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  One day the minister’s message seemed explicitly written for her:

  You can sit in the pews or read the Bible all you want, but if you aren’t doing anything with your faith, what are you really doing?

  She knew the inner whisper she had been trying to ignore was telling her the one thing she needed to hear: you are going to be a minister.

  It had been more than a little inconvenient to listen. She had to completely disrupt the life she had planned and launch herself on a course she never anticipated. Now Louise was not only an ordained minister but also had been involved for years in community organizing in DC and New York. Through many social justice projects, Louise had become familiar with public housing organizations. While I still wasn’t sure if I had promised Denver bunk beds or buildings, Louise started telling me about national housing leaders I could contact for information.

  It seemed laughable, really. I couldn’t even believe we were talking about this. My expertise was typefaces, magazine ads, and brochures. Housing and homelessness were subjects I didn’t even understand well enough to ask the right questions.

  Louise knew where to start. “You should call Roseanne Haggerty with Common Ground in New York.”

  Haggerty grew up outside Hartford and was only seventeen when her father died, so she helped her mother take care of her seven younger siblings. In the 1980s, Roseanne Haggerty went to New York after graduating from Amherst College, and she volunteered at Covenant House—a homeless teens’ charity—on 43rd Street in Times Square. Each time she walked there, she would pass the homeless sleeping in doorways on the same block where a multistory building, the Times Square Hotel, stood vacant. It made no sense to her that this available shelter was going unused while on the same block people were homeless. Roseanne kept thinking someone should do something about that.

  One day she realized that someone might just be her.

  Roseanne launched Common Ground in 1990, and her organization became a leader in a program called “permanent supportive housing,” which combined the support services of counselors directly with housing units. It was at the forefront of a growing movement known as Housing First. The idea was that in order to end homelessness, organizations needed to shift the way people thought about helping.

  Instead of expecting homeless people to “earn” their housing by becoming sober, Housing First philosophy advocated for moving the homeless directly off the streets into apartments and then providing them with the counseling, medication, and addiction treatment they might need to succeed. By having counselors work in these same housing complexes with formerly homeless tenants, services were accessible and success more likely.

  Research showed this new approach was a game changer for ending homelessness. Men and women who had been homeless for years and were thought to be unreachable had dramatic improvements once they had consistent sleep, food, and medicine.

  Roseanne was an early pioneer when she convinced city, state, and federal funders to use low-income tax credits to finance the purchase and renovation of the Times Square Hotel—that same empty building she had passed so often. With her vision, the Times Square reopened in 1993, transformed into a state-of-the-art apartment building with 652 homes for homeless and low-income residents. It had on-site counseling services to help residents turn their lives around. It also had a garden roof deck, a computer lab, a library, and an art studio. These amenities weren’t luxuries; they were all part of a therapeutic and holistic approach to restoring someone’s health and dignity after years on the streets.

  Homeless residents moved in directly from the streets to a home, and case managers worked with the new tenants on mental health treatment, addictions, and disability payments. All tenants paid 30 percent of any income they earned as rent, cooked for themselves, and abided by a code of conduct. Residents could be evicted, but Common Ground understood the fact that these tenants literally had nowhere else to go. Second, third, and fourth chances were available to try to prevent someone from returning to the streets where they would most likely die.

  Above all, Roseanne and Common Ground believed in the right of every human being to have a place to call home.

  By 2007, when I was learning about Roseanne from Louise, Common Ground had already opened several more buildings, including another renovated hotel called the Prince George. Now considered a worldwide expert on permanent supportive housing, Roseanne and others were spreading the Housing First philosophy to cities across the country. They just hadn’t made it to Charlotte yet.

  When I finished reading every online article I could find, I was amazed. I couldn’t believe a proven solution existed. To my knowledge, Charlotte didn’t have any abandoned hotels, but there had to be a way to make this idea work. I started dreaming not about magical beds but Common Ground buildings. If I could just tour one of their buildings to see how it worked, it seemed possible to believe we could build one in Charlotte.

  Three weeks later on a snowy December afternoon, I stood in front of the Prince George in Manhattan on 27th between Madison and 5th Avenues. Charlie and I had already scheduled our annual New York City trip for his company’s Christmas party, so I decided to forgo holiday shopping for a Common Ground building tour. It was a stealth mission. No one at the UMC knew I was investigating these beds.

  I couldn’t have been more excited if I were heading to a Broadway show. What Common Ground had accomplished was better than a Christmas miracle—housing thousands of the hardest-to-help in only a decade.

  I hesitated in front of the doorway and triple-checked the address. It certainly did not look like a place for formerly homeless people. There was no outside evidence to suggest this building was any different from a standard apartment complex. Stepping inside was an even bigger surprise—it looked like a cross between a bank lobby and a hotel. Dark wood paneling provided the background to soft sofas on my right with turnstiles straight ahead. It all looked too clean, too well appointed to fit my stereotyped vision of what might be homeless housing.

