Out of Room

Barbara Barbour Whittaker has managed to navigate a lifetime of job losses, drug addiction, broken families and even the tragic loss of her oldest daughter, Neisha, three years ago. But things really started to spiral in February of 2020 when she lost her job as a cook and then, in short order, her apartment in Church Hill.

Then the pandemic hit. A few months later, she and her husband, James, found themselves homeless. Alternating between motels and the front seat of their 2003 Lincoln Continental, they lived day to day. Sometimes they were able to get emergency help to pay for a motel room, other times they slept in her car. James, 61, suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and has days when he simply can’t get out of bed, much less work. Things got so bad that Barbara, who is also 61, had to give up her loyal black Lab of 10 years, Precious, and her 16-year-old tabby, Kat-Kat. The additional pet fees at the motel were too much. James “let them go,” Barbara says, but he refused to tell her where. Distraught, she spent weeks looking for them on the streets, to no avail.

A life of hard knocks, however, breeds resilience. Barbara managed to scrounge up $250 to enroll in patient care training, earning her certificate in April to work as an in-home, nonmedical senior caretaker. She now works 20-30 hours a week, bringing home just enough to pay rent at the Church Hill House on Burton Street, which offers affordable, subsidized housing for seniors and those with disabilities. Barbara and James moved into their one-room first-floor apartment in March.

Aside from the drug dealing and general mayhem along Burton and Venable streets — a few weeks ago, she and James awakened to the sounds of a man and woman having sex outside her window — she considers herself one of the lucky ones, save for the loss of her pride and joy, Precious. She still finds herself looking down alleys and around corners when driving to and from work, hoping to find her lost companion.

“I’m just hoping and praying somebody picked her up and is taking care of her,” she says, breaking into tears. “But other than that, I’m doing OK. It’s just been a struggle.”

After a decade of steady progress, Richmond’s homeless population is surging again. A lack of affordable housing and growing economic disparity have stretched local resources and safety net programs. The region’s growing senior population, many of whom live month to month on Social Security and fixed incomes that haven’t kept up with inflation, has been hit particularly hard. Coupled with the pandemic, when retail and service jobs dried up and government assistance was harder to access, many older adults who were already living on the margins were literally left out in the cold.

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Whittaker outside her apartment building in Church Hill

‘A Very Difficult Winter’

An infusion of federal funding and emergency eviction moratoriums over the past two years have helped, serving as a temporary stopgap. But now the money is running out, and the last of the eviction moratoriums put in place during the pandemic expired in June. With dwindling housing inventory driving up rents across the region — metro Richmond’s rental vacancy rate stood at 1.9% in the second quarter of this year, the lowest in the state, according to census data — local shelters are struggling to keep up.

“It’s going to be a very difficult winter,” says Kelly King Horne, executive director of the nonprofit Homeward, which coordinates homeless services in the region. After reaching a 10-year low of 497 people experiencing homelessness in 2019, according to data compiled by Homeward, the number jumped 68% to 834 in 2021. While the numbers dropped 16% to 697 people in 2022 (the data comes from the annual “point-in-time” count that takes place in January), much of the decrease can be attributed to increased federal funding for local shelters and emergency housing intended to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The number of older homeless adults, which the Greater Richmond Continuum of Care, Central Virginia’s umbrella organization for homeless services, identifies as those 55 and older, is increasing. Last year, 642 older adults stayed in area emergency shelters, according to Homeward, and the percentage of older adults served by regional homeless providers increased from 29% in 2018 to 36.7% in 2021.

“We did a lot of work as a community from 2007 to 2012,” Horne says of regional nonprofits, 14 to 15 of which work directly with Homeward on a weekly basis. “We created efficiencies, coordinated services — but we already realized those gains.”

During that period, Homeward and homeless service providers shifted priorities, putting more resources into helping people find permanent housing — assisting with lease applications, reading credit reports and reaching out to landlords. The idea was to get people housed first and then provide resources and job training to help keep them under a roof and off the streets.

Now, that permanent housing has largely disappeared. Local shelters managed by nonprofits such as CARITAS, which operates two emergency shelters, a 36-bed facility for men and a 28-bed facility for women, in addition to a 334-bed long-term facility for individuals recovering from substance abuse, are struggling to transition people into more stable housing.

