Clients lose their housing for stupid kid stuff---smoking indoors,
stealing the roommate's leftover Chinese take-out, refusing to wear pants
in summer ---and while we remain optimistic, it is unreasonable to expect
a person who's slept on concrete for ten years to suddenly become a good housemate.
Let me illustrate with turtles.
One of our higher-ups used to be a supportive housing manager, which usually
meant bi-weekly home visits to check for leaks or bugs, but often met with
unorthodox housekeeping issues that might have been tolerated on the street but
obviously not in an apartment complex where everyone can hear your girlfriend
punch holes in the plaster during sex. Pets are never allowed outside of
service animals, though you might forgive the odd goldfish, so she wasn't
terribly surprised to walk into a resident's bathroom to find a tub full of turtles.
She never asked "why turtles?", whether he sold them to
neighborhood kids or nurtured a domestic impulse, only that he needed to hide
them from Code Enforcement for 24 hours. Clients who foster strays on the
street, often a dozen cats or dogs at once, tend to succeed in supportive housing since
they are happiest when nesting, less inclined to seek adventure or abandon
their home for the arguably more exciting company of traphouses.
Compared to other hoarders, whose living rooms were a maze of newspapers, green-screen
computer monitors, and bicycle parts, the turtles were fairly benign.
It's easy to take a reductionist view in social work and assume that
all men who've lived on the street will get bored in their new homes, which, to
an extent is true, in the same way that newly graduated college students will
spend their first day home wondering what the hell to do with themselves now
that they're no longer churning out papers on Hobbes or wondering which
classmate has the lowest Erdos number. The smarter agencies realize
this and offer daily activities, classes, reading rooms, and movie nights to
fill the hours normally spent on basic survival, or hire case workers who can
really build trust with the clients on move-in day.
Which brings us to Boo. Boo lucked out when he signed the lease on his new
apartment, because the woman behind the desk happened to be an old high
school connection, the baby mama of his best friend's children.
She pulled out wallet photos and together they traced a timeline from when they
were 17, both starting with the same barriers (teen pregnancy, rough school,
no money anywhere even if you enlisted in the Army), with their trajectories
splitting in the 1990s, a career in NGOs for her and prison for
him.
Boo had been fidgety all morning, eager to sign and return to his crack dealer,
but the sight of a familiar face softened him, and when he finally sat down on
his own bed with his own linens, the reality that his long, dangerous trek
had ended in sanctuary rather than the morgue like so many other friends, hit
him all at once.
"You know how long it's been since I had my bed, that wasn't a prison bed?
2009." He closed his eyes and whispered thank you, thank you. Five
minutes later I drove him to a crackhouse.
The driving belief behind Harm Reduction isn't to make clients quit
drugs but that they are able to do it safely and pursue other life goals while
working on their addiction. Boo will likely live a double life the next
few years, getting high with his asshole buddies by day and returning thru the cat
flap to eat ramen and watch Murder, She Wrote at night, and that's
fine.
Over time he'll develop the bandwidth to take on long-term goals,
maybe find a job or play the bongos or raise tub turtles, but that kind of
personal growth is only possible when you're not freezing to death on the
sidewalk. We have to get to their level first. We can't expect them to become
good housemates unless we're willing to meet them at the crackhouse.