He Sits, He Waits, He Needs a Home
Dismissive Greetings and Dignified Policy
Michael pees his pants on my office steps.
I know this because I've watched it happen. Sixty-something years old, arthritic feet stuffed into crocs, sweatpants dark with urine, sitting behind the walker I bought him because moving hurts too much to make it worth finding a bathroom, not that there are any public ones nearby. The booze he hides in the walker's seat cushion doesn't help with mobility, but it helps with everything else…temporarily, at least.
He positions himself where he can see the Orioles game through the bar window next door. Smart angle. Good view. Terrible smell.
For months, I'd greet him dismissively on my way into the office. "Morning, Michael." What else was I supposed to say? He's a veteran. He'd earned the right to sit on public steps, even if those steps happened to be mine.
There are parts of the neighborhood that would like to see him evicted from my doorway. “A bad look for businesses,” they say. They are not wrong, but my email signature line reads, “Support your local everything,” and I don’t know where else to tell him to go even if I want him to sit elsewhere. Moving people around is only the mirage of solution, and he is always polite.
Here I was, this person who talks about dignity and policy all day, confused about what to do for the actual human being who needs both. How quickly I'd learned to make polite conversation while breathing through my mouth.
But something shifts when you stop treating someone like weather - just another condition you have to navigate around. I started bringing him sandwiches - power bars hurt his teeth. Not because I had some grand revelation, but because it seemed like the least I could do for someone camping outside my workplace, when I didn’t know what else to do.
"You been here long?" I asked one Thursday, sitting down next to him in the rain. “In Baltimore, I mean.”
He looked at me like he was trying to figure out my angle. Smart man.
"Long enough to see it change," he said.
Three months of sandwiches. Three months of eating them in the rain. Three months of learning he didn’t know where to go, and all I could do was rattle off the names of local shelters that a quick Google search produced. That he'd rather sit in his own waste than lose his spot watching the game because getting up and back down again with that walker is agony. That the bottle in his seat cushion is the only thing that makes his feet feel like something other than poorly oiled gears.
He would leave later, and again I would wash the steps.
Trust doesn't happen because you bring someone food. It builds in the spaces between Tuesday and Thursday, in the moment you stop seeing someone as a problem to be managed and start seeing them as a person who knows things you don't.
When Michael finally let me connect him with services, it wasn't because I'd done anything heroic. It was because I'd shown up enough times that he believed I might actually follow through.
He isn’t housed yet, but he goes elsewhere now to get help, and that’s a really big win. It’s a symptom of trusting that there is a community on his side. His life used to be as big and wide as my steps, and now he gets hot meals instead of sandwiches.
The average person cycles through homelessness eight times before finding something permanent.
Eight times.
That number should make you angry. Not at Michael, but at a system that moves people around instead of actually housing them. Because what we call "helping" is often just relocating the problem to someone else's steps.
Kindness is soft policy. Sandwiches and eye contact and learning someone's name - that's the foundation. But soft policy without hard policy is just charity that makes us feel better while changing nothing structurally.
Hard policy is Housing First programs that put people in apartments immediately, without requiring them to get sober first or prove they deserve shelter. Hard policy is rapid rehousing assistance that prevents people from cycling through the streets for years. Hard policy is coordinated entry systems that match people to appropriate services instead of making them navigate a maze of bureaucracy while sleeping outside.
Hard policy is funding mental health treatment and job training and case management - the wraparound services that address why someone ended up homeless in the first place. Hard policy is affordable housing development and rent stabilization so people don't lose their homes because housing costs more than they can earn.
We know what works. The research is clear. People first programs reduce homelessness more effectively than "treatment first" models, and they save money by reducing emergency room visits and jail stays. But knowing what works means nothing if we don't fund it.
We have a debt issue in this country. Not a money issue.
We have a priorities issue in this country. Not a resource issue.
We have an understanding issue in this country. Not an information issue.
Dignity isn't something we give people after they get their lives together. It's the foundation that makes getting their lives together possible.
Michael reminds me that both matter. The human connection and the housing policy. The eye contact and the systems change. The sandwich today and the vote next month.
We can't choose one and ignore the other.
Not if we actually want people to come inside.
Sincerely,
Taylor Patrice