Vacating Homelessness

-An essay written in conjunction with the Seattle Times' collaborative project on family homelessness-

Every Wednesday for the past two summers my wife and I stroll down the street with our two young children towards Aurora Avenue and 90^th Street, an intersection known for prostitution, drug dealing, and other criminal activity often called, “the switchblade”.

But just before we round the corner to get there, we duck into the lot of a quadplex, which is home to a small community garden.

The tomatoes may be struggling this summer, but here in this garden a new kind of Aurora Avenue is sprouting as every Wednesday night anywhere from fifty to one hundred neighbors gather for a meal hosted by Awake, the neighborhood faith community where I serve as pastor.

It’s like a weekly block party – and everyone’s invited: families from owned townhouses and rented motel rooms, coffee-addicted graduate school students and recovering drug and alcohol addicts from the nearby AA meeting hall, young professionals from neighborhood condos and women caught in the oldest profession.  Cheeseburgers and hotdogs (and some Boca burgers too!) fly off the grill, are topped with garden greens, and enjoyed.  As neighbors huddle in eclectic clusters around the garden, stories are shared and perspectives are shifted.

It was, similarly, food and conversation with the people of Aurora that contributed to the shattering of my perspective a few years earlier.

Back when I lived in the heart of Greenwood, Aurora was nothing more than a boundary to cross to get to the promised land of Green Lake, a road to be used to get downtown or as a debatable short-cut to the airport.  Aurora was not a destination; it was a gash down the middle of an otherwise vibrant area.

But then, along with my neighbors from Awake Church, I started noticing the motels.  And the rusty cargo vans and tired RVs parked on the side streets.  And the people who call these places, “home.”

Inspired by the work of another area church, we began to show up at motels and share food with our newly discovered neighbors.  When we started listening to the their stories, the infamous Aurora stereotype began to crack, and everything changed.

Sure, there were motel stories of drug use and threatening behavior, but more often than not the motel stories – as we learned directly from our relationships with tenants and indirectly from our relationships with the many motel managers who essentially function as social workers – had to do with people who simply didn’t know where they were going to sleep tomorrow night.

Jessie had a steady job at Safeway, but slipped on the ice and injured her back.  Now she can’t work.  Her boyfriend Danny, who usually watches the kids, can’t find a job.  They’re already two weeks behind in rent at the Sun Hill Motel.

Brenda ended up at the Motel Georgian after fleeing her abusive boyfriend.  She’s 7 months pregnant and can’t afford a room after tomorrow night.

The Lee’s house burned down and the transitional housing they’ve been planning on moving into got delayed.  Again.  In a matter of days this family of six will be out of the (now closed) Motor Inn and be spending nights in a van on an Aurora side street.

Soon after we began spending time at a handful of motels, when we started the garden cookouts, our neighbors who are used to sleeping in vehicles on Aurora side streets told us similar stories.  Addiction landed some of them on the street, but others lost jobs or got injured or experienced some other series of unfortunate events that contributed to their homelessness.  Often, like many of our motel neighbors, they had a steady income, but simply couldn’t front the costs to rent an apartment.

In the Aurora motels and in the aging vans and trucks, the need for housing was simply overwhelming.  It still is. 

City resources are slim and low-income housing waiting lists are long.  While providing our neighbors with emergency assistance is good news because it keeps people off the street for a week, there’s bad news too: it’s only a week! 

So we’ve decided to attempt our own neighborhood-generated solution.  Earlier this year we started the Vacancy Project, an attempt to partner with our homeless neighbors in the Aurora area to help them escape the cycle of poverty and transition into stable, affordable housing.

By providing individuals and families with small no-interest loans to help them cover first and last month’s rent and security deposit, our hope is to empower people to break through what is otherwise an insurmountable barrier in the journey out of homelessness.  So far, we’ve been able to assist three families and one individual as they courageously embark on this journey. 

In another situation, rather than give a loan, we provided funds from the Vacancy Project to keep an Eritrean refugee family off the street as they waited for space at an emergency shelter to open up.  The family had previously sought help from a variety of organizations – including a rather interesting experience at the Seattle Mayor’s Office – but was on the verge of homelessness until an aware motel manager thought of the Vacancy Project and contacted us.

A few months ago some of my friends had the privilege of visiting a family that had received a $700 loan from the Vacancy Project shortly after they moved into their new rental home in Lynnwood.  My friends brought mattresses for the two little girls – who until then had been sleeping on the floor – and covered them with fresh bed sheets and purple comforters; one with flowers, the other with polka dots.  The girls were ecstatic.  They stood on the beds and talked about how tall they were.  They sat on their beds and tried out every corner.  They invited each other over to their respective beds and posed for pictures. 

I imagine they slept really well that night.

At the garden, countless neighbors are still wondering where they’re going to sleep at night.  Those on the street dream of a vehicle, those in vehicles dream of a motel room, and those in motel rooms dream of an apartment. 

Soon the summer will end.  Cool air and rain will arrive.  Our weekly cookouts will come to an end, too.

Fortunately this fall, regardless of the weather, we’ll be able to continue our weekly gatherings – and even more than that.

Just south of 90^th on Aurora, and within a few blocks of where most of us live, we’ll be launching a 1500-square foot community center called the Aurora Sharehouse.  It will be a lot like the garden, only indoors – a place for storytelling and celebrations. 

We also hope that it will be a hub for neighbors, businesses, faith communities, and other groups to scheme together about how we can build a continuum of care to help even more homeless neighbors vacate their vehicles and motel rooms for the sake of stable, affordable housing.

And with each new neighbor that gets his or her own place to fall asleep at night, it may just be a sign that we’re waking up to a new Aurora.

Which is fitting.

Aurora, after all, means dawn.