The problem is particularly acute for seniors, many of whom have chronic physical or mental health issues and require supportive housing.

“Roughly close to 60% of our folks in the emergency shelter have a chronic health [or mental health] condition. Oftentimes, the emergency shelter, it’s not really a fit place for them to be,” says Karen O’Brien, chief operating officer at CARITAS. “They are not sick enough to be in the emergency room or the hospital. The assisted living, or nursing care facility, isn’t really ramped up to handle those intakes, or to be able to do it quickly, and then they end up on the street or the emergency shelter. There is this gap, this crater, that’s between the medical system and emergency shelter, and the participants suffer for that, unfortunately.”

Dr. Patricia Cook, chief medical officer at Daily Planet Health Services, which provides health care to the uninsured and people experiencing homelessness, has seen a 10% increase in the number of patients over age 65 during the first half of 2022, from Jan. 1 to July 1, compared to the same period a year ago.

“This year we’re seeing more people for chronic things,” Cook says, explaining that living outdoors can dramatically speed up the aging process. “Chronic pain from lying on concrete rather than lying in a bed. High blood pressure. It’s really hard to control diabetes if you can’t store insulin on the street. What we see in someone who is over 50 who has had uncontrolled, chronic illness and doesn’t have means for shelter — that person would have complications from that illness that we would see in someone who is 20 years older.”

Of late, Cook has also seen a growing number of men over 50, particularly day laborers, suffer from a physical injury that puts them out of work. She’s had cases where a patient was evicted while still in the hospital. For someone living paycheck to paycheck, a physical injury can quickly lead to mounting bills, eviction and homelessness.

“These are hardworking folks who suddenly are over the age of 50 and unable to do their job, and they suddenly find themselves on the street,” Cook says, “and that’s terrifying.”

Kenneth Decker is still searching for permanent housing.

From Shelter to Shelter

After his partner of 15 years died in May, Kenneth Decker found himself evicted with nowhere to go. He had quit his job as a gas station attendant at Sam’s Club in May 2021 to take care of his partner, Wes, who became homebound due to complications from diabetes. As Wes’ condition grew worse, he lost both legs and spent more than a year in the hospital; he also had intestinal cancer.

Without a steady income, Decker was able to stay afloat during the eviction moratorium with limited savings and income from a side job working as a “life model” for art students at Virginia Commonwealth University. When the moratorium expired, he was forced out of his $1,200-a-month apartment off West Broad Street.

“I managed to cover May’s rent,” he says, by depleting his savings and using a grant from a local nonprofit. “I was trying to find a job and put things together, but I just couldn’t make it.”

Decker, who also has diabetes and a bad knee, managed to snag a bed at the Daily Planet’s medical respite facility for a few weeks. In early August, he found his way to CARITAS’ emergency shelter for men on Dinwiddie Avenue.

At age 60, finding a new job won’t be easy, especially with a bum knee. But Decker, a longtime transgender rights advocate, is keeping up hope. He can stay at the CARITAS shelter for two months — federal funding typically requires emergency shelter beds turn over every 30-60 days — but after that he’s on his own. With help from CARITAS, he’s working on getting Social Security Disability coverage and is putting together a resume with the goal of finding a job in the arts, media relations or something related to social justice.

Despite all that he’s been through — in the late 1970s, he lost his first partner, who was beaten to death in Washington, D.C., barely a week after turning 17 — Decker has somehow avoided substance abuse. Not having any money, he jokes, has its perks.

“If I could afford it, I’d plow through a dozen Black Russians a night,” he says.

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Richmond Food Not Bombs delivers meals to the homeless population at Monroe Park in early August.

Searching for Answers

The region’s dearth of new housing inventory, which grew worse during the pandemic as remote work and historically low interest rates spurred demand, isn’t expected to abate anytime soon. The downward pressure has left more people in apartments for longer, which has driven up rents. Even facilities that accommodate housing vouchers and other government subsidies for low-income families are turning away renters.

“Even now they don’t have any availability because individuals who have steady income and have had to move out of their current placements because [rents] are too high are moving into the apartment complexes that we were actively working with,” says Jenn Patterson, director of emergency shelter at CARITAS. “Finding an apartment to rent is a jewel in the rough.”

