A12 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, DECEMBER 25 , 2021
AMANDA VOISARD FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTtoo busy with HVAC-repair job
training to meet the people sent
from Pathways to bring his bed
and sofa. The room is empty, save
for an air mattress covered with a
brown blanket on the floor, al-
though he sleeps undisturbed in
his own home.
He marvels at the well-off resi-
dents outside who walk quickly,
warily, down 14th Street NW and
surrounding blocks in Columbia
Heights, looking over their shoul-
ders on their way to Target or
their fancy condo buildings. What
in the world are they so afraid of?
His lack of fear is an unexpect-
ed benefit of living a hard and
dangerous life, he thinks. He once
sold drugs in the city’s public
housing complexes, and spent
years hopped up on PCP, cocaine,
you name it. He fought in a gang,
partied unhoused for two decades
far from his native Largo, Md., on
the streets of Alabama, Georgia
and Florida, while working con-
struction jobs or not working at
all. He’s been stabbed and run
over by a car, whose driver then
backed up and rested a wheel
between his shoulder blades, he
says. He woke up in the hospital; a
scar now wriggles its way across
his bald scalp. As he describes it
all, he opens up, shuts down,
opens up. He feels much older
than 48.
He married and divorced a very
devout Christian woman, accept-
ed a higher power in 12-step
groups, but eventually he decided
those programs and Christianity
lack an edict of self-empower-
ment. “Where is the part where
you say, ‘I believe in me,’ ” he
wondered.
His beliefs are now purely
metaphysical. Energy returns to
its source; his mother, who died of
cancer in 2020, guides him from
the beyond.
After his girlfriend passed out
from drugs in Charlotte and he
barely managed to revive her, he
felt his mother’s spiritual pres-
ence with a jolt, he said. She had
long warned him that he would
die if he stayed with that woman.
“I quick crammed my clothes into
a gym bag, hopped in the van and
shot straight up” to D.C., he said.
Dove eventually landed on the
streets in the NoMa encampment.
After Pathways found him hous-
ing, he began relying on his own
power, including the construc-
tion and repair skills his father
and a mentor had taught him as a
boy and young man.
The day before, he had gradu-
ated from the job-training pro-
gram at Project Empowerment
and was chosen to give the
speech.
In his apartment, he sifts
through the contents of his closet
to show a visitor the dark blazer
and tie that he wore on the stage,
where he thundered affirmations
for his fellow graduates. “I got this
applause and I was like, ‘Wow,’ ”
he said. He tilts his chin up with
laughter in the dim light.‘I’m sad’
In the week before Christmas,
Johnson’s newfound stability be-
gins to quiver. His girlfriend’s
father died, and shortly after, an
old friend passed away, too. His
voice trembles on the phone with
a reporter.
“Miss Sydney,” he said, “I’m
sad.” He suffers from, among oth-
er things, bipolar disorder and
tried twice this year to kill himself
when he was living on the streets,
he said.
He is easily thrown off balance
and is trying to better manage his
emotions, he said. “You know
what a honey badger is? It’s a very
defensive animal. It goes up
against lions and everything. It
don’t back down for nothing.
That’s how I feel sometimes.”
To fill his days, he helps a
neighbor deliver goods for chari-
ties, works on preparing for his
GED exam through Khan Acad-
emy and goes with his girlfriend,
Natasha, and his pup, Popeye, by
bus to pick up her three children
from school. His early and brief
experience of love from a step-
mother and the genuine affection
he feels from the children keep
him going.
The apartment, too. As the sun
streamed through the window a
few days earlier, he felt strong.
He would try his best with the
little he had in his new home to
conjure Christmas magic for the
people he loves most. Two of
Natasha’s three children call him
“Dad.” He wants to be someone
who deserves that.
He planned to cook not one,
but three cakes in his own kitchen
— “a chocolate cake, a strawberry
cake and a marble cake” — to take
to Natasha’s mother’s house for
Christmas dessert.
On Christmas Eve, the kids
would spend the night at his
place. He hoped he could afford
something that would brighten
their faces in the morning.
He doesn’t believe in Christ-
mas, but he was home for the
holidays and glad of it.
[email protected]ty issues, and that providing
housing was the right thing to do.
The night before, advocates an-
nounced at an annual memorial
vigil that 69 homeless people died
in 2021 — 22 after receiving hous-
ing vouchers, like Johnson, that
would have allowed them to move
into homes. People who experi-
ence homelessness have an aver-
age life span of 50.
Even as he remembers — fond-
ly, painfully — some of his friends
on the street, Johnson said he’s
grateful to have survived long
enough to find a home. During an
interview, he lounges on his
brand-new green sofa before a
large open window glowing with
sunshine, the whoosh of traffic
from the nearby highway buff-
ered by a thicket of trees along the
dead-end street. On the small
deck in the back, Popeye, John-
son’s sandy Staffordshire terrier
service dog, playfully shakes a
fallen tree branch.
“I have my own place. No one
can tell me what to do,” said
Johnson, a tall, slim, tattooed
man with an emotive face. He
sometimes wakes up in the mid-
dle of the night and takes in his
new surroundings — the lack of
loud street noise, the warmth, the
solitude — and, he said, “I have to
pinch myself.”
