Nowhere like home: A journey that began in desperation and a tent ends in a better place

Belinda and Marty Bonine now live in an apartment after years on the streets, thanks to a new approach to homelessness. It’s an improvement — but there are still struggles.

By Christopher Connelly, KERA NewsOctober 11, 2024 10:16 am, ,

From KERA News:

Belinda Bonine is still getting settled into the apartment she shares with her husband Marty and their dog Whiskers.

Standing in the kitchen, she pulls a box out of the friend and calls out to Marty, who’s in the bedroom.

“You want a French bread pizza?”

A couple months ago, it would’ve been impossible pop a frozen pizza in her oven — or sit on her couch to wait while it bakes. Belinda and Marty were living under a bridge in East Dallas. They’d been there for years, living in a tent.

“Even when it was pouring down rain on us, as long as we were together we were alright,” Belinda says. “I watched his back, he watched mine and Whiskers watched everybody.”

But a new approach to combating homelessness helped bring Belinda and Marty from a tent under a bridge — where they had no electricity, no running water, no safety or stability — to a furnished apartment with all the amenities.

Since 2021, the number of people who are homeless in Dallas has been dropping. It’s a major change after years of increases and amid a nationwide increase in people living on the street. And that’s the result of a shift in strategy based on a deceptively obvious principle: The solution to homelessness is a home.

Homelessness is miserable, Belinda says. It’s dehumanizing, and damaging. For both of them, it degraded their health. When she moved in, Belinda could barely walk — she weighed close to a hundred pounds.

“Before you wouldn’t ever come out of the tent because you didn’t want to see or something bad would happen and stuff, so I wouldn’t,” she says. “And I didn’t know that after a while you atrophy in your muscles. So I get around a lot better. Like I walk all the way to the train station almost daily.”

Now, Belinda and Marty are sleeping better, eating enough, and feeling more confident. They’re getting help from a caseworker to sign up for services like SNAP benefits

The biggest change: Spending time with her grandchildren.

“When I was homeless they didn’t even know I was homeless,” she says. “So I didn’t see my grandkids because you can’t [say], ‘Oh let’s go to grandma’s house under the bridge in the tent.’”

Going off a financial cliff

Belinda and Marty got married in 2009 — just months after they met at a friend’s party.

“Both of us had jobs when we got married, she says. “There were three cars. I had a wonderful job. He had a wonderful job.”

But things went downhill when Marty broke his back while working at a mechanic’s shop and couldn’t work anymore. Then Belinda got laid off from her job at the county.

Yfat Yossifor / KERA News

Hannah Sims with Housing Forward talks to Belinda and Marty Bonine through their tent in an encampment under an I-30 overpass in Dallas. The Bonines often stayed in their tent because of health issues as the decommissioning process ramped up.

“We had a home and all that stuff, but you know you can’t make mortgage payments when there’s just one salary,” she says. “First we lost the house, and gave up the two cars. We were living in the car with the dog.”

That was okay for a while, she says, until the car got impounded. They couldn’t afford to get it back.

“And then you’re at Walmart checking out ‘you can get a lovely home here for $35 dollars. Tents….And that’s what we did, walked into Walmart, bought a $35 house.”

That “$35 house” was a tent — their shelter under a Buckner Boulevard bridge.

This a common pattern — a financial shock or catastrophic health problem ultimately drives people to places they’d never imagined.

Belinda blames herself for some bad decisions, but says they didn’t really have any good options. She looked into subsidized housing programs but said the wait list seemed insurmountable.

“If you look under like Dallas Section 8 and stuff, they weren’t accepting any more applications…” she says. “And people were on that list for years and years and years!”

New strategies

The process that ultimately got Belinda and Marty and everyone else from under the bridge into apartments is new — and it’s a major strategic shift according to Sarah Kahn. She leads Housing Forward, the nonprofit that coordinates the homeless response system in Dallas and Collin counties.

Yfat Yossifor / KERA News

Belinda and Marty Bonnie sign their lease with the help of case worker Melissa Hilton.

“What we started doing is listening to what people told us they wanted and needed,” Kahn says. “And that thing is housing.”

A lot of people who become homeless can get back on their feet if they get a little help quickly. But folks who remain homeless for a long time, who end up sleeping on the streets or in encampments, who have or develop disabling conditions — they need more than just a little help, Kahn says.

“It’s housing and wrap-around services that ends homelessness,” she says.

This strategy has helped reduce unsheltered homelessness in the Dallas area by 24% since 2021. That’s a huge success after years of increases, Kahn says, but it doesn’t shut off the pipeline.

The shortage of affordable housing in Dallas is large and growing. It takes five people at Housing Forward to find landlords willing to take in tenants who’ve been living on the streets.

“Until we solve the affordable housing crisis, we’re not going to be able to prevent people from flowing into homelessness,” she says.

For Belinda and Marty, this apartment is a massive improvement. Belinda is waiting for her Social Security checks to start coming in — she wants to hit the thrift store.

“If you have a little money, you can do stuff like that,” Belinda says. “Even [with] the little bit of retirement I’ll get, we can go out to dinner and stuff. Whoa. Not go to the movies — who can afford that?”

She’d also like to go to Fair Park and check out all the museums.

No utopia

But there are problems Belinda and Marty worry about their safety at the new apartment complex and they’re too afraid to go out at night. Sometimes, they hear gunshots.

But moving to another apartment complex in a safer neighborhood isn’t a likely option. Finding apartments where people living on the streets can go is a constant struggle.

“I think the disheartening thing is that there are so few options,” says Robin Craddock, who manages caseworkers for The Stewpot, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the homeless. Craddock and others at The Stewpot work with Marty and Belinda and eight others who moved from under a bridge into these apartments.

Walking around the apartment complex in May, Craddock says clients there are worried about violence and drug dealing. Police are always being called.

And more apartments are boarded up than are occupied. Craddock points to unit after unit with windows covered up with plywood. “The whole property is like this.”

One resident says he built a gate around his patio because people were shooting up in his doorway. He asks not to be named, but says he’s packed up his apartment and is waiting for someone to help him move.

Down the way, an apartment is burned out — it was set on fire, Craddock was told — she doesn’t know the story. Another client from the East Dallas encampment was forced to flee his apartment after squatters forced their way in. It took days to find him again.

“They kicked the door completely — I mean, I’ve got pictures of it — completely off the hinges,” Craddock says.

Yfat Yossifor / KERA News

Marty Bonine lies down on an air mattress in his nearly empty Dallas apartment after moving in. The couple lived unsheltered under the I-30 bridge for 3 to 4 years before they received the voucher through the encampment decommissioning process.

This was back in May. Craddock says she stopped letting her case workers go alone to visit the 10 clients they had at this apartment complex. For months, she says the landlord refused to let their clients move out without paying thousands of dollars for breaking their leases.

“We’ve been blamed, they’re saying it’s our client’s fault, the state of the property,” she says — even though it looked no different on move-in day.

It took months of negotiations, but in late summer, Craddock says, The Stewpot, Housing Forward and the Dallas housing authority finally pressured the landlord into agreeing to Belinda and Marty and the others in their program move out.

Belinda says they want to move closer to family.

“Marty and I want to actually try to look for one for senior citizens because they have so many amenities,” Belinda says. “We’re not getting any younger, so if we could find a senior citizen one what would be great.”

If they can find a safe apartment closer to her son, Belinda says, she can spend a whole lot more time with her grandkids.

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