George Chandler, Dan McLeod and Terri Franco may be homeless, but they know how to keep a home.
They share a well-tended campsite in Tucson on the edge of the dry Santa Cruz River.
You wouldn’t know it’s there unless you looked carefully: It’s hidden beneath the thickly vegetated, low-hanging branches of a big tamarisk tree.
As I searched for them Tuesday morning — Franco having told me over the phone the site’s general vicinity — what clued me in was their dogs, emerging occasionally from the shadows of the tree to play and sniff.
But Franco had just left when I arrived — no electricity there for the phone to charge, so no appointments possible. Chandler and McLeod gave me the tour: Each one has a tent and a campfire site, and a common area is furnished with a discarded couch and chairs. They’ve removed previously dumped garbage and have rigged up their own bathing facilities and toilet sites.
These people are veterans of many homeless camps and living situations. With Franco at age 54, Chandler at 68 and McLeod at an amazing 77 years old, they know what they like and tolerate. They have lived together for years because they get along, lead simple lives and try to stay out of trouble.
“I call myself an urban camper,” Franco, the only woman in the group, told me. “I keep myself clean. I haul water out to the desert.”
They’re the sort of people — chronically homeless but basically functional — for whom we ought to have a solution. Other places, especially our neighbors to the north in Utah, have actually found ways to reduce chronic homelessness drastically.
The solution was surprisingly simple: Provide homes for the homeless.
When I asked Steve Berg, vice president of the National Coalition to End Homelessness, about solutions to homelessness, he pointed to Salt Lake City as a prime example among several cities addressing the problem.
“What these places have in common is a couple of things. One, there’s really a spirit of people working together and trying to solve the problem,” Berg said. “The other part is listening to homeless people about what they need in order not to be homeless anymore.”
Two of the approaches that have worked are known as “housing first” and “rapid rehousing.” The idea in both cases is to get homeless people into homes without trying to solve all the problems that made them homeless in the first place.
“Fix that problem, and a lot of other problems people are perfectly capable of taking care of on their own,” Berg said. “The problem of not having a place of their own makes everything else so difficult to deal with.”
In Utah, the state decided about nine years ago to take a new approach to chronic homelessness. Some advocates argued that simply providing homes would both save money and reduce homelessness. They started building apartments and other homes.
In 2006, they finished building their first 100 units, and now the state has more than 900. Residents are required to pay 30 percent of their income in rent.
“We think that we save money by doing it,” said Gordon Walker, the director of housing and community development for the state of Utah. “We continue to do exhaustive studies as to the cost. For us to house a chronically homeless individual costs about $12,000 a year. If we don’t house them, those same individuals cost us, as a society, $20,000. It’s cheaper to house them.”
Since the program began, the number of chronically homeless people in Utah has gone down by 74 percent, he said.
Franco, Chandler and McLeod, each of whom faced poverty and dysfunction and eventually fell into homelessness, get a certain amount of enjoyment from living outdoors — but they certainly would prefer a decent home with walls. McLeod has been struggling with shingles and finds it hard to sleep.
Troublemakers also regularly disturb their peace. Someone has been coming out into the river bottom at night and shooting, occasionally sending bullets through their tree. Another homeless man tried to squat at their site and injured Chandler with a rock before he could be shooed away.
“It’s getting to be old. It’s hard for me to keep going,” Chandler said.
For him, living on a $600 monthly Social Security payment, the key would be to find a place that accepts dogs. He adopted a beautiful German-shepherd-looking dog that was dumped in the river bottom almost a year ago. Chandler named him Solo.
“That dog gives me more enjoyment than anything in this world,” he said. “Every morning, without fail, he gets on my chest and nudges me till I get up. I love every minute of it.”
The four dogs, he said, “think they are one big family and they own three humans.”
All three of them prefer to avoid shelters. For McLeod, the explanation is simple. Years ago, he told me, he stayed in a shelter in Longview, Texas. When he got up in the morning, the man sleeping three mattresses down had had his throat cut during the night.
The three of them, of course, have talked over possible solutions. The problem with the cheap, available rooms is that too many neighbors tend to be druggies, drunks or prostitutes, Chandler said. The ideal for the three of them would probably be a mobile home where dogs are allowed.
This isn’t an expensive city like Boston or San Francisco. In Tucson, a decent trailer where dogs can live should not be an impossible dream for this trio of aging homeless friends who know how to keep a home.
