Homeless Families Find Gateway Out

Hattie Long turns toward the chain-link fence that separates her dream from reality.

On her side is a temporary shelter, the place where Long, her daughter, Dovie Meredith, and her four grandchildren live and hope to mend their broken plans. They left St. Louis for California in May to start over. They found only homelessness.

Beyond that fence, as Long stands and gazes, dusk settling over a hilltop, are the faintly twinkling lights of nearby houses. She knows that, if destiny dropped her family here, it can also deliver them across the road, into one of those fine homes on the hilltop.

Meredith says what her mother leaves unspoken: “It makes me feel determined. I can get over this fence and live on one of these hills.�

Until then, they’ll live on their strong spirit. That, and the ice cream cones Meredith buys her children to assuage their fears. They’ve never been without a home before. And they won’t be much longer if an unusual experiment to help the homeless works.

They live at Gateway Family Community, a square enclave of 15 small mobile homes on what, just a few months ago, was a dusty patch of earth beside the Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside.

City officials say Gateway is the only mobile-home shelter for homeless families in California. Even so, with a $200,000 federal grant, $300,000 from the city and so few units, Gateway can’t help most of Oceanside’s estimated 1,000 homeless.

(In downtown San Diego, a much larger facility for homeless families is run by St. Vincent de Paul, which provides 150 bed spaces in a dormitory-like shelter for families. The shelter offers medical care, job training, child care, educational and recreational programs.)

The Gateway community is determined to prove that families, especially those with grit and determination, can turn their lives around in about 30 days. That’s how long families can stay at Gateway, and, although a month’s extension might be granted, it’s still not much time.

The families chosen to live here possess some undefinable spark that convinces Gateway’s staff they’ve got the drive to make it back into the community. Back to normal lives of mowing the lawn, hanging out the sheets to dry, and tacking pictures on their own walls.

“I see the fire in some of their eyes,� said Ron Mazone, a Houston-born, ‘60s generation optimist who was a VISTA volunteer before becoming Gateway’s administrator.

Gateway, he said, with its individual units for families and specialized counseling, “is new and different.� The mobile homes have two bedrooms, a living room and kitchen, and are furnished with donated goods.

Mazone’s staff looks for families with the drive to succeed. Applicants are also screened by the Oceanside Police Department to make sure there’s no history of felony convictions, drug or alcohol problems, child or spousal abuse.

The first families, some virtually without possessions, gratefully moved into the mobile homes in May. A few have already found their way back into permanent housing. The others hope that day is near for them.

Mazone believes in his families and defends them from a stereotype that homeless are mostly winos and derelicts who have committed homelessness on themselves.

“You look at some of these families,� he said. “You think they’re ‘Leave It to Beaver’ families.�

Despite austere surroundings, the simple grassy play area and some recently planted trees, Gateway is like any other tiny neighborhood where the people are quite ordinary, except for one thing.

Somehow, the bottom fell out of their lives.

Dan Stout used to be a pastor in Arizona. Now, the strapping man with sandy hair, his wife of five years, Dennie, and their two daughters live in a little mobile home, where they talk without bitterness about the misfortune that brought them here.

“I never blamed God for it, or myself,� Stout said, choosing to regard the experience as a divine message. “God has shown me that security doesn’t lie in our circumstances. It’s with family.�

The problems started about four years ago, after the Stouts returned to North County from their stint in Arizona. Stout said he liked serving the Lord, and he expects to again some day. But the family needed money to raise the children, and he knew he’d make a fatter paycheck plying another of his skills, construction.

But, in 1986, soon after arriving in California, he ruptured disks in his spine, ending his days of strenuous physical work. Surgery to remove the damaged disks cost $22,000, and even though 80% was paid by insurance, it left the family broke.

The Stouts lived on welfare, with benefits totaling $500 a month. Their apartment alone cost $575 a month, and, after seven months, the kindly landlord who had carried the family asked the Stouts to leave.

They lived in another apartment four months, but lost that one, too. Then they house-sat for a friend, and, finally, lived temporarily in a motel room.

Then, nothing was left except Gateway, where, Stout said, “We’re resolved to the fact that, until finances come in or something dramatic happens, this is where we’ll have to be for a while.�

Daughters Sarah, 4, and Amanda, 20 months, seem oblivious to their parents’ struggle.

