Homeless Family of 5 Lives on Hope, Memories

WASHINGTON â€”  Gladys Hill, weary and $300 short, ran to the rent office last April when a marshal showed up at her door with an eviction notice. While Hill frantically was telling the manager that she had paid part of the rent, workers began carting her belongings outside.

In less than 30 minutes, the Landover, Md., apartment was empty. Hill and her two daughters stood by and watched as strangers began to claim pieces of their household from the curb.

“I couldn’t fight them off,� said Hill. “They took the girls’ beds, the old raggedy curtains we had up at the window and they took the kids’ toys.�

Yolanda Green, 7, remembered that day in a rush of words that uncovered an old hurt. “They took my rocking chair and I told them to stop, ‘cause I wanted my rocking chair and that was my best toy,� Yolanda said. “Then they threw it down and it broke.�

The family’s eviction began a struggle that continues one year later. Hill, her fiance, Andre Green, and their children have lived for 10 months in one room at the Capitol City Inn, a hotel where the District of Columbia operates a shelter. The couple’s youngest child, 6-month-old Calvin, has spent his entire life in that room.

Cramped Living Quarters

Theirs is a life of cramped spaces and hidden dangers, of indignities and searching for a home. The family huddles bravely, two adults and three children for whom togetherness is a bulwark against homelessness.

Yolanda and her sister, 6-year-old Shalanda Green, keep old photographs of the way things were. During a week they spent with a reporter, they proudly showed off their pictures, giggling at how they had mugged for the camera with old friends and naming every relative who popped up in the holiday snapshots.

The girls slowed down when they reached the pictures showing them playing in their old yard. They stopped at a photo that proved they once had their own room.

Capitol City Inn, which has housed as many as 199 homeless families and 700 children, is the largest shelter in the capital’s system, a village unto itself in a city that houses 525 homeless families, among them 1,338 children, according to the most recent statistics.

Hill, 23, and Green, 27, tried for two months to find housing but were unable to do so on Green’s irregular income as an $8.25-an-hour roofer. They tried staying with Green’s father but then he, too, was evicted. At one point, the couple sent the daughters to live with a friend while they spent two nights on a park bench.

Five months pregnant and having pains, Hill abandoned the park bench for Howard University Hospital. Doctors there referred her to District officials and she and her family were placed at Capitol City.

“Every day when I wake up I have to boost myself up the minute my feet hit the floor,� Hill said. “We’re still looking like a family, but I have doubts every day that I’m not doing enough for my family.�

On a recent Friday afternoon, the door to the room stood open and a stack of boxes was in the middle of the floor. “I am doing spring cleaning just like I used to do,� said Hill, a sturdy woman with a pensive face.

She is a stickler for cleanliness. Daily, she borrows a vacuum cleaner for the worn brown carpet. She launders the towels and sheets on the same days each week. The children are reminded constantly to hang up their clothes and put away their toys.

Hill manages to keep things clean but she cannot transform the tattered old room into a home. The family longs for the simple pleasure of sitting in a chair. The only one in the room has a broken leg and the twin beds and floor are a poor substitute.

Though a year had passed, Hill had not given up on finding a place to live. The family had been on waiting lists for apartments for months, but Hill was sure that they would move soon into a three-bedroom house she had set her sights on. She was one of the first to apply for it.

The shortage of affordable housing and Green’s low income have stood in their way. Some landlords told Hill that a family of five would need $22,000 a year to qualify for a two-bedroom apartment.

Living as a Family

While they wait, the family struggles to hold onto the routines and everyday pleasures of home life without a home. “If we don’t keep that,� Hill said, “we have lost our family.�

Green catches a ride to work at 5:30 a.m. Hill takes the children to breakfast in the hotel cafeteria, walks the girls to the nearby elementary school, takes care of Calvin and checks on housing. In the evenings, the girls show Hill their class work as they stretch out on the floor.

On weekends, they imitate the rituals they enjoyed before their eviction. Green buys breakfast at McDonald’s for everyone on Saturdays.

In the role of provider, he admits that he sometimes feels very down. “I make my wages and (landlords) say I don’t make enough,� he said. Meanwhile, the social workers tell Hill another story.

“She goes to try for public assistance and they say I make too much,� he said. “We can’t get nothing going.�

In the parking lot that serves as a playground for shelter children, Yolanda and Shalanda were jumping rope.

Suddenly, three hotel security guards burst onto the scene, chasing a man who had been barred from the shelter. From the family’s doorway overlooking the lot, Hill called the two girls back to the room.

It is a standard drill for Hill and her children. At the shelter, such movements of security guards are a visible sign of the drug-trafficking, violence and alcoholism that flourish there.

Other dangers lie in wait. Traffic moves freely in and out of the lot, so it is not unusual to see small children in harm’s way. Youths climb on the balcony railings and up to the hotel roof.

Death, too, steals into the lives of young children there. Last month, 6-month-old George Waddell, who lived in a room above Yolanda’s, died of meningitis. The day before, a 2-month-old succumbed to pneumonia.

The infants’ deaths were not the first at the shelter. Three months before, two boys in wheelchairs, Dwayne Barnes, 8, and his brother Jerome, 4, were stabbed to death.

Yolanda remembered playing with the boys. She remembered how Stanley Simpson, their father, used to cut the other homeless boys’ hair for $1 “or nothing if you didn’t have money.� Yolanda still does not understand what Simpson meant. He reportedly told police that the pressures of trying to rear the boys without a home caused him to kill them.

Yolanda still engages in carefree childhood activities, such as singing along with television commercials and pretending that her Barbie doll is a famous fashion model. But at 7, she is already aware of the responsibilities that go with being the eldest child.

When her mother was sick recently, Yolanda made the bed, changed Calvin’s diaper and cleaned up the room. Before leaving on a city-sponsored trip to the circus, Yolanda asked for 50 cents in case something happened and she needed to call home.

School has become Yolanda’s joy. When she first arrived at Langdon Elementary, she told her second-grade teacher that she could not read. Now she is one of the best students in the class and is teaching her mother, who read at the sixth-grade level when she dropped out of school, how to spell.

Turned Down for House

While walking home from school recently with the girls, Hill slipped her hand into Yolanda’s. “I’ve got some bad news,� Hill said. “We didn’t get the house.� Green had been told the family’s credit was unsatisfactory.

Back in the room, Hill placed a call to a housing counselor. “I called you several times and you did not call me back and. . . . No, no, you listen!� Hill said, trying to control her anger. “We put down an application fee. I waited to hear from them and now they tell me I don’t have the house. How do I know they even considered it?�

Hanging up, Hill fought back tears.

“I had told the kids we would be moving soon,� she said. “Now, I have to retract what I said. It’s like I have failed my family again. . . . When I make a step forward, it’s like I’m taking a step back. This has to get better. It will get better. . . . I’m struggling, but I still got my family.