Linda Rimmer opens the door to her white-walled, one-room apartment. The only sound from inside comes from an air-conditioning unit. On the way to the refrigerator and bathroom at the end of the room, she passes a table, a bed and a cubby to store her belongings. The only color coming from the room is a pink blanket on the single bed, and the color radiating from her first words.
"Welcome to my home," she said with an inviting gesture.
It was only two weeks ago that she was homeless-living in emergency housing at Central Arizona Shelter Services.
Linda, who prefers to be called 'Feather' by friends, to represent her Native American roots, in addition to her black and Italian background, moved into Horace Steele Commons in Phoenix this month. A friendly-looking, 57-year-old woman, Linda appears to be much younger than someone who has experienced so much hardship. She keeps her hair in dreadlocks for easy maintenance and a constant smile on her face to keep her going.
"Despite everything that has happened, I am a positive person," Linda said.
A self proclaimed optimist, poet and avid reader, Linda never had trouble making ends meet until her medical issues began to pile up all at once: back problems, arthritis, asthma and diabetes to name a few. Then she was diagnosed as bi-polar.
She now has the security of a permanent home and is able to pay subsidized rent. Horace Steele Commons is the first permanent housing facility in Arizona that offers full-time supportive services. In addition to those services, it provides a nice living community, where residents feel comfortable with the staff and safety, Linda said.
Megan O'Neil, a Central Arizona Shelter Services (CASS) caseworker, listens to and interacts with homeless clients at the center everyday.
"What is it that causes people to be homeless? It's hard to say, some people have serious mental illness, struggle with drug addiction their whole lives, have bad relationships; I have elderly people here that have more or less been abandoned by their children. And some people have just had a string of bad luck," O'Neil said. "Maybe you're a laborer who had one bad accident and you can't work for six or eight months, and you're not getting a pay check, and making slightly too much to get health insurance. You're out of your place and out on the street ... Sometimes a combination of circumstances like these, lead you, through no fault of your own, to end up on the street."
In a situation not too far removed from O'Neil's example, Linda found herself suffering financially after she left the healthcare industry due to her own deteriorating health. With a two-year college education in nursing, general education and psychology, which she obtained in Los Angeles in the 1980s while raising her daughter as a single mom, Linda has overcome hardship and obstacles her whole life.
"I had never been without a job, so it never dawned on me to collect unemployment," Linda said. "I panhandled and prayed to get by. It took forever for my Social Security to get approved, so in the meantime I lived in my car, after I couldn't pay the rent. That was the beginning of my homelessness."
The beginning, which Linda referred to, was the beginning of a long journey to get back on her feet and have a place to call home again.
Having lived all over the country, while Linda was still working, she moved from Phoenix to Tucson with her daughter, who was studying anthropology at the University of Arizona. Even after she lost her job, she said she continued helping her daughter pay bills and ultimately hid her financial situation from her and also from her successful sister who lives in New York.
"I didn't want to burden them or come looking for a hand-out," Linda said. "That wasn't the way I raised my daughter ... It's been at least seven years since I've seen my daughter, but I'll see her once I'm back on my feet. We are very close."
Linda's face brightens every time she hears her daughter's name, with what can only be described as parental pride. She takes a moment to look out the window and remember raising her daughter as a single parent.
"I always worked two jobs so I could raise my daughter in good areas and give her everything her friends, with two-parent incomes had," Linda said.
Though there were bumps in the road, Linda has managed to get an education, raise her daughter and deal with her health issues, and at the same time is slowly, but steadily getting her life back together, she said.
Now that Linda has acquired her Social Security, she is looking for work again, through the government's Ticket to Work program. Short-term, she plans to look for customer service work, but long-term, she aims to finish a degree in sign language at Arizona State University-with hopes of becoming an interpreter for the deaf one day.
"It's like that Phil Collins song, the song itself says it all, it says 'They pretend not to see', the homeless people that cross the street or pass you by, instead of taking the time to hear how that person became homeless, they look away," Linda said.
A day in the life of
Amy Schwabenlender sits down in an air-conditioned office in business attire, surrounded by framed photos and nice furniture. Months ago, Amy decided to go undercover and walk a day in someone else's shoes. Someone like Linda Rimmer.
Homelessness, according to Amy, who spent the day undercover as a homeless person, is a situation that cannot be judged until you experience it first hand.
Amy described her day as, "Not really feeling the true sense of being homeless, I'm sure, but starting to scratch the surface of when you're at that point, 'What do you do?'"
Amy, a United Way community investment manager, volunteered to take part in a 24-hour immersion project with Maricopa Association of Government's Continuum of Care Subcommittee on Homelessness. Locally, Amy was the third person to undergo this experience. As part of the program, Amy was scheduled to experience a day in the life of a homeless individual trying to access services within the community.
Dressed in jeans, a grey T-shirt, a baseball cap and glasses in place of contact lenses, Amy began her day at a permanent housing complex for formerly homeless individuals.
Given only two bus tickets for the day, Amy learned what it was like to have to make decisions like choosing between a bus ticket and a bottle of water.
While riding the bus, Amy remembered a man who needed money for a bus ticket to get down to the court house.
