to HUD.90 Whereas according to HUD, 35,900 people were homeless in the state of Florida in 2015,91 a statewide count by the Florida Department of Children and Families of school data the year before identified 71,446 homeless children alone.92
The difference lies in definition. While HUD includes in its count children and families with unstable housing situations, it qualifies its “homeless” criteria with the requirement that individuals have not been on a lease and had to move more than once in the past sixty days, and will continue to be unhoused due to disabilities or barriers to employment.93 This excludes anyone who, for instance, lost his or her apartment last week and is living with family; individuals whose barrier to employment is not a disability but their lack of a diploma or their race; those who are employed, but underpaid; and those who’ve been lucky to move only once in two months but are still housing unstable.
The Florida Department of Education uses a slightly different definition. Its has no numeric or temporal definitions, or requirements that those counted validate the reasons behind their unstable housing. They only ask if those counted are either sharing housing with others; living in hotels, motels, RV parks, or campgrounds; living in shelters; have been abandoned in a hospital or are awaiting foster care; are living somewhere where human beings shouldn’t live, like cars, parks, bus stations, or abandoned houses; or are migrants who haven’t yet settled in a new place.94
Family homelessness has been on the rise as low wages fall further still while housing costs skyrocket.95 In February 2016, President Obama proposed putting $11 billion in federal funds into fighting family homelessness over the next ten years—up from $4.5 billion in 2015.96 More than half of homeless families with children live in five states97—New York, California, Massachusetts, Florida, and Texas. But compared to the Florida Department of Children and Family’s 2015 finding that over 77,000 of Florida’s schoolchildren were homeless, HUD reported that there were only about 123,000 homeless children nationwide.98 Data collected by HUD helped shape Obama’s $11 billion proposal, including the Family Options Study, an analysis that compares the effectiveness of housing vouchers, or long-term help, to “rapid rehousing,” or short-term assistance. It found not only that vouchers were more effective, but also that the cost to communities was the same.99
The inciting incident in G.W.’s novel is the death of Branna Coyle. Branna is a twenty-one-year-old woman with mental retardation who is prone to seizures. She’s the daughter of Molly Coyle, who, according to the G.W. character, calls him “for just about everything.”100 Molly Coyle and her eight children live on the streets. Branna is the youngest and breaks everything she can—especially things that shine. Ashtrays. Glass tables. She and Molly were evicted from their last apartment because Branna broke the front window. The landlord called them animals.
The conflict of “Things That Break” is its setting, and the character of G.W. is the lens through whom we view it. When the fictional G.W. gets off the street, he appoints himself the mayor of Williams Park.101 There, he mediates between the park’s homeless and the city, the homeless and the fellow homeless, the homeless and God. He grows close to the Coyles because they need him. When Branna dies, he’s there.
“They are young people on the verge of going under,”102 he says in the novel of the Coyle children. Molly’s daughter Collete goes to her mother’s spot to wake her on a Sunday. She’s brought coffee. Her mother wakes, but Branna doesn’t. Collete calls G.W. “I can’t really do anything for them but be there,” he says. He takes a bus to Williams Park. He thinks about how they called for Christ after Lazarus died.103 He agrees to hold a service for Branna that evening.104
The service is held in the park. All the park’s homeless are in attendance. They pass around a bottle of whiskey. It’s been a hard day for everyone, unraveling secrets and testing the limits of each character’s morality. G.W. speaks to the people who are gathered there. “I want you to know that the word ‘repent’ means to ‘turn,’” he says. “Change course. Don’t do what you used to do.”105
He places a megaphone to his lips.
“There are some who do not have the power to willfully ‘turn,’ to change, to be willing to repent . . . Ask yourselves, all of you, if given the choice to turn, to change, if our sister would not have been the first in line to have an average childhood and live an average life.”
He slugs the whiskey.
He holds a vigil for all who have died on the streets before Branna. “The souls of our comrades, plus the souls of our kin, have gone before us to loosen our bonds and show us the way,”106 he says.
He gives Communion. Each person comes up reluctantly and takes the bread and wine. Then they disappear into the park, and G.W. finds himself alone. He thinks about what he’s just done. He is satisfied and grateful that he’s done Branna right.
“Things That Break” is a book about family, about the ties that bind people to people: mother to child, pastor to disciple, lover to lover, friend to friend. It queries the ties that bind character to reader—for the cruel world the characters inhabit is one that implicates the reader in its structure. And yet it asks us to empathize. It tells us to repent. It instructs us to humble ourselves and care for one another.
Two days after the homeless count, G.W. calls to tell me he’s relapsed again.107 Less than a month has passed since his heart attack. He’s spent sixty dollars that wasn’t his to spend. He asks if I can replace it. I tell him no.
