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.