"I remembered I had an extra bus ticket, but then I realized I only had one left for the rest of my day and didn't know when I'd need it," Amy said. "Normally I would have given him money to buy a ticket."
After getting off the bus and walking many blocks on that hot, August afternoon, Amy said she was thirsty but had no money to buy any water. She began to wonder if Circle K would trade her bus ticket for a bottle of water. Instead, she decided to tough it out until she got to her appointment at the transitional living apartment complex, where she knew there was a water cooler.
"It sort of started to click for me then, why you see people on the streets keeping things," Amy said. "You don't know what you'll need or how you're going to use it or if you'll be able to trade it."
Reflecting on the situation, Amy added, "You're making these choices that you otherwise wouldn't have to. I tell people it's so easy when you have your ATM card or you have a couple dollars-when you're thirsty you stop and buy something to drink and that's it. For people on the streets, it's a whole other story. They're hungry. They're thirsty. But these things aren't always available to them."
At one point, Amy said as she sat in an outpatient waiting area, a woman in professional attire sitting near her, picked up her chair and faced it away from Amy.
"Do I smell now? Does she really think I'm homeless? Is she worried I might do something to her?" Amy recalled thinking at the time. "That was hard to swallow. It was right in my face."
Amy visited Chaplain Dave Goodall, of Ecumenical Chaplaincy for the Homeless in Phoenix, to help get her identification.
According to their Web site, Ecumenical Chaplaincy for the Homeless and Chaplain Dave, as he is known by clients, help clients find their birth certificates and assist them in getting proper identification so they can apply for jobs, housing and government benefits.
Amy recalled Chaplain Dave showing her stacks of envelopes containing birth certificates of people they had recovered, but where the client stopped coming, or in some cases, died, and never claimed them. She said she learned that when they set up client records, they also take the client's photograph, because sometimes police would uncover a dead body on the street with nothing but Chaplain Dave's card.
"It was a very chilling sobering moment, looking at envelopes of people that are probably still homeless or maybe even dead," she said.
Throughout the day, Amy encountered and connected with many homeless individuals, whom she said opened up to her because they thought she was "one of them." Among these people, she noticed many of the people she encountered had some kind of drug or alcohol addiction.
Recounting her memories from her day as a homeless person, Amy's eyes looked teary by the time she talked about sitting in on an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at a resource center for the homeless. She noticed there were people from all walks of life, sharing their addiction and recovery experiences among strangers-in rags, in business suits, in work uniforms.
Amy said she doesn't think there can be one set plan for everyone to follow in recovering from addictions and getting themselves back on their feet and off the streets.
"This woman who had been using drugs for over 20 years, who has been clean for six months, is not suddenly going to have a degree, get a job that pays enough to afford a mortgage," Amy said. "It's just not the same timeline for each particular person."
Getting back on their feet
Central Arizona Shelter Services in Phoenix helps manage homeless clients, setting clients up with case workers, to help them design an individualized plan for each person. Amy, who has toured CASS before, and Linda, who lived there for nearly a year, support the services offered by the center.
The bright red buildings sprawled on a well-kept lawn within the gated campus, where the homeless have a place to enjoy activities, talk and just feel safe, paint an inviting picture to people on the streets. Walking down the corridor in the main building, bulletin boards are covered in encouraging messages, ads for support groups, employment fairs and housing options.
CASS offers emergency shelter for single adults, families and veterans, case management, a dental clinic, employment services, child development and after school programs and permanent affordable housing-like Horace Steele Commons, where Linda now lives.
According to John Wall, the program director at CASS, there are an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 homeless men, women and children in Maricopa County today. Maricopa Association of Government's regional human services plan on homelessness reports that in a 2005 regional point-in-time shelter survey and street count, they concluded that 20 percent of the homeless people in the MAG region suffered from mental illnesses. Their Web site also stated that in their 2005 gap analysis, there was 7,972 unmet emergency, transitional and permanent housing for individuals and families on the street.
According to Wall, the community is a big part of helping the homeless-through funds, volunteer services and running the different centers. He said ASU's legal assistance program and nursing students are among important volunteers that assist clients on the CASS campus.
Wall said of the people that entered CASS in July and August of 2006, 70 to 80 percent left with housing.
"We are the regional solution to homelessness and by far the largest homeless services in the state," Wall said. "The crime rate is down from 5 years ago, so we really have pushed a lot of the gang element out of the neighborhood."
Amy and Linda both said that although housing and services are essential to helping the homeless, recognizing them as human beings is the first step people can make in addressing the issue.
"In my opinion society judges adults very harshly," Amy said. "With kids, everyone rallies around them and says you can be whatever you want to be, but when adults haven't met some expectation, instead of continuing that positive support; there is a bashing on adults for not having achieved."
Amy added that after her experience on the city bus, she now carries bus tickets and an extra bottle of water with her to give to anyone who might need it.
"You don't always have to reach in your pocket, just reach in your heart, and that can help a homeless person more than you'll ever know," Linda said. "I used to be like the people that would keep on walking past the homeless, never making eye contact."
"Then it happened to me," she said.
Reach the reporter at: sklloyd@asu.edu.
