Finding a path out of homelessness – by David Sarasohn

August 11, 2016 – For more than two years, Kakieba Taylor and her four kids experienced just about all the desperate alternatives to being homeless in Portland. Following her eviction, after a long fight between landlord and tenants over what they considered imaginative water bills, Taylor’s family crashed at her older daughter’s place, at her mom’s, at motels, at a shelter. The Portland housing market, with a minimal vacancy rate and a price-rise leading the nation, can seem like a giant ‘Keep Out’ sign with barbed wire on top.

And the wall seemed to keep getting higher. These days, putting in a bid for an apartment can carry an application fee – maybe $25, $30 or $50, money hard to find between the cushions when you’re couch-surfing. Landlords ask security deposits (another obstacle) and can check credit ratings and choose from a list of hopeful tenants. They can just rule out anyone with any record of eviction.

Being homeless – making the constant emergency on-the-fly moves needed to keep your family sheltered, fed and together – actually takes a lot of time. Taylor’s teen-age daughter got into some trouble. The pressures from all different directions cost Taylor the job she’d held for nearly a decade, as a certified nursing assistant.

“Looking for an apartment,” she says, “is worse than looking for a job.”

But Taylor managed, through it all, to keep her kids in their schools – even if it meant taking her son out in the early morning to show him which bus to take. And, she says firmly, “We didn’t go begging.”

Then she found a path out. “I met another mother going through some of the same things,” she says, “and I talked to her advocates.”

Taylor went to Human Solutions, a nonprofit agency covering East Portland and East Multnomah County. Human Solutions operates emergency shelters, transitional housing and affordable housing, which comes with social services to help tenants find their feet.

She went to Rent Well, an agency offering a 15-hour, six-week class that provides tenant training, “appropriate for people with poor/no credit, past evictions, no rental history, criminal history, and/or other screening barriers to rental housing and who are low-income, at risk of homelessness, or currently homeless.” It can also offer landlords a guarantee, pledging to cover damages, eviction costs or unpaid rent from a sudden departure.

Taylor is now a proud, successful graduate of the course.

“You have to do the things they want you to do,” she explains. “You have to come to class on Saturday. You have to be willing to do the work.”

Taylor and her family have been in their apartment for about a year now. The difference is dramatic she says, “I don’t have to worry about where my kids are going to lay their heads at night.”

She’s getting ready to return to the job market. And she has become a different kind of tenant, and different as a potential tenant, “Now, I can apply anywhere I want to.”

After this change in her life, and the change in her, Taylor want to do more, “I’m willing to share my story. Maybe it can help another family.”

Homelessness isn’t just a lack of a mailing address; it’s a thread running through your life, making everything else – work, school, food, medical care – more of a struggle, turning the simple task of finding another place to live into an ever steeper uphill climb.

The way out isn’t easy, and the direction of the Portland real estate market isn’t making it easier. Human Solutions and Rent Well both depend on contributions to keep the doors open, and the options possible.

But Kakieba Taylor found a way out, and wants to show the way to others. “There is a place, there is a job out there for anybody,” she says. “You have to know where to go.”

Oregon Food Bank welcomes David Sarasohn as an occasional contributor on topical issues.