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Street Roots • June 29-July 5, 2018
Rural Housing
Housing Rural Oregon
In search of shelter
With no year-round shelters in Lincoln County, people on the streets struggle to survive while dedicated advocates piece together relief
BY EMILY GREEN
Coastal Crossroads
SE N IO R STAFF REPORTER
t 65, Richard Bailey is tall and
slender. He takes his strides slowly,
revealing a pronounced limp that
stems from an ache in his right hip. The
pain has increased over the years, making
work difficult for a man who’s almost
exclusively held labor-intensive warehouse
jobs since his early 20s.
Bailey doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink and
said he’s never used illicit drugs. He places
great importance on cleanliness, and for the
past five years, he’s kept his small, first floor
apartment in Newport impeccably spotless
and free of clutter.
He sits calmly, sipping his coffee from
time to time, as he provided details from the
11 years he spent living on the streets in the
small coastal town.
He had moved to Newport from Costa
Mesa, Calif., in the mid 1990s to live with
his parents, a devout Southern Baptist
couple who owned a big house on Yaquina
Bay Road. He soon found work operating a
forklift for Wild Planet seafood, where he
was employed for about 10 years.
Home life was difficult - his deeply
religious parents didn’t approve of his less
traditional ways, and in 2002, they kicked
him out. With nowhere else to go, Bailey
moved into the Summer Wind Budget
Motel, where he paid a weekly rate, he said.
It wasn’t too long before the cannery
where he worked moved its operations to
Coos Bay. Bailey thought life down south
would be “too fast,” so he decided to stay
where he was, in Newport. Plus the pain in
his hip had progressed to the point where
warehouse work was becoming
unmanageable. He soon ran out of money
and th at’s when, for the first time in his life,
Bailey found himself without shelter.
He remembers his first night outside
“just like it was yesterday,” he said. He slept
in a cardboard recycling bin near Pacific
Tire and Brake. He said if there were a
homeless shelter in Lincoln County, he
would have happily stayed there.
Lincoln County’s 2017 Homeless Point in
Time Count identified 160 unsheltered
homeless individuals. Point-in-time counts,
however, are largely acknowledged as vast
undercounts up and down the coast because
of methodology and limited resources.
Over the next decade, Bailey slept under
porches, hidden in wooded areas and in the
backs of empty semi-trucks, all within a
town of about 10,000 people that spans just
9 square miles of Oregon coast
With 70 inches of annual rainfall, Newport
gets 30 more inches per year than Portland.
Brisk gusts of coastal winds regularly blow
through the streets. Living outside in
Newport can be numbingly cold and
endlessly damp.
Part V Shelter Shortage |—
A
Oregon's coastal communities are
struggling with a housing crisis all
their own - one that's gotten worse
every year following the Great
Recession. Short-term vacation
rentals, generational poverty,-an
increasingly visible wealth divide and
aging populations have all pushed
coastal communities to an irrevocable
reckoning. For these communities to
have a viable future, something has to
change, but what?
P H O T O B Y E M IL Y G R E E N
Richard Bailey in his apartment. He was homeless in Newport fo r 11 years
before he discovered he was eligible for permanent supportive housing.
The emergency-only warming shelter
offered refuge when temperatures dropped
below freezing, but the rest of the time
Bailey fended for himself.
He took odd jobs when he could get them
- landscaping and washing cars. He never
had enough money to stay in a motel room
for very long, and he didn’t have a tent. He
would spend his days at the library or, if he
had earned a little money, he might spring
for a cup of coffee at Oceana, a local food
co-op.
He obtained a food stamp card, but was
unaware of any other resources that could
help him, such as Section 8 housing
assistance or disability benefits. He survived
mainly on snack foods, but when he could
find a place to build a fire, he would roast
meat over the open flames. He was
homeless for five years before he learned he
could apply for Social Security, but when he
got his stipend, it wasn’t enough to rent an
apartment.
During 2004’s rainy season, he broke into
an abandoned house infested with dry rot.
“I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there,”
he said. “It was really kind of unsafe to
occupy, but it was raining, and it wasn’t
warm, but at least it was dry.”
He stayed there for about a month until
he arrested. He was assigned five days on a
work crew as punishment, according to
Lincoln County court records.