Meanwhile, the city’s efforts to increase available shelter beds have yet to pan out. All of the emergency shelters that operate year-round (roughly 300 beds total) are run by nonprofits. With federal funding made available during the pandemic, the city implemented inclement weather and winter shelter programs at local hotels to add additional capacity, but those programs expired in April. A plan to expand Commonwealth Catholic Charities’ housing resource hub on Oliver Hill Way to include at least 75 winter shelter beds also fell apart earlier this summer. The city is now seeking bidders for a new winter shelter, or multiple shelters, with up to 150 beds that would operate from November to April using $3 million in funds from the American Rescue Plan Act and other sources.

Regardless of what happens to the proposed winter shelter, none of it matters much if those facilities don’t include case management workers and other wraparound services, says City Councilmember Stephanie Lynch, a social worker who’s become a vocal advocate for the homeless. The city’s previous winter shelter program didn’t include case management workers on-site, she says. For much of the last year, she’s been pushing for additional city funding for homeless services (Richmond typically spends between $500,000 and $1 million annually). Ultimately, Lynch envisions a permanent city shelter run by nonprofits, with accompanying services similar to those of the Housing Resource Center in Virginia Beach, a $25 million facility that opened in 2018. The Virginia Beach facility includes 89 temporary shelter beds and 29 permanent housing units, along with a health clinic, showers, laundry services, cafeteria and a multitude of services to help the homeless get back on their feet.

“I don’t know how to get people to care about this enough to invest the resources we need,” says Lynch, adding that it often comes down to location. It seems nobody wants a homeless shelter, especially a large-scale intake facility, to open in their neighborhood. And time is running out. While Homeward’s July point-in-time count, a supplement to the federally mandated January count, found 447 people experiencing homelessness, a 36% drop from the year before, it also found 204 individuals were unsheltered (living outdoors), the highest number ever recorded by the nonprofit. “We’ve got to stop playing human shuffleboard with the homeless population,” she says.

There are other options, including tiny home villages, which are popular in places such as California, which has long had the nation’s largest homeless population, but Richmond officials have struggled to find available land that is close to public transit and isn’t contaminated or located on a former landfill. Tiny houses (between 100-400 square feet) can be problematic for other reasons, especially if the villages don’t include on-site health and substance abuse services.

Cathy Ritter, a Midlothian woman who regularly delivered food and clothing to residents of the temporary tent city that popped up on Oliver Hill Way a couple of years ago, decided she had to do something after city officials shuttered the encampment in March of 2020. Known as “Camp Cathy” (it was named after Cathy Davis, the late co-founder of Blessing Warriors RVA, a nonprofit homeless services provider), the tent community regularly housed more than 100 people who were homeless. After the city shut it down, the residents scattered.

“It was devastating. I couldn’t get it off my mind,” Ritter says. “I thought, ‘Somebody’s got to do something about this.’ ”

An active volunteer at her church in Chesterfield, she started researching tiny home villages and landed on an organization in Missouri known as Eden Village, which offered programming and licensing akin to a franchise. She met with the proprietors over Zoom and reached an agreement in December 2021. Ritter’s daughter, who’s an attorney, helped her fill out the paperwork and gain nonprofit status earlier this year. A village consisting of up to 30 homes, each typically about 400 square feet, Ritter’s Eden Village will be gated with a community center, requiring tenants to pay $350 a month, Ritter says, including utilities.

She needs 3-5 acres to build the first one, but so far finding the property has been a challenge. “It’s hard to find that much land,” Ritter says, adding that she’s looked in surrounding counties and has been in contact with city officials. The first village is expected to cost roughly $4 million, which Ritter hopes to finance through grants and private fundraising.

“This is the missing piece of the puzzle,” she says. Still, it’s not a quick solution. If all goes according to plan, Ritter expects the first village to be completed by early 2025.

For Barbara Barbour Whittaker, things seem to be looking up. Her husband has felt better of late and has been able to pick up a few odd jobs, and she’s hoping to get more hours at her job. Her goal is to find a larger apartment in one of the city’s public housing complexes, but there’s a lengthy waiting list (in early August, there were 189 people ahead of her).

She dreams of the day when she can finally relax a bit and act like the grandmother she is.

“I’d love to have all five of my grandkids around me just kickin’ it,” she says. “Right now, I’m just living one day at a time.”