  Beginning in the lobby, a Common Ground staff member took me through the multistory building, including individual apartments, a computer lab, an art studio, and music rooms.

  “You’d be surprised how many talented people we have moving in off the streets,” my tour guide said as we passed a music practice room with sounds of a saxophone coming through the door.

  On each floor we passed social workers’ offices. Tenants could be seen talking comfortably with counselors, and often it wasn’t obvious who was a staff member and who was a resident. In fact, throughout the entire building I didn’t see anyone who looked obviously formerly homeless. Up the hall a clean-shaven man in a striped shirt, jacket, and blue jeans was leaving his apartment. He carefully locked his door behind him and nodded cordially as he passed us on the way to the elevator.

  The realization hit me hard: once homeless people are housed, they’re just people.

  Homeless is an adjective that defines an extreme situation, not a human being’s character.

  Common Ground had found the way to change that circumstance and eliminate that stigmatizing adjective. The Prince George didn’t merely suggest a different way of looking at this population but demanded it.

  My guide had told me everyone pays rent, but I wasn’t sure how that was possible. “You say everyone who lives here now pays 30 percent of their income for rent, but if they’re mentally ill or disabled, how do they have income?”

  “That has been a problem,” she said with a nod. “Because of their physical and mental impairments, each tenant is eligible for disability income from the federal government, but most have never been able to complete the paperwork without the help of a case manager. That’s why Housing First works. To get off the streets, chronically homeless people need a lot of help, but that can best be done when they’re not starving and sleep-deprived on the streets.”

  When I returned to Charlotte, I could not stop thinking about what I had seen.

  Homelessness seemed
like a big, impossible problem, and I wasn’t even sure how many homeless people there were in Charlotte. Apparently it was no one’s job in Charlotte to build beds like Common Ground. And if it was no one’s job, was I really willing to make it mine?

  As crazy as it felt, it was already feeling crazier not to try.

  eleven

  MILLION-DOLLAR LARRY

  The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

  —C. S. Lewis1

  If I was really going to close my graphic-design business to work on housing the homeless, I was going to need to convince Dale of two things: add housing to the UMC mission statement and hire me to do it.

  As a board member and volunteer, I had worked with Dale enough to know he listened to new ideas. Months before, he had listened to my fledgling True Blessings plan. I hoped that success would give me credibility for this second pitch about my growing obsession to bring the Common Ground model to Charlotte.

  Unlike when I approached him for True Blessings with no real plan, this time I would be armed with facts from my visit to New York. I was ready to convince Dale that the UMC must begin housing.

  I was unaware he no longer needed convincing.

  While I was learning about Housing First in the Prince George lobby, another man named Moore, unrelated to Denver, was powerfully influencing Dale in a Charlotte living room because of a newspaper article.

  A few months before Ron and Denver came to town, the Charlotte Observer ran an editorial written by the UMC’s assistant director, Liz Clasen-Kelly. While Dale’s strength in leading the Urban Ministry Center came from his ministerial background, Liz’s skill was with data and public policy.

  Liz had been studying Housing First for over a year before I ever heard of it, and she had tried at least once to convince Dale to implement it at the UMC. His concerns were overwhelmingly financial. Pursuing housing would cost a lot more than running a soup kitchen, and the UMC was struggling some months just to make the bread budget.

  Liz did not give up. She had read a persuasive article in 2006 by Malcolm Gladwell called “Million-Dollar Murray.” Gladwell wrote that homelessness was easier to solve than just manage. As evidence he offered the true story of Murray Barr, a homeless veteran living in Reno, Nevada. Gladwell argued:

  If you toted up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets—as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors’ fees, and other expenses—Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada. It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray.

  That was what shocked Liz the most. Even after a million dollars spent on services like hospitals, drug treatment, even jail, Murray was still homeless. The system was not working for anyone, least of all the chronically homeless. The surprising fact Liz realized was this: it is less expensive to house chronically homeless people than let them die on the streets. That is how Liz decided to write her own op-ed piece for the Observer.

  In her essay Liz used the cost of a Charlotte jail cell ($110 per night), an ER visit ($1,029 average), and a hospital bed ($2,165 per night) to show a certain Charlotte homeless man incurred costs similar to Gladwell’s Million-Dollar Murray. In Charlotte, like other cities, the chronically homeless represented only 10–20 percent of the homeless population but consumed more than 50 percent of the resources dedicated to the homeless. Housing people like Million-Dollar Murray would free up the shelters to serve the 80 percent of the population that could transition out of homelessness with less intensive support.

  The Charlotte man whose life and costs Liz traced to make her argument for our city was Chilly Willy, whom I now knew as William Larry Major. Liz knew if the UMC could help Chilly Willy, we would change the conversation about homelessness in Charlotte.

  Liz’s article and argument were powerful and prompted Dale to think about the UMC’s mission. What if he could do more? What if they tried housing some people?