Finding a safe place to sleep was a daily
priority. One night, Bailey thought that
place might be in the woods behind the
library.
But then he awoke with a forceful kick to
his free.
Dazed, he looked up at his assailants,
Bs
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C O AST GUARD
C ITY US a I J
Rural Housing
Street Roots • June 29-July 5, 2018
-SSS
who he described as a couple of drunken
lunatics.
“You’d be surprised with how much pain
you can inflict on somebody with just a
tennis shoe,” he said. A woman repeatedly
kicked him in the head, and when she was
done, Bailey said, the man who was with her
took his turn beating on him before
throwing him down the steep ravine behind
the parking lo t
“I was told not to camp back behind the
library, but I went and did it anyway,” Bailey
said, “So to an extent, it was my own fault.”
He said when he came to, he alerted
police and was taken to a hospital. A
victims’ fund paid his medical bills, but he
had to figure out how to pay for the pain
medication he needed for his hip, which had
been aggravated by the attack.
According to court records, Nathan
Dorough and Janet Bell were both convicted
of felony assault for their attack of Bailey.
Reflecting on the event, Bailey advises
anybody who is experiencing homelessness
to always find a safe place to sleep to avoid
being assaulted.
In the latter years of his homelessness,
Bailey said he found a haven sleeping on the
stoop of S t Stephen’s Episcopal Church,
where he also sought the counsel of clergy.
Bailey said he will never forget the day
during the winter of 2012, when he was
walking across the parking lot at Community
Services Consortium, and Cox opened her
window and yelled down to him that she had
found him an apartment he could move into
at the start of the year.
“I always kept the faith,” Bailey said. “I
k n e w that someday, somehow, some way,
things were going to turn around for me.
They finally did.”
A friend had introduced Bailey to the
social service provider that was able to get
him into permanent
supportive housing,
k
Street Roots asked
I Community Services
| Consortium’s housing
■ services manager, Dina
| Eldridge, how someone
could spend so many
years outside in such a
small community - where
several people we
interviewed knew Bailey
- when resources were
available.
“If someone is
unaware of how public
services work, like HUD
¡programs, Section 8, etc.,
{they will not know where
to access those
I services,” Eldridge said
I in an email. “Lincoln
County does not have
F any homeless outreach
| workers who can direct
I folks like Richard in the
| right direction."
Eldridge also said
Bailey’s disability was
| | not the only reason he
was homeless.
“He was homeless for
i 11 years because he
1 could not afford rent on
I his own and didn’t know
where else to turn,” she
said. “That is reality in
places where housing
N O A A Pacific Fleet
E3 Headquarters
Page 9
j About this series
This article is part of Street Roots’
I Housing Rural Oregon series.
I Read previous articles from the
I series at news.streetroots.org.
P H O T O B Y E M IL Y G R E E N
A m anda Cherryholmes, standing, chats with her mother Sharon Padilla a t the front desk o f the
Lincoln City W arming Shelter.
choices are limited and unaffordable to
those of modest means.”
Seeds of hope
If Bailey had children, he would have
been able to get on the waitlist for
Newport’s Samaritan House - or another
p ro g ra m available to fam ilies 25 m iles n o rth
a t Fam ily P ro m is e o f L incoln City. B u t fo r
single adults and unaccompanied youths,
there are no overnight shelters available in
Lincoln County - unless a warming shelter
has temporarily opened because of extreme
temperatures.
People from all walks of life are having
difficulty finding housing in Lincoln County
- and in many other areas along the coast.
Increases in tourism and vacation rentals,'
along with a demographic that’s aging in
place and an expensive rental market that’s
out of reach to many locals, have all
exacerbated what has always been a tight
market. Those who have a criminal record,
low or fixed income, eviction history or bad
credit have been completely pushed out of
the m arket
There are also few options for parents
who are unable to pass a drug and alcohol
te s t
“What we really lack here are programs
and resources that are designed to engage
with people at the very bottom of the
spectrum,” said Lola Jones, Samaritan
House’s executive director. “People that are
sitting in front of you, half-drunk - that’s a
place where a lot of people are starting, and
we are asking'them to get three or-four
steps ahead of where they are without a ton
of support”
While a year-round overnight shelter is
still out of reach for those “at the very
bottom,” two grassroots drop-in centers for
homeless folks have sprung up in the past
year and are building momentum toward
opening such facilities in both of Lincoln
County’s more populous coastal towns.
