Time to Leave, But Nowhere to Go

(This is the final story of a three-part series.)

One way or another, Sarah Fay’s life will soon change.

In early November, her 82-year-old grandmother, Pat Fowler, announced that she will sell the house that she bought in the mid-1960s and that she is moving to Riverside County. 

Grandma Pat decided it was time to leave the home where she and her first husband raised three kids, including Sarah’s mom, Karon, and where she later spent 40 years after marrying the love of her life, Matt Fowler. “I’ve had good memories here and I’ve had a lot of sad memories,” she says.

Deep into their golden years — Matt was 84 and struggling with health problems — Pat decided they should move to the city of Corona in search of a simpler and more financially sustainable place before it was too late.“For the first time in my life,” she explains in mid-November, “I need to do something for my husband and myself.” 

But when it comes to her daughter and granddaughter, Pat adds, “I feel bad, and I’m stressed because of her situation.”

Sarah, 28, is attached to the modest Southern California ranch-style home a stone’s throw from a hectic 12-lane freeway. It is the closest thing she has had to stable housing — even if she usually sleeps in the cluttered garage near her ailing 64-year-old mother, while passing other nights in her car, a tent or motel and hotel rooms she cannot afford.

Sarah organizes belongings in her grandmother’s garage.

Pat’s decision to sell the house and start a new life 60 miles east means that Sarah and her mother Karon will need to leave their grandma’s house in Culver City by the end of January.

Sarah and her mother are both struggling with the prospect of change. Sitting on the couch in the garage, Karon said through tears that she is considering moving into her car and parking out front. That way, she can be close to the memories of her son, who died by suicide in the same spot, where he had lived in a camper.

Sarah can’t seem to decide what to do. But she says that the deadline for permanently leaving her grandma’s house triggers difficult childhood memories. “When we would get taken away to the foster care homes and all that, I remember the social workers would come into the trailer. They would say, ‘All right, get your stuff and let’s go. You can only [take] one plastic bag of stuff and that’s it,’” Sarah says.

As a result of such a past, Sarah hopes to take family mementos with her for the day when she has her own place. That may not be very practical given that Sarah has spent years unable to find an apartment. Even with the Rapid Rehousing subsidies she qualified for, she said she couldn’t find a landlord willing to rent to her. With her gross salary of about $4,000 per month, she has no idea if or when she can afford to rent a place to live within commuting distance of her job.

Losing Support

Prior to Grandma Pat’s announcement, Sarah’s housing situation had already taken on new urgency. In June, Sarah’s case manager at the St. Joseph Center, a homelessness nonprofit in Venice, told her that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority was making changes to its criteria for who qualifies for the subsidies for which she had been eligible. Those vouchers would have paid a percentage of rent for up to 24 months — if she had been able to find a home at a suitable rent level.

Sarah visits with her grandfather, Matt Fowler, at the Beechwood Post-Acute and Rehab nursing home on Dec. 7.

Sarah spent three years trying — and failing — to land an apartment that satisfied the rehousing program’s requirements, but the landlords she contacted all preferred to rent their units to people who earned more than her, or who had people to co-sign their leases. With such tenants, landlords don’t have to deal with housing vouchers and other bureaucratic hurdles associated with a low-income tenant.

Ned Resnikoff, policy director for California YIMBY and the author of a new report on homelessness, says, “There will always be landlords out there who will see a group of voucher holders and then see a longer line of [higher income] tenants around the block who are desperate for housing. There will always be the incentive to discriminate.”

At the beginning of the summer, a case manager got in touch to tell Sarah that she had just three more months to secure an apartment — or she would no longer qualify for the housing subsidy. 

The only way to access the rent subsidy would have been for her to accept transitional housing — group shelters that offer little to no privacy or Project Roomkey, which opened hotel rooms to the unhoused. Sarah said she declined such interim housing because of traumatic memories from her experiences in foster care and group homes, which left her with a kind of phobia for living with strangers. For similar reasons, getting a place with roommates has also been out of the question for her. 

Unable to find an apartment in the three-month time window, Sarah saw her access to a subsidy expire. Around that time, she switched to a new job that pays about $2 per hour more than her previous one, which meant she earned slightly above the maximum allowed by the program. 