Two days pass. We don’t speak. I worry that he’s using. I text him and he doesn’t answer. He always answers texts. I worry that his silence means that he’s dead. I think about the people in his house finding him, how many days could pass before they think to go in his room. What that would mean for them. What it would mean for Missio Dei. I worry about his book. I make a silent promise to him that it will see the light of day.
He answers the phone at nine a.m. on the morning of the third day. He’s slept through the last three days.108 Someone paid back the money. He regrets what he’s done. He’s tired. I apologize for reaming him out, and t
ell him I was scared. He says he’s scared, too.
That Saturday, I arrive late to the church. G.W. is in the kitchen with a troupe of co-ed scouts in matching T-shirts who are helping cook. It’s near the end of the month and government checks have run out, and two hundred people are lined up outside, waiting to eat. When the food is ready, we wheel it out to the tables and make a circle. G.W. speaks.
“The face of this breakfast might change,”109 he says. “I managed, last night, to get a donor to prep the coffee and stuff like that. But otherwise, we’re living off the land. It seems as though there are insurmountable odds against us having breakfast.”
G.W. tells us that Trinity Lutheran has raised Missio Dei’s rent. They also want to have the food brought in from now on, instead of being prepped in the kitchen. That just won’t work, G.W. says. “What would happen to all of you? What would happen to my volunteers?”
He recounts that something similar happened at the Unitarian church years prior. They served dinner there. The church members decided that they wanted to cook and serve instead of the homeless themselves. “They wanted to work and pat people on the head, and say, ‘Bless their little hearts,’” G.W. says. “This is the antithesis of what I’m about. I’m about enabling people to bring themselves up from the shit. This is just a way station,” he says. “This is not our reality.”
From now on, whenever someone passes a supermarket, they are to stop inside and ask for extra food. Dated cereal. Dated milk. Plates and napkins. Tell the people inside about the breakfast. Lean on the community.
“There are great odds against us, even in this building,” G.W. says. “But I’m sixty years old and I seldom lose. A man who was seventy-three years old, when most lives are over, got released from prison and changed the world, and I’m talking about Nelson Mandela. They thought he was drained. They thought he had shot his last shot. But he is one of the most famous men in the world for what he did—for other people. So I’m not going to aspire to do anything less.”
We hold hands.
“Lord, thank you,” he says. “Thank you for today. Thank you for our strengths. And thank you, thank you, thank you for our weaknesses, because they show us that we come and we go, and we can progress. Because where we are now, we’re not going to always be. And thank you, God, that we’re not where we used to be. Lord, help us. We see your hand in this. We see you all the way. Lord, stand with us. Help us, and let us kick some ass. In Jesus’s name, I pray these things. Amen.”
“Amen,” we say.
A Tiny Homes Project volunteer meet-up is held that afternoon at a downtown pastry shop. Fifty people crowd inside110—more than a hundred signed up after reading about the project on the cover of the Tampa Tribune111—and eat crème brûlée and key lime pie, telling one another why they’re there. A real estate agent who’s been bringing sandwiches to homeless people in Clearwater for years says she hopes to help Celebrate Outreach work with the city on zoning regulations. A man who spent three years on the streets of Orlando after the corporate job he’d held for two decades was downsized says he wants to do whatever Celebrate Outreach needs him to do. Another man just wants to learn to build houses.
George Bolden wears a cream-colored suit as he smiles and shakes hands. A week ago, he held a conference call with students in the architecture program at the University of South Florida who are helping design the Tiny Homes with input from veterans. At the end of the semester, students will submit their designs and the future Tiny Homes residents will vote on the ones they like best. Each will be under five hundred square feet, use renewable energy, and cost less than $25,000 to build. Veterans will pay around $250 a month toward ownership—with financial help and supportive services available if they need them. Celebrate Outreach has identified some city-owned lots, each between $1,000 and $3,000. They hope to buy at least one the following week. They’ll start building in September.112
“There was a question asked on our Facebook page about what role children can play,” Bolden says, settling the room. “Perhaps some of our volunteers today can come up with specific suggestions for things children and youth can do.”
“Water boys,” one woman offers.
“Helping in the garden,” says another.
“I’m just thinking about my own kids,” says a voice behind me. Everyone turns. A woman with wet blue eyes leans against the door frame with her arms crossed over her chest. She wears a woven white sweater and faded jeans. Her hair tumbles down over her shoulders. Her mouth trembles. “They love learning how to do things, like . . . They would love to do the tile. You know, a veteran, if it’s not perfect, they’re not going to care. They’d rather see a fingerprint in the grout. It’s homemade.”