In the meantime, visitors to these
resource centers can access showers, food,
laundry, clothing and other forms of
assistance during the day.
In Newport, Traci Flowers opened Grace
Wins Haven in January with the goal of
rehabbing the former Patrol Services
building and turning it into a year-round
overnight homeless shelter. Building code
violations and her health have hampered
progress, but while Flowers addresses
building code issues, the location is serving
as a drop-in center.
On June 4, Flowers made a plea,
published in News Lincoln County, for
people to volunteer at Grace Wins Haven
while she undergoes treatm ent at the
hospital.
“Even if you can only be there for an hour
and it’s just to sit and have a cup of coffee
with someone or let them talk, it makes a
big difference in the way people feel and the
success of the center,” she wrote.
In Lincoln City, 28-year-old Amanda
Cherryholmes single-handedly transformed
the city’s warming shelter, which was run
out of a church on cold nights, into its own
independent facility that offers daytime
resources as well.
Cherryholmes said when she began
operating the warming shelter two years
ago, she realized many people experiencing
homelessness were not getting their basic
needs met in the community. “We ended up
running into issues where people needed
answers. Simple stuff, like they needed to
shower,” she said.
She secured a $45,000 grant from the
city and leased a building from the mayor
that serves as the resource center and on
cold nights, the warming shelter. She’s
thrilled that as of this summer, Lincoln City
will now have daytime services for people
experiencing homelessness year-round.
Cherryholmes and her mother, Sharon
Padilla, are the backbone of the Lincoln City
Warming Shelter, and they do it on a
primarily volunteer basis. When Street
. Roots visited, Padilla was manning the front
desk as a steady stream of people stopped
by for everything from clothing and coffee
to help with obtaining their birth certificate
or government I.D. card.
To support herself, Cherryholmes works
as a caregiver in the mornings before
opening the center at 10 a.m. and then
again in the evening after it closes at 4 p.m.
What Cherryholmes lacks in experience,
she makes up for with ingenuity. When she
realized kids who rely on free lunch at
school might go hungry during the summer,
she brokered a deal with the local transit
authority to allow low-income parents to
take their kids to meal sites on the bus for
free when school is out.
The coast is experiencing its own opioid
epidemic, but those in the region seeking
detox services have only local emergency
rooms at area hospitals as an option. In
response, Cherryholmes also hopes a
manufactured building that’s been donated
to her center can be converted into detox
facility, shelter and daycare once she finds a
lot to put it on and secures funding.
“There is a large number of families who
are not getting help because the parents
aren’t clean,” said Cherryholmes. “Most
substances you can’t just quit cold turkey,
you need the medical detox. What are you
supposed to do if you’re a single parent?
What happens to your kids? People get stuck
in vicious cycle. They need help, know they
need help, b u t there isn’t an organization
that will babysit your kids while you’re in
detox. I’ve never heard of a detox center
before that provides childcare. Why would
you do one and not the other? If we’re not
helping the parents, all we’re doing is
passing it on to the next generation.”
There are no syringe exchange programs
in Lincoln County, which is also one of only
three Oregon counties where Hepatitis C
occurs at a rate of more than 200 per
100,000 residents, according to Oregon
Health Authority’s 2017 data. (The other
two counties are Lake and Jefferson.)
About 60 percent of the 300 people who
dropped into Cherryholmes’ day center
between November and April were travelers,
she said. This population increases during
the summer, when just like other
Oregonians, those without homes flock to
the coast
She said about 25 percent of her clients
are temporarily or newly homeless because
of situational circumstances, such as a
no-cause eviction or job loss. She said the
other 75 percent are dealing with substance
abuse, mental health issues or both.
“There are people who are lost, and they
know they are,” said Cherryholmes. “A lot of
addicts know they need help, but don’t know
where to go because they know they won’t
pee clean.”
But it’s not just people who use drugs.
People like Bailey and families on waiting
lists will continue to camp in tents, squat in
condemned buildings and find other ways to
survive outdoors in Lincoln County until a
year-round shelter opens its doors and
ultimately, more units of affordable housing
are built
emily@streetroots.org
@greenwrites