After searching for three years for an apartment that would fit the “rapid rehousing” program, she remains where she began: unhoused.

Sarah dreams of finding a two-bedroom place for her mother and her in Los Angeles that she can afford. But with her $4,000 monthly gross income and her mother’s $1,000 disability checks she found that to be impossible. There are few studio apartments available in her price range.

The median rent for one-bedroom apartments in L.A. County climbed 11% in 2022 from the prior year, according to the apartment search site Zumper. High inflation is hurting Los Angeles County renters, most of whom spend more than 30% of their income on housing. “It’s not just that housing costs have skyrocketed; incomes have stayed flat while costs have skyrocketed,” Resnikoff says.

His report notes that the combination of higher costs and insufficient incomes is the primary reason why Californians fall into homelessness — even if other factors contribute on an individual level.

Grandma’s House

Pat’s “single-family residence” has long been a sort of north star for two generations of her descendants, who have gravitated around it throughout their lives.

It is a place where tensions sometimes surge, especially when it comes to money; but when guests arrive in mid-November, the interactions appear more tender. Pat stands watch over her husband Matt in the kitchen to make sure that he eats his bowl of cereal and sliced bananas. 

Matt is friendly and witty, but suffers from dementia. Days before Thanksgiving, when Matt is asked if he is excited about the approach of the holiday, he becomes oddly perplexed. He responds by insisting that the holiday has already passed. Told that the date is Nov. 18, he rises from his seat to look at a calendar on the kitchen wall, where he confirms that Thanksgiving is indeed almost a week off. He chuckles to himself. 

Two weeks later, Grandpa Matt fell down and hurt himself. Later, while recovering in a physical rehab facility, he caught COVID-19. “When we got to the hospital they had him hooked up to keep him alive,” Pat explains, her voice trembling.

Matt contracted COVID while at the nursing facility.

In the second week of December, Pat, who had recently gotten over COVID-19 herself, was preparing a room in the house in which her husband could safely recuperate. 

But Matt, who was a heavy smoker with weak lungs, died on Dec. 10. “We didn’t get to say goodbye,” his wife of four decades says, tearfully. “He was already gone.”

Becoming Housed?

Pat decided to move to Riverside partly because it seemed as though it would be easier to care for her husband there. His death might have changed those plans, except that she was already in escrow on a house in Corona and preparing to put the home in Culver City on the market. 

Besides, she explains, she lost her husband, brother and grandson this year, and “I’m sick of this house.” 

With a storage container stationed in front of the house, she has turned her attention intently toward the move.

“I’m trying to get everything cleaned out in the next three to four weeks,” Pat says days before Christmas. “Sarah is not happy, and my daughter is not happy, but it’s something I wanted for Matt and I, and it’s already a done deal. I would like a little happiness for the years I have left. I just want to be out of here.”

Pat thinks that Karon and Sarah should move to Riverside with her. “I don’t expect for them to understand it, and I feel bad because I know [Sarah] doesn’t want to go out there, but with no money, what choice does she have?”

A relative has sent Sarah listings for shelters. Research from the nonprofit Rand Corporation indicates that fewer than a third of people without a permanent place to live are willing to spend time sleeping in such centers, and Sarah insists she is one of them. “I’m not going to a shelter,” she says.

Moving to Riverside would likely provide housing stability for Sarah, but she doesn’t necessarily see it that way given that she would likely have to quit her job and at least temporarily become more dependent on her family. She would also be far from friends and other loved ones, and the community in which she has spent nearly her entire life.

Sarah watches a Christmas home movie from the late 1990s showing herself as a baby with her grandfather.

Sarah could move into her car full time. She’s already become accustomed to parking on quiet residential streets, away from prying eyes, and reclining the driver’s seat of her black 2018 Ford SUV in order to sleep. (When she does, the backseat and the trunk are usually filled with her clothes and other possessions.) It would be crowded if she takes along Titan, her pitbull and Australian Cattle Dog mix, as she has done in the past.

