The Face of Unexpected Homelessness

By: Monique Henderson, Director of Development and Communications, AVLF

Even though it was twenty years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday. I was thirteen and had just started my freshman year of high school. School had only been in session for a few weeks, when I ran for, and won a seat on our class student council as a “Senator”. Like most 9th graders, I was nervous and anxious about starting a new school. My trepidation wasn’t just centered around this being a new venture, but how would a middle class girl like me fit in with all the kids from the other feeder middle schools, as well as the large majority of students who came from very wealthy households?. With nearly 1,500 students, my high school was twice as large as the middle school I had just graduated from. And I had heard all through 8th and 9th grade how wealthy the kids at this school were. The juniors and senior didn’t just have their own cars; they drove BMWs and Mercedes Benzs, and lived in sprawling homes with pools and tennis courts in their back yards!

However, despite my fears, I managed well. Six weeks into the school year, I was on the honor roll, had already joined the French Club, art club, swim team, and won a seat on the student council with some of the most popular kids in our school. I easily made a ton of new friends, loved my classes and was generally looking forward to this new endeavor called high school. Life was good!

The afternoon that I found out that I was elected a “Senator”, I couldn’t wait to get home so I could call my mom at work to share the good news. When the last bell of the day rang at 2:30, I made a bee-line to my bus. I was giddy with excitement and busting at the seams with joy the entire bus ride to our neighborhood. “Congratulations, Monique” my friends shouted as they exited the bus’ double doors as we arrived at their stops. “See you tomorrow!” When we finally arrived at my drop, I bounced out of my seat, made my way down the narrow aisle, burst through the doors of the bus, and began to run the two blocks through our subdivision to our three bedroom, two story home.

As I approached our house, I began to slow my pace. I squinted my eyes. It looked like someone was moving or having a yard sale; there were massive piles of furniture and clothes, and toys strewn on the lawn, curb, and sidewalk. But there was no one around. Why would someone decide to have a yard sale in the middle of the school day, I wondered?. I’m five houses away now. Something is wrong. My heart begins to race. While it’s still in the distance, the pile appears as if it’s right in front of our house. What in the world is going on? As I near the pile of things, I begin to recognize the white dresser and nightstand from my bedroom. Are we moving? Mom didn’t say anything about us moving, I think to myself. I stop in my tracks, confused by the sight. Other kids whirl past me on their way home from the bus stop. “Look at all that stuff,” one boy exclaims. “I think someone got evicted,” his friend answers as they walk past me. Evicted? What did that mean? I’d never heard that term before. I sprinted the short distance to the pile of things awaiting me on the sidewalk. My stomach was in knots, my heart was pounding, my head was throbbing from the intense Florida sun beaming down on me like the reality of the situation I was facing. I stood over the things. I knew then for certain that they belonged to us. My dolls, clothes, and bedroom furniture. Our couch, ottoman, dining room table and television sets. My mom’s bed, her shoes, and suits. My brother’s remote control trucks and little green army men were strewn all over the front lawn and sidewalk. Everything we owned was sitting in front of our house for public display. “Are ya’ll moving?” I heard a neighborhood kid ask me from behind. I wiped the tears that were welling up in my eyes. “Yes,” I lied without turning around. “Cause Shelly Rosen said ya’ll got evicted.” “No!” I said empathically. “I gotta go.” I made my way to the front door of our house and inserted my key into the doorknob. It would not turn. I wrestled with the key, shoving it in and out of the keyhole, praying it to unlock the door. No such luck. “I think ya’ll got evicted,” the girl said, still watching in awe from the sidewalk. “They probably changed the lock on ya’ll.” I wish she would shut-up. My mind is racing. I gotta call my mom. I head to a neighbor’s house four doors down and knock on the door. A middle age woman who sells candy to the neighborhood children comes to the door. “I’m locked out. Can I use your phone to call my mom?” I ask quietly. “Sure, you okay?” she inquires.

After reaching my mother at work, she rushes home. The next few hours are a whirlwind. Phone calls to a U-Haul facility to get a truck. Phone calls to my family in our native town of Washington, DC. Phone calls to my mother’s brother, our only relative in Florida who also lives just minutes away. Night falls and my brother, Michael, now home from middle school, and I take turns guarding our things on the sidewalk while my mom, still on the neighbor’s phone, reaches out to friends and family members to figure out our plan of action. We can already tell that some of our things are missing. Some of my mom’s jewelry, a VHS player, toys, and a new coat I just got for my birthday. Did the people who moved it out of the house take it? Or was it one of our neighbors? I don’t have the heart—or interest—in sharing the good news of my election to the student council with my family. It seems so insignificant now that my life seems to have been turned upside down. As I patrol the sidewalk, I think to myself what started out as the best day of my life, slowly begins to turn into the worst day of my life.

By 10pm that night, the majority of our household items were in a storage facility and we were checking into a motel. My brother and I, seeing my mom was distraught, didn’t have the heart to ask her how we ended up here, what happened. “We will probably be here a few days,” she tells us as we bunker down for the night. We don’t sleep that night. I feel nauseous and I want to cry, but I don’t want to upset my younger brother or my mother so I hold it in. The three of us spend the next nine days in this one room, dilapidated motel. We eat out for dinner every night because there is nowhere for my mom to cook. There are no school buses serving this motel, so my brother and I walk the 1 ½ miles to and from school each day for two weeks.

On our last day at the motel, my mom tells us that my uncle was able to get us in at an apartment near the beach. He has a friend that is the apartment manager and a unit just opened up. Michael and I were ecstatic! Not just because we were finally moving from this motel, but we would get our own rooms again…and we’d be near the beach. “That area is out of the district. Are we changing schools?” my brother asked my mother. “No, you’ll continue to go to the same school. I’m going to bring you to school in the morning and you will catch the city bus home in the afternoon. This is just a temporary move.” After getting the address and directions to the apartment from my uncle, we quickly pack our clothes and hop into the car.