Sarah has climbed onto the family car, where she’s perched on all fours and is happily pounding away on the hood like a baby Gene Krupa.

Inside, while Mom and Dad talk, Amanda is getting crabby. She’s somehow mashed her face sideways into the carpet, hoisting her tiny bottom into the air.

Although Stout said he and his wife, both 36, look at this poverty as “a growing process,� there are moments when it’s hard to be circumspect.

“I’ve caught myself being embarrassed even with friends, telling them where I live. That makes me feel isolated,� he said.

Dennie adds, a bit less forgivingly: “That’s their problem.�

She finds no great privations at Gateway and described it as being “like any other neighborhood.�

Friendships are made as the children play together and parents meld into small social groups to share confidences, sorrows and hopes.

Gateway lends a quiet but conspicuous helping hand to the families, making sure they look right and feel right so they’ll be presentable as they seek jobs and permanent housing.

Dennie said a woman routinely visits to cut hair, and a doctor comes around in a van to drive anybody needing medical attention to a clinic in Vista. Gateway’s seven-person staff provides job counseling, helps families apply for welfare, teaches about good nutrition, health and how to draw up a household budget.

Right now, an adequate budget is still a fantasy to the Stouts.

Dan works full time as a security guard at a large industrial plant in San Marcos, earning about $7 an hour. He enjoys the job, but is looking for something that will pay a higher wage to support his family of four.

When that happens, the Stouts will get an apartment and continue where they left off.

“I just wanted to be a typical, happy nuclear family with a house and a stable job,� he said. “It’ll happen, I know it will.�

Two units away, Long and Meredith sit on the front steps, quietly watching the night descend, inventing plans to put some luster back on that California dream they had when they left St. Louis.

In a way, it is a typical story. Meredith’s marriage collapsed, so she packed up her mother, the four children, ages 7 to 14, and arrived by train in San Diego to start over.

She had done uniformed security work, but there was little demand here for a guard who didn’t own a car and couldn’t find public transportation to work odd-hour shifts.

The family came in May and entered Gateway in June. Meredith found a low-paying job to try to tide them over, but her mother, a widow in her ‘70s, became ill with a lung ailment.

“She was on a job, but I got sick and she took care of me, and they fired her,� said Long, who lived in California once before, back in World War II, when she helped build ships at Mare Island in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Each day, Meredith, 30, ventures out to find work or a place to live, but often returns to Gateway a little discouraged.

“When I go for a job, I say I stay at a temporary shelter. They look at homeless as bums. They don’t see people who are really struggling to get somewhere,� Meredith said.

Long knows her family has troubles, but her mirth and faith bring them a stability no money can buy.

“Oh, we’re not what you call downright suffering. It’s just that we’ve got to have money to get into a house,� she said. Her eyes scan the family’s borrowed mobile home, and she added, “It’s as good as being in a rich home, but I haven’t got a maid. Living is living.�

That’s hard to understand for Meredith’s children, who watch television, read and wonder what’s going to become of them.

“I’m probably just a little confused,� said 12-year-old Gregory. Some of Meredith’s kids want to go back to St. Louis, others want to stick it out in California, waiting for a break.

Long has opportunity of all kinds in mind and, as a visitor leaves, she buoyantly calls, “If you see a nice old man with a lot of money, send him over to me at the shelter.�

Bob and his wife, who live near the back of the enclave, count the days until they can rent an apartment and leave an experience Bob admits had defeated him for a while.

The couple’s streak of bad luck started in May when Bob took a job transfer that brought them and their child from Nevada to California. After nine years as a semi-trailer mechanic with the same company, his job went sour and a thief took almost all of their belongings from their truck.

They found themselves living in a motel room for $49 a night.

“It scared the hell out of me. I was starting to think crazy, I was so scared,� said Bob, who didn’t want to be identified by his last name because he’s already lost work when employers hear he lives at a shelter.

His wife is afraid she will lose her new clerical job in Del Mar if her boss finds out where she lives.

They entered Gateway at the end of May and are nearing the end of their allowed two-month stay. Between the clerical work and Bob’s landscaping jobs, the couple expects to move soon.

Bob said Gateway’s staff encouraged him, helping restore his lost self-esteem.

He said he has learned how frail and precarious the human condition is, and how judgmental people can be.

“Society is designed where anybody can be homeless, you’re only one paycheck away,� he said.