Johnson’s indoor struggles,
however, have just begun. He
needs to finish a math course to
earn his GED, find a job despite a
felony record, stick to the medi-
cines for his mental health condi-
tions and weather the stresses
already coming his way. Yet hav-
ing a home has boosted his ambi-
tions “to be a better person,” he
said, starting with the holiday.
The challenge is the same for
everyone moving off the streets,
said Christy Respress, executive
director of Pathways to Housing
DC, the nonprofit group working
with the city to help find housing
for the people in the NoMa en-
campment and connect them
with services such as mental
health care, education and job
training.
“Housing ends homelessness,”
Respress said. “Then lots of other
hard work comes... the hard
work of connecting with family
and finding a career for some
people, reconnecting with faith
communities, addressing long-
standing mental health needs or
physical health or substance is-
sues. But housing gives you a safe
place to start to do those things.”
As of Thursday, 89 of the 111
people who had been living in the
three targeted encampments —
NoMa; New Jersey and O streets
NW; and E and 20th/21st streets
NW — have either been housed or
are working with nonprofit or-
ganizations to find places to live.
The rest have either so far refused
help or are no longer living there,
according to city government
data.
The 33 newly housed people
from the NoMa encampment in-
clude Christina Giles, 42, and Wil-
liam Dove, 48, who together with
Johnson demonstrate the hu-
manity behind homelessness and
the significance of a stable home.
‘That strong’
Giles camped for 2^1 / 2 years un-
der the Metro overpass at L Street
NE in a green tent, marked at one
point with a makeshift “window
box” composed of a small plastic
bonsai atop a concrete block.
The surrounding blocks had
been home during earlier times in
her life, first as a child growing up
in a sprawling house at K and
First streets NE, the daughter of a
stay-at-home mother and a father
who at first managed to hide his
alcoholism and opioid addiction
to earn a living as a master
plumber.
During the 1980s crack epi-
demic, Giles’s mother became
hooked on the drug and would
disappear for long stretches. Giles
herself became pregnant at 12
and went on to birth three more
children by the time she was 25.
She spent time in foster care and,
perpetually angry, ran away be-
fore turning 18.
At 22, she was convicted on
federal charges of possession of
more than five grams of cocaine,
she said. But she had already
begun the work to turn her life
around, and the judge, im-
pressed, granted time served and
gave her five years’ parole.
She labored long hours at cus-
tomer service and waitressing
jobs, often two gigs at once, to pay
market rent and keep her chil-
dren housed and fed. She volun-
teered at her son’s school, becom-
ing a parent leader in the Head
Start program and then a del-
egate in the national organiza-
tion. She earned a high school
diploma and took classes for two
years at Strayer University, before
lack of steady work and rising
D.C. rents began to shake her life.
On the cusp of 40, Giles left
what she described as an abusive
marriage to a truck driver in New
HOUSING FROM A
After years of being homeless, a place to call their own
AMANDA VOISARD FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTABOVE: Christina Giles in her
apartment in the District’s
NoMa neighborhood.RIGHT: Emmanuel Johnson
stands outside his one-bedroom
home in Southeast Washington.BELOW: Johnson spends time
with his girlfriend’s children.BOTTOM: William Dove
moved into his studio
apartment in Columbia Heights
just before Thanksgiving.morning sun. Small, spiky plants,
candles and the crystals and
rocks she uses for healing thera-
pies line the ledge. On a low,
brown table, a row of brightly
painted acrylic nails glistens; a
necklace of tiny white shells and
bright beads — her own creation
— rests on her throat. Everything
on display will be part of her new
creative venture. This is how she
plans to lift herself and others up.
But even in her new apartment
far above the streets, anxiety
seeps in. Despite assurances from
Pathways to Housing DC that it
plans to place everyone in a per-
manent home before the year is
up, Giles fears what next fall will
bring.‘I believe in me’
William Dove stands in the
neat white kitchen of his Colum-
bia Heights studio as the light
through the window behind him
begins to wane with the setting
sun.
He moved in just before
Thanksgiving, and with Christ-
mas now a week away, he’s beendays, she said, and when she
wasn’t dozing, she “sunbathed
like a cat” in a gray club chair
beside a wall-to-wall window in
her new kitchen.
On this day in mid-December,
the window offers a view of a
cityscape illuminated in the late-chose herself on North Capitol
Street NE — in the same NoMa
neighborhood where she lived as
a child and survived on the streets
as an adult. Two of her children
and six of her grandchildren live
nearby.
Giles slept a lot for the first 30Jersey and found herself back in
D.C. with nowhere to live. Her
mother had died, her father was
old and faltering, and her grown
children were also overwhelmed.
Sometimes she would rent a
room, “but if you pay under
$1,000, people treat you like
you’re living there for free.” The
landlords sexually harassed her,
verbally abused her and tried to
extort her to make up the differ-
ence, she said.
The threat to homeless women
was ever-present. Once in the
encampment, she witnessed a
man beating a transgender wom-
an with a golf club. She ran over
and wrested it away, she said. “I
didn’t know I was that strong.”
She connected her unhoused
neighbors with nonprofit work-
ers who would help them get
housing vouchers. And yet she
didn’t seem to meet the criteria
herself. She had no mental health,
substance abuse or gender issues,
she said, and her efforts on her
own behalf failed. Then the pilot
program began, and on Oct. 5 she
moved into a tiny apartment sheAMANDA VOISARD FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTSYDNEY TRENT/THE WASHINGTON POST