A Room for Two-Thirds of My Income

(Reprinted from the Street Sheet, published by the Sand Francisco Coalition on Homelessness)

After months of begging, pleading, applications, phone calls and waiting, a possible room appeared: $788 a month.

My current Social Security and SSI income is approximately $1,260. The rent alone would take nearly 63 percent of it, leaving $472 for everything else.

Apparently, retirement planning now requires a calculator, a miracle and a landlord who accepts the miracle as verifiable income.

I am 65, a cancer survivor and homeless in Sonoma County, where I was born and raised. I earned an economics degree and an MBA, worked, paid taxes and cared for my family. None of those accomplishments comes with a bedroom.

For this room, I was asked for a recent Social Security award letter, identification, a Social Security card and an application with a budget. I supplied documents and explained that I lacked the card.

Then came the answer: my current income did not qualify for the room.

I had been trying to prove I could survive after paying the rent. The process concluded that I could not qualify to pay it.

There is something remarkable about being too poor for an affordable housing opportunity. It is a market signal delivered directly to your nervous system.

I understand that programs have eligibility rules and landlords need reliable payments. But understanding the machinery does not make it less crushing when you are underneath it.

Waiting has become my unpaid job. It requires phone service, transportation, document storage, follow-up and enough concentration to explain the same circumstances again. The compensation package includes uncertainty and an occasional new form.

Economists call the next-best use of our time an opportunity cost. Mine includes looking for work, keeping medical appointments, eating, resting and finding somewhere safe to sleep.

These are not spare hours. They are survival hours.

I plan to find part-time work within walking distance of wherever I live. Walking keeps me healthy. But future employment cannot count as current income and finding work is harder when I cannot say where I will be sleeping.

Housing would make employment more possible. Employment would make housing more possible. I am standing between those two doors while each asks for proof that the other has opened.

My temporary place ends October 31.

A deadline like that changes how you read an email. “Please contact another agency” may sound routine at a desk. Without a stable home, it can mean another afternoon spent explaining yourself while the remaining days disappear.

I call this the homeless shuffle: movement through a system that produces activity without necessarily producing a home.

Some people have responded kindly. One COTS worker offered phone help with a housing-navigation referral and, once housing is approved, an application for move-in assistance. That practical offer matters.

But a referral is not a roof. An invitation to apply is not approval. An active file cannot keep the rain out.

As a woman living in constant survival mode, I cannot treat another night without secure housing as an administrative delay. Safety is not theoretical when you are deciding where to sleep and whether you could get away if someone threatened you.

My Christian faith keeps bringing me back to a question: What would Jesus do?

I imagine he would notice the person before reviewing the folder. Compassion would mean helping carry the burden, including the paperwork, toward an actual place to live.

I am asking for that kind of practical humanity: one named person who follows through, clear eligibility information before another round of document gathering and housing whose price bears some relationship to the income people actually receive.

A fixed income cannot stretch because an apartment is labeled affordable.

I will keep answering emails and gathering documents because I need a home. But I would like the housing process to produce something more substantial than evidence that I have participated in it.

Even my documents are required to be recent.

I would like my last night of homelessness to become old news.