As we near our new home, our excitement begins to fade. We soon realize the apartment, although near the beach, is in a seedy section of town. My brother and I sit bug -eyed in the back seat while we drive by police cars, ladies of the night, and men standing on the corner drinking liquor out of a paper bag. Having always lived in upper middle class neighborhoods, we were shocked to witness this side of life firsthand. The apartment itself is an old, one level, garden style brick building with glass doors and approximately seven units. We wait in the car as my mother retrieves our key from the apartment manager’s office. When she returns, we grab our suitcases and follow her tour new home. As she opens the door and we enter the unit, I’m shocked to see the apartment is only the size of a master bedroom. It’s an efficiency with a futon bed, a kitchenette, and an extremely small bathroom. I begin to cry hysterically. Where’s my bedroom? What is this place? My mother begins to explain that although we were not victims of abuse, this was a temporary shelter for women and their children who were fleeing domestic violence situations and that my uncle was friends with the woman who ran the apartments. She agreed to let us stay there for six months until we could move into our own place.

While some families face harsher realities, the next few months were very difficult for us. For the first three weeks, each night when we would go to sleep, we could hear the clawing of a rat scrambling around the small apartment. I was then, and am now, terrified of these pests. All I could think about was the horror movie I watched when I was 11 where the rats were eating people in London as they slept. I was certain this rat, which I had the unfortunate luck of seeing a few times as he scurried across the floor, was going to nibble my toes off during the night if I fell asleep. Needless to say, I was extremely sleep deprived for many a night. (Eventually, my brother found the hole that the rat was using to enter the apartment and we were able to seal it off.) During our second month at the apartment, the husband of another tenant who fled with their young daughter because of domestic violence, showed up with a rifle “to kill her”. Apparently, he tracked her down through family members who divulged her safe place location. On this particular afternoon, he shouted obscenities as he banged repeatedly on the front door of her unit with the weapon, threatening to break the door if she didn’t open up. Michael and I hid in the tiny bathroom of our unit until someone managed to call the police and he was arrested. I spent the next few months terrified that this man, or some random neighborhood person, would break the glass on our front door and kill us.

Back at school, my friends would constantly ask me if they could come over to our house to visit and hang out. It pained me to have to make up a million reasons as to why this was not a good day to have company over. I have swim practice after school, I would say. I have a project to work on. I’m going out of town to visit family. I’m going over another friend’s house. I never shared with any of them, not even my best friend of three years, the sad truth of where we were living. How could kids who had pools in their back yards, drove Mercedes Benz, ate lunch off campus every day understand what my family was going through…if I couldn’t understand it myself!

Shortly after Christmas my mother announced that we were moving back to the other side of town. I learned to hold my optimism and excitement until I knew exactly what situation we were moving into. As it turns out, by picking up two extra jobs while we were living at the safe house, she was able to save up enough money to get a condo a half mile away from my high school. We lived there for the next two years until my mother purchased a newly built ranch style home a few miles away.

A year later, as I was packing for college, I finally found out the details that led my family to become homeless overnight. My mother was renting the home we lived in from a gentleman who ended up having the property foreclosed on him. The bank, not knowing, and probably not caring, that we were renting the house, had our things removed from the property and the locks changed. Unfortunately, there was no Protecting Tenantsat Foreclosure Act (PTFA) back then to look after the rights of tenants like our family. Likewise, my mother, although college educated, was not savvy in the law and had no idea of her rights, if any, under Florida law. Nor was she aware of any organizations like AVLF that advocated on behalf of those families facing eviction, foreclosure, or landlord-tenant disputes.

I share this deeply personal story for two reasons. First, I think it’s important to humanize the statistics and stories you hear on the news of families being evicted from their home. Every Tuesday and Thursday at Fulton County Magistrate Court, as many as 300 families face the same uncertain future my family faced twenty years ago in Florida. Not all of them are guilty of not having paid their rent. Many of them have been illegally evicted or have outstanding landlord-tenant disputes, but just aren’t aware of their rights and may be unable to accurately articulate their case during mediation or before a judge. And, before they know it, they’ve been handed an Order to evacuate their homes within seven days. Last Tuesday I observed a dispossessory calendar at the Fulton County Courthouse. Hundreds of tenants, mostly women, many with small children in tow, were waiting to have their chance before the Judge. “I lost my job,” one would say. “They didn’t fix the heat,” another would say. Despite their pleadings, the majority were eventually told they would have to move out of their home just a few days before Christmas. I was saddened and overwhelmed as I looked into the eyes of these families.

Second, while my family’s bout with homelessness and our stay in the shelter was but one short chapter in my life, it left a profound impact on me and has a lot to do with who I am today, and why I’ve chosen this career tract. I’ve worked for nonprofit organizations for fifteen years; I value and have a deep appreciation for the work organizations such as AVLF do in the community. This year alone, more than thirty pro bono lawyers in our eviction defense program worked to protect Fulton County tenants facing imminent eviction from their homes. As a Development and Communications Manager, I also understand how much we rely on contributions from our constituents and stakeholders. Without volunteer attorneys and the donations of time and money we receive from these pro bono heroes and the firms and departments in which we work, we are compromised in our ability to protect those who face immiment eviction from their homes. The emotional shock of the world turning upside down in an afternoon is not unique to me, and we hope that you will volunteer your time, and make a donation to the Foundation, and in so doing help the next child avoid the trauma of losing her home.