Promise of home is snatched away

Frank, a single father, had subsidized housing within reach, then it was snatched away — a casualty of federal budget cuts.

Frank’s is a life of struggle. His obstacles are huge, his victories humble but life-defining. He has a job but he’s poor and dependent on a safety net that is fragile and full of holes. One huge hole was torn in it this year, and Frank fell right through. The affordable housing subsidy he was about to receive, which would have put him and his son out of institutional transitional housing and into his own permanent apartment, was canceled due to federal budget cuts.

He is among more than 1,500 poor families in Los Angeles who lost their vouchers because Congress and the Bush administration consider subsidizing the poor a low priority. Nearly 250,000 families will lose their vouchers nationally by 2005 and up to 600,000, a third of the total, could lose them by 2009.

Frank is a taxpayer. He works full time, earning $360 a week or $1,440 a month picking up repossessed cars with a tow truck for a repossession company, a job he has done for about six years. He works 10 to 14 hours a day, averaging $5.14 to $7.20 an hour. The only way he can manage to support himself and his son is through the many social services that provide him with free rent, free child care, food vouchers, donated clothing and free public health care benefits. It took him about a year to save the $2,500 required to qualify for Section 8 vouchers, a program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that subsidizes the rent that poor working people pay for private-sector apartments. With the ultimate goal of gaining custody of his baby son, Austin, who was in foster care and in danger of being permanently adopted, Frank got sober and got off the street and into L.A. Family Housing’s Sydney M. Irmas Transitional Living Center.

Working with his case manager, he applied for and received a large number of social services and would get custody of his son when he “graduated’“ into the private studio apartments there that people like him can occupy for up to two years while seeking permanent private-sector apartments.

The money Frank earns isn’t nearly enough to cover his expenses. Every three months, he receives vouchers from the Women Infants Children program of the California Supplemental Nutrition Program, redeemable at Food For Less Stores for juice, eggs, cereal, milk and peanut butter.

“I get gift cards, people give me stuff,” Frank said. “They donate stuff here. The only things I like from their donations is the stuff that’s not cheap. Diapers. Sometimes when I see my case manager, I get lucky and I get diapers. It’s a big expense for me in raising my kid.”

Frank spends up to $20 a week, $80 a month on diapers, up to five percent of his income. Childcare, which Frank says would cost $400 a month, is free, either through daycare programs at L.A. Family Housing or friends in the building who help each other out by babysitting.

Frank says he couldn’t get by without the government’s help. “It would be real hard,” he said. “I could be living in a homeless shelter. Or I’d have to rent a room. And when you rent a room, you don’t know who you’re renting from. You don’t know who’s going to steal from you.”

Despite that and the fear and uncertainty of not knowing if he will ever receive Section 8, he is sustained by hope that things will work out. “Yeah, I just gotta have patience,” he said. “Having hope is very important. All I can do is leave it to the man upstairs. It’s not in my control, you know.”

Frank has worked very hard to pick himself up from homelessness, crime and drug addiction and built a life for himself and Austin. Without his perseverance and his current motivation, he would not be where he is today: healthy, with custody of his son, working, in stable, safe housing. Despite that, his life is precarious and largely dependent on countless factors totally beyond his control or even his knowledge.

The cuts to Section 8 are one example. Another is expressed by the fact that Frank’s life in part depends on a man named Michael Osbourne. Osbourne is not a politician, case manager, police officer or Department of Children and Family Services custody officer. He’s a plastic plaque hanging on the outside of Frank’s front door reading, “Made possible by a donation from Michael Osbourne.” Frank doesn’t know who Osbourne is, he’s just someone in L.A. who donated $10,000 to the Sydney M. Irmas Transitional Living Center. Frank might not even have this modest studio apartment or his child if Osbourne hadn’t made the donation, but Frank is too preoccupied with his own matters to think about it.

In some ways, living like this reduces a person to the state of a dependent child. Frank gets a weekly inspection from the center staff and a report card on the organization and cleanliness of his apartment. Frank accepts this gracefully as a necessity. “You gotta be in compliance, doing everything you’re supposed to here,” he said. “Going to meetings, classes. That’s mandatory. You must meet with your case manager. Keep your place clean, you know, when they give you these little slips right here. My place is clean so they don’t trip. As you can see, it’s small but I still keep it clean.”

Frank’s 18 years of drug abuse left a trail of crime, jail time and living on streets on and off since 1989. It destroyed his relationships with his family and left him without many job prospects. He lost custody of his daughter, who is now 3 ½ years old and will soon be permanently adopted, although he is allowed to visit her periodically. When the mother of Frank's son lost custody of him due to mental illness, and the spectre of losing his son as well suddenly became a real possibility, Frank acted quickly and decisively.

In October 2002, after completing a voluntary 90-day drug rehab program he had done while fighting for his daughter, he checked into L.A. Family Housing’s transitional living program and started working with a case manager to get custody of his son. He had to maintain a job, save money and stay in rehab to move from a dorm room with 50 other men on cots to a room with six working men, then to his private studio apartment. He was only allowed to gain custody of his son once he got the private place.

“I didn’t just do it for my kid though,” he said. “To do the program right, you gotta do it for yourself, otherwise you’re gonna get high again. You gotta help yourself before you can help anyone else.”