  Dale and Liz explored some preliminary costs, but they were daunting. After the article ran, Dale got a call from John and Pat Moore, local activists and philanthropists, asking for a meeting in their home. Although John and Pat shared the same last name as Denver, there was no connection between the families.

  “Liz’s article made a lot of sense to me,” John told Dale. “Someone should do something about it.”

  “I absolutely agree,” Dale said feeling a little uncomfortable and wondering where this conversation was going.

  “So why aren’t you?” John asked.

  Dale probably looked over his shoulder as I had done when Denver spoke to me.

  “Me?” Dale said.

  “Well, yes, you and the Urban Ministry Center. Isn’t that what you do? Help the homeless?” John said. “Seems like this housing idea is the best help you could give them.”

  “Well, that’s true, but it would be an expensive undertaking. And besides, we’re a soup kitchen, not a shelter,” Dale countered. “We weren’t really planning on getting into housing.”

  “But if you were going to do something, what would you do?” John asked, not giving up.

  “Um, I’m not sure,” Dale hedged. “I guess we’d start a pilot program?”

  “How much would that cost?” John probed.

  Dale took a wild guess. “Two hundred thousand dollars.”

  John looked at his wife, Pat, and she nodded. “All right,” John said. “We’ll fund it!”

  Dale was speechless. No one donor had ever given that much money to the Urban Ministry Center, much less for a program that didn’t even exist. With a promise of full funding, Dale had no excuse not to try Housing First.

  Dale and I sat across from each other in his office shaking our heads at the improbability of it all. We had each made a promise to a man named Moore to do something about housing the homeless.

  “It’s a God thing,” Dale said.

  He had certainly learned to accept this sort of divine occurrence, but I wasn’t convinced. I was merely willing to admit this remarkable coincidence was about to lead to a career change.

  “So we have two job openings right now,” Dale informed me. “The first one is in the development office, maintaining relationships with donors and coordinating event planning. We have a lot of follow-up after True Blessings, and I think we should make this an annual event.”

  I nodded. True Blessings was certainly worth repeating, but I wasn’t interested in taking up event planning as my profession. Maybe Dale wasn’t willing to take a chance on me for something as important as the housing project. “And the other one?”

  “Well, I need Liz to help run the Urban Ministry Center, so that means I need someone to start this pilot housing program,” he finished with a deadpan expression.

  “I want that job,” I said. We both smiled.

  The thought terrified me, but in my bones there was nothing I wanted more. I needed Dale to understand that I brought passion to this project but no actual experience.

  “You know I am definitely not qualified for this position, right?”

  Dale didn’t hesitate. “The good news for you is, neither is anyone else.”

  I spent the rest of the holidays winding down my graphic-design business. As I called my clients to explain my job change, I was giddy. It was thrilling to finally feel unstuck. I felt that my life was in motion again, and I was ecstatic to start doing something that truly mattered.

  My mom had given me a Thought for the Day calendar in my Christmas stocking. Thumbing through it, I laughed out loud when I saw this one on Day 218:

  Start some big, foolish project like Noah.

  —Rumi

  On January 11, 2008, I drove to the Urban Ministry Center for the first time not as a volunteer but as paid part-time staff. My official contract was for twenty hours a week, but Dale and I both understood I would be working much more than that.

&
nbsp; Liz greeted me on my first official morning with her ash-blond hair pulled back in a low ponytail. She wore blue jeans and a dazzling smile. Everything about Liz was welcoming. While I served soup to Neighbors and tried not to get involved in people’s lives, Liz was the opposite, opening her office door and heart to whomever entered. Although hundreds of men and women came to the UMC each day, like Dale, Liz knew almost everyone by name. More important, she quickly earned their trust and learned their personal stories of how they had become homeless. Her small office on the first floor was constantly filled with Neighbors, the bags they carried, and their stories.

  “I am so excited you are starting,” she gushed. “Can you imagine if we could get Ruth a home?”

  Standing barely five feet tall, Ruth’s tiny figure had a large presence at the center. She worked in the UMC job program keeping order as dozens showered each day. Ruth usually reported for work in an oversized T-shirt and baggy jeans after spending the night under the Sixth Street highway overpass bridge. With little sleep and in chronic pain from severe neuropathy in both legs, Ruth was surly to Neighbors who lined up at the counter waiting patiently for their turn to take a shower. When she wasn’t snapping orders, Ruth was slumped over the counter sleeping. Personally, I was terrified of Ruth. She had a way of narrowing her eyes when she looked my way that made me feel incredibly overprivileged.

  “Or what about Jay?” Liz asked. “If we could promise him a place off the streets, I bet he might consider a twenty-eight-day program.”

  That thought made me sweat. Ruth and Jay under my watch? Jay was the loud drunk who was always ranting in the parking lot. I could not imagine trying to deal with him every day. Whenever I saw him at the front door, I went to the back entrance of the UMC to avoid confrontation.

  “What about Samuel?” I asked. I needed to get some of the gentle guys under consideration. Samuel was the sweetheart with a smile.