Blog
The Answer is 232.
The answer is 232. At least it is for Coleman. It’s the question I get every time I present at conferences about outreach: “How do you get people into housing who have been on the street for years, even decades, who just don’t want to go in?” I’ve been seeing Coleman every week for the [...]
His Eyes Said He Didn’t Believe Me: A Thanksgiving Blog
His sleepy eyes said he didn’t believe me. It was almost 1 a.m. and Lamar was lying on a piece of cardboard, with late night traffic speeding 20 feet above the light blanket that was covering his slight frame. The traffic noise, Lamar’s soft voice and my own hearing challenges necessitated Lamar patiently, but listlessly, [...]
NamUs
“What we got next?” Travers asks. It had been a long day and night as we scratched off a rather substantial list of abandoned buildings, musty underpasses and urine soaked doorways on our clipboard. We’re rubbing our tired eyes and cautiously monitoring the digital clock on the dashboard that’s progressing slowly past midnight. We were [...]
Mr. Michaels’ Water
In south Louisiana, we don’t worry too much about not having enough water. Too much water? Well that is many totally different stories for another day. But not having enough water? That thought rarely even crosses most New Orleanians’ minds… The overpasses and the oaks were dripping after the 30-minute afternoon cloudburst. The spray from [...]
The Roof with a Hole Carved out the Top
Every day I pass the intersection of Opelousas and Newton. There’s a roof there with a hole carved out the top, shingles tossed to the side. It’s where someone was pulled from the depth of their Katrina hell sequestered in a dark attic waiting for their liberation as the flood waters rose to take their [...]
Mr. Sullivan
I can personally verify Mr. Sullivan’s homelessness going back 13 years. When I first landed in The Crescent City I used to work at a bar on South Peters Street. It was in the Warehouse District before the area became an address or a destination; before the condos, boutique hotels and art galleries. Back in [...]
Hegira: A Flight to Escape Danger
Technically it’s not homeless; at least not tonight. Instead of steering our blue outreach van toward the abyss of vacant buildings and into the darkened neighborhoods of New Orleans, we head to the neon glow of the West Bank Expressway. Our guy has hollowed out a relatively comfortable, yet tenuous, routine here. As the first [...]
Sleep
It’s the most physically demanding, mentally challenging and exhausting kind of social work there is. While the greatest occupational hazards of a lot of my colleagues are the occasional paper cut or the draining hum of overhead florescent lighting, I managed to stab my foot with a rusty roofing nail last week. It was stupid. [...]
Fig and Eagle
I’ve got a headache. It all started with a conversation through the threadbare screen door of an abandoned house. A week ago myself and Clarence scampered over a chain-link fence, trail blazed through an overgrown side yard, pushed open a crumbling back door falling off the hinges, danced across rotted floorboards and illuminated the well-established [...]
Cold Wind
Two in the afternoon, 38 degrees and a blustery southern wind pushed Katy and I to play a little cleanup. A brutal winter by New Orleans standards forced the Abandoned Building team out of our normal routine of searching dilapidated houses and into the emergency freeze plan, temporarily halting our post-Katrina search and rescue. We [...]
