Living in a housing crisis – by David Sarasohn

June 21, 2016 – Just under where she was sleeping, Miriam could feel the concrete. She did have some cushions, rescued from the apartment she’d just lost, to put down on the floor of her friend’s garage, but in the night she could feel the cold hardness just inches beneath her.

And she knew that around here, she might actually count herself lucky.

“I did read all the time that we have a housing crisis, so that helped me feel a little better about my situation,” Miriam remembers.

“At least I was in shelter. I wasn’t out on the streets in the cold.”

But she had other problems.

Miriam had lived in her own apartment for 11 years, a refuge from a world where she’s found it hard to find her place. She’s had jobs, some for years, in the past, but now she’s over 60, and “I have difficulties in getting jobs because I’m short, fat and not good looking.”

She also has scoliosis, and gets around with a walker.

Miriam got crosswise with her landlord partly because she was letting other family members, who also had problems, stay in the apartment. She says there was also a calculation – widespread in the current Portland market – that if the apartment was empty and upgraded, it could be turned into a considerable higher rental.

When she was told she had to leave, she was “devastated.”

In 10 minutes, she says it three times.

It was more than losing a place to live. Unmoored, Miriam now had no way to get to counseling. Without it, she found herself calling crisis hot lines as often as three times a day, breaking down and fearing she might do something disastrous.

That danger wasn’t impossible to imagine. A friend of hers was recently killed in a traffic accident. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but Miriam says the police report said that her friend stepped in front of the car.

A life, it seems, it something like a sweater: Pull out one thread – such as housing – and everything can come apart.

A lot of lives are unraveling on the streets of metropolitan Portland these days. Sometimes you can see them, in the tents and makeshift sleeping places blooming along streets and parks as the weather warms. Sometimes they’re just cluttered spaces under bridges, or a phone ringing at a crisis line.

It’s part of what seems like a national homelessness explosion, but it may be more intense in a metropolitan area where house prices are rising at the fastest rate in the country, and rents shoot up on a monthly basis.

Slowly, Miriam has reassembled her life. Her friend started driving her to the counselor, and slowly Miriam learned to navigate the four blocks from MAX to the counseling office with her walker. The counselor worked with her, and tried to find her a place to live.

The agency found a studio apartment available for $750 a month – but Miriam’s income, a disability payment, is just $850 a month. There were rooms in a house at $400 a month – but the rooms open were upstairs, a problem for a walker.

Miriam spent nine months on a waiting list for low-income housing, with the help of her providentially supportive friend and the rather too supportive garage floor. She got through it by “listening to Christian music, keeping my spirits up, hoping that I would get something.”

Although, she admits, she knew “I had no for-suredness about it.”

Now, with the help of the agency Home Forward finding her an affordable place, she again has that most magical of possessions: an address.

Miriam is now helped by several food programs, including a weekly church supper and an Oregon Food Bank effort that delivers fresh food to the housing complex. It lets her do something that makes her new place feel like a home, cooking.

She cooks by turning the walker around and sitting on it.

Still, there is a difference to it.

“I’m always vulnerable,” she says. “I worry about it happening again.”

Unraveling always leaves its mark.

And she can still feel the concrete.
Oregon Food Bank welcomes David Sarasohn as an occasional contributor on topical issues.