Bolden thanks her. Everyone turns back around. Someone else suggests painting. Another, babysitting.
I find the woman later, sitting alone on a leather sofa. Her name is Megan, and she is the first recipient of a Celebrate Outreach Tiny Home. Megan is a fifty-year-old mother of three and a recent divorcée. She suffers from PTSD, military sexual trauma (MST), and bipolar disorder. She is two and a half years sober and, after leaving the air force, worked as a nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit for twenty-five years—until September 2015, when she Baker Acted herself.113 The Florida Mental Health Act of 1971, or Baker Act, allows for the involuntary examination and institutionalization of an individual with mental illness who may present a danger to themselves or others. Megan was suicidal. “I did the best I could, and things started falling apart anyways,” she tells me. Her car was repossessed. She lost her family. She was about to lose her home. “But somewhere in all this chaos, I asked for help. I asked a higher power for a will to live.”
She went into PTSD and MST treatment at the VA. She found people there who understood her pain, who didn’t question her triggers or ask her why her life was falling apart in spite of her best efforts. When a friend from the group heard she was losing her house, she put her in touch with Celebrate Outreach.
“They reached out to me two days ago.” Megan laughs. “I have no idea what to expect.” But listening to George Bolden talk, she began to fantasize about drawing up a plan for her new house. “I’m going to learn how to do carpentry,” she says. “I’m going to learn how to put tile together. I’m going to do all the things I’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t because they weren’t girly.”
She’d been living on Family and Medical Leave Act payments and then on short-term disability insurance since Baker Acting herself in September. She grieves the loss of her job but admits that she was burned out. Neonatal intensive care is triggering for her PTSD: she might have somebody die in her hands and somebody else born in her hands in the same day. The bureaucracy of the health care system is also triggering. She worked nights, weekends, and overtime, constantly. She witnessed decisions being made that she felt were unethical. “We don’t really have ethics committees anymore, because you can’t have them and try to keep babies alive that probably should have been let go,” she says.
The hospital was short-staffed. On the outside, it might look fine, but it’s “rotten as hell” on the inside. “Hospitals want their employees to lie and make everything look pretty,” she says. “When you lie to yourself, that’s self-abuse. When you lie for somebody else, it’s self-abuse. We’re enabling the medical system to hold our health hostage. I get angry over that. Everybody’s getting set up to lose.”
It reminds her of what she went through at Chanute, the air force base where she was stationed. “You have people with political power, with money, making decisions,” she says, of the hospital. “But it won’t be the people that are making decisions that are held accountable, it’ll be the little people. And they’re trying to protect themselves.”
She’s been living with the pain of Chanute for thirty years. Her first trauma happened in 1987, others in 1990. She never allowed herself to think about it after she left. She could never afford to. She supported her family financially, her husband and
three daughters. “I thought, in order to live with the trauma, ‘Well, I’m just going to work really hard and be really good,’” she says. “That’s what I did, and I was. Until I wasn’t.”
Of all that she’s lost, she grieves the most for her family. Her daughters live with their father now. Two are in their teens. The youngest one struggles with her mother’s situation the most. “I think it really hurts her because I isolate [myself] from them,” Megan says. She doesn’t know if she does so because she’s in pain or ashamed. “I just have to get brave and face it. I try to do a little bit at a time. I just try to have faith that there will be a couple of good memories, that it won’t be all lost.”
The experience of losing her car was humbling, though she admits it was also liberating—it gave her a sense of peace. There are no more car insurance payments, no more gas. She gets around now on a bicycle and a bus pass. She’s learning to be content with what she has, to live with less. She’s also learning how to be selfish. “Me asking for help helps somebody else, and helping somebody else helps me,” she says. “Seeing things through other people’s eyes makes you connect with them, be empathetic to them. They become human. They become real. That’s when you start seeing value.”
Help for veterans like Megan through the Tiny Homes Project includes support group meetings, sessions with psychologists, and service dogs for veterans who want them.114 The dogs are trained to help treat PTSD. There’s also a gardening element to the project.
“Gardening provides food, so you’re ending hunger,”115 George Bolden tells me later, after the café has cleared. “Gardening also creates entrepreneurship opportunities. You can sell the produce to local restaurants, institutions, hospitals, schools, or neighbors, other families in the area.” Gardening is also therapeutic. Once you’ve gone through the trauma of taking life in a combat situation, he says, to nurture a plant and watch it grow into a head of lettuce, or a tomato, or a cucumber is incredible. It restores a person’s humanity, gives them the joy of caring for life. His hope is for each tiny home to have a garden of its own and for there to be a community garden in each village.