Moving into her car would eliminate the need to pay rent so she could continue to occasionally escape to hotels and motels, but the high cost of rooms would likely add to her credit card debt and continue to hurt her credit score, making it even harder to rent an apartment.

The Perception Problem

Sarah knows what many people think of her decision-making. Last summer, she created a post on the neighborhood app Nextdoor about her housing situation. The platform advertises itself as a place where neighbors can get trusted information, or give and get help. Sarah got some sympathy, but also plenty of judgment and insults.

Sarah asked people to read her post with an open mind. She wrote that housing, like free speech, should be something to which people have universal access. She explained that few landlords able to charge top-dollar rents are open to taking a chance on someone like her even though she had a full-time job at the time as a campus peer navigator at a nonprofit helping unhoused youth. She explained that her 504 credit score and inability to earn three times the market-rate rents, which is what many landlords require, shut her out.

Her post sparked nearly 300 comments, including plenty of advice for Sarah. Some said she should quit working in the homelessness sector and move in with her grandparents. Neighbors accused her of bad time-management skills, and wondered why she couldn’t get a second job so she could afford to rent a simple place. One person said people should refrain from giving Sarah sympathy that might reward her poor life decisions. Another commenter called her “entitled.” 

Some said that people like Sarah were a “minority” among the unhoused. To many neighbors commenting, most “homeless” people act out by screaming, urinating and defecating in view, or leaving used needles in public. They wrote that Sarah wasn’t really “homeless” because she wasn’t one of those people.

California YIMBY’s Resnikoff said those stereotypes are misinformed. He notes that Sarah is clearly part of a majority when it comes to housing insecurity. “The people who are living in encampments are easy to count, but there’s a much broader slice of the population that is housing insecure,” says Resnikoff. 

He notes that there is no definitive calculation of their numbers. But what experts do know is that the population of people living on the streets may continue to grow until dramatic advances are made. Los Angeles is failing to generate enough affordable housing and too many people earn too little income to afford to rent. “So long as you have a housing shortage,” says Resnikoff, “you’re really playing whack a mole.”

Voters in Los Angeles decided in November to create a roughly $900 million annual stream of income aimed at reducing homelessness by making housing more affordable, as well as protecting low-income seniors who are at risk of losing their homes. Measure ULA will generate funds from tax increases on the sale of homes and business properties valued at more than $5 million.

Sarah Fay watches a home movie from the late 1990’s with her grandmother, Pat Fowler. Sarah’s ‘grandpa’ Matt Fowler died recently and watching these home movies brought them to tears and laughter.

“We need more public housing,” says Molly Rysman, chief programs officer for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. “We need social housing. To assume the private market can serve everybody is not realistic based on the discrepancy in our economy between what people earn and what rents cost. The private market can’t serve a huge chunk of people now.”

In contrast to European countries with affordable housing in nearly every neighborhood, Rysman adds, “This is a uniquely American thing.”

She notes that when she does outreach to unhoused people in various parts of the city, she often comes across people like Sarah who have deep ties to the neighborhoods they grew up in — even when they can no longer afford to live in them. 

The solution, Rysman says, is “to publicly start controlling property to make sure there is access in every neighborhood.”

Pat notes that her granddaughter’s income goes to things like car payments and insurance, leaving her far too little for rent. “I don’t know what she’s going to do,” the grandmother adds.

Between long-standing family tensions, a year that brought Sarah so much loss — her brother, grandfather and great-uncle — and stress over Grandma Pat’s move in five weeks, Sarah says that she and her mother are in a bad place. “The honest truth is: I really don’t know what we’re going to do.” 

She fears losing a local support system of friends if she moves away, and her coping mechanisms, like the motel stays when she needs a break from her family or work pressures. 

It all adds to her concerns for her mental health if she goes with her grandma and mother. “I feel like throwing my hands up and saying [forget] everything,” she says. “It’s difficult to steer away from those thoughts…. Everything has been such a struggle.” 

“My grandpa [dying] was just so unexpected. It’s just so weird,” Sarah says, beginning to weep. “It’s so weird without him in the house.” 

And as the clock ticks on her grandma’s move, Sarah still has no clear roadmap home.

All Photos by Barbara Davidson
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