Tracie Marcil lives in a two-bedroom apartment with her three school-age children. Her boys, Hunter, 11, and Dakota, 8, share a room with a bunk bed, and 15-year-old Rylee has her own room.
Marcil sleeps on the couch, but that’s OK because she’s rarely home. She works about 70 hours each week at two minimum-wage jobs, typically starting her day at Burger King in Delta Park and ending it at a Vancouver 7-Eleven.
“Everybody around here works a lot,” Marcil said, yawning as she talked. “I have to in order to keep our house.”
Staying in a small, $1,050-per-month apartment is not ideal, she said, but it’s better than staying in a garage.
Marcil and her kids were homeless for several months before landing at Parc Central Apartments about a month ago thanks to assistance from the Council for the Homeless’ Housing Relief Fund. Marcil got about $2,200 from the fund to cover the first month’s rent and deposit, and within a week the family had a home.
“We would’ve been in our car because I didn’t have any money or anything,” Marcil said. “The kids have stability and I can continue working. … It made my day, my year, my month.”
The Housing Relief Fund launched in the summer of 2015 after low-income tenants were given 20-day notices to vacate Courtyard Village Apartments. The complex has since been renovated and — ironically or not — is now where Marcil and her children live, Parc Central. The displacement of dozens of people highlighted the area’s lack of affordable housing and the benefits to helping people secure new rentals rather than enter the already-overwhelmed homeless system.
Courtyard Village residents had been paying rent and that boded well for their ability to rent again, so long as the Council for the Homeless could prevent or shorten their homelessness. The longer someone is homeless, the longer it takes them to get housed and the longer that trauma wears on them, said Andy Silver, the agency’s executive director.
About $215,000 in private money has been raised for the Housing Relief Fund. The fund is used to provide one-time emergency assistance that gets families into housing. Money mostly goes toward application fees and security deposits. Occasionally, people don’t need any financial assistance, they just need someone to talk to about untangling their situation.
Caroline Lopez with the Council for the Homeless spends her time working with these people. She said her clients could pay rent if only they could get into an affordable place. Not every family needs long-term, in-depth housing support.
“I