I know what happened to Iishea Stone: a luminous and extraordinary woman was failed repeatedly—by her family’s pathologies, by poverty, and by a social safety net that couldn’t seem to catch her. Had Iishea grown up with the advantages I had, she might have accomplished anything.

What Jumps Out?

• Juxtaposition
  • Assault by ex-boyfriend and his two friends / Honest error by trusted dealer
  • While panhandling, she usually reads a book a day
  • In prison, she added, “I became a welder, I became a metal fabricator, a cook, I got my G.E.D., and then I got with the older women and I listened. I knew they didn’t want nothing from me. I could sit down and actually be O.K. with listening, you know? And I learned. So when I came home I was a woman. And every bit of a phenomenal woman … Everyone will say you become pessimistic from being in prison. Nope. N-O. I found refuge.
• Housing First (Sam Tsemberis)
  • Providing housing without behavioral mandates
• Humor
  • Pregnant for like a year. It’s a big baby.
  • He doesn’t discuss his crimes, except to say that they went along with what he calls “the life style” of drugs and easy money, which always ends—he likes to quiz me on this—in either jail or death. (“Jenny on the block!” he’ll crow, when I get it right.)
  • Ever since Bill started following me around, I stopped making money,” she vented. “He’s trying to hug and kiss me. And I’m, like, ‘Dude, my sign says “Pregnant with an Abusive Husband”—they think that’s you and I’m still with you! Get away from me!
  • Common sense is not common, especially when it comes to hygiene. You gotta give ’em a extra push: ‘Get in the shower, the water free! Ain’t got no alligators, no sharks, and such.’
  • Let me see your place, man! No, I don’t do that. I tell him, ‘It look just like yours. You know when you walk in your door with your key? Imagine that, just with me in it.’
• Tough Moments
  • If you have to ask — “You promise you’re not going to leave me by myself?” — maybe you shouldn’t move with that person?
  • He became a father at forty-three; that daughter is now thirteen, living with her mother, and their second daughter is a year old. He wants to get his G.E.D. and become a veterinary assistant—he adores animals—but says that his Social Security card was stolen by terrorists during 9/11.”
• The scale of the problem:
  • 60,000 people applied to get into 90 sands
  • Point-in-time count
• What causes someone to experience homelessness?
  • Parents who had drug addictions?
  • An abusive step-father?
  • Divorce?
  • “Then their housing fell apart: they were supposed to move into a rental apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone, but the building was sold to new owners who rescinded the agreement—a development that seems to have crushed them.”
  • Confronting son about sexual identity → Stabbing → Family dissolves
• Are we doing too much or not enough?
  • “The van arrived at the appointed time, Cameron wasn’t there”
• A Life Before
  • “I had a life before this,” Ishea said once she’d rolled her wheelchair into a small office off the Kelly’s bustling hallway. “When I was homeless, I used to roll around the streets at night. I like being outside; I’m like a butterfly. There’s a peace of solitude. I was able to talk to God. If God spoke back, I was able to hear him—either a thought or an emotion, I was able to connect it to God. I roll the streets, like ‘Wheeeeeee!’ I own the streets—there are no cars.”
• Relationships
  • Abusive Stepfather
  • Nearly all the people I spoke with described a trail of failed or abandoned case-manager relationships preceding the successful one—like Jessica’s with Medley—that finally helped get them off the street and into housing
  • He’d had relationships with women simply to have a place to sleep, he told me. ‘I lost my home, my family’s broken down. It make me cry a lot,’ he said.
  • Son stabs father after being confronted about sexuality
  • Troy her sometime friend
• Research
  • 100’s of types of people who are homeless, but two patterns:
    • People who are homeless for short periods of time → Rapid Rehousing
    • People who are homeless for long periods of time → Permanent Supportive Housing
  • Disproves the notion the homeless individuals more to the west coast (it’s a lack of shelter beds)
• What Does Progress Look Like?
  • By the time she moved in, a few weeks later, she had reduced her daily heroin intake from two grams—or twenty-plus bags (“My tolerance is out of this world”)—to a quarter of a gram, which she divided into morning and evening injections.
  • When I was on the street, every day, every minute of my life, was idle time. I didn’t want to feel anything, so I used. I haven’t stopped, but I sure cut the hell down. At this point, it’s when I want to do it, not when I need to anymore.
  • At 90 Sands, ten people died in the first four months of 2023, eight of them from suspected overdoses.
  • Moved into 90 Sands. “My cousin said, ‘She told me she’s so proud of you.’ I was, like, I don’t know what for.”
  • By the time I saw Jessica two months later, in August, she was using again (albeit on a smaller scale) and had new wounds caused by xylazine-adulterated doses that she said she’d purchased from a dealer living in the building. Still, in the halting realm of opioid recovery a spell of sobriety is an accomplishment
• Judgement
  • We try not to leap too readily to evictions for behavior stuff. But some are just blowing that tolerance—or one in particular is blowing it—way out of the water.
• Advice
  • Don’t get the fuck-its!’ she told me, acknowledging her tendency to give up impulsively out of frustration and impatience.
  • ‘There’s a lady that was eighty-six that went back to school, and she got her diploma,’ he told me. ‘It’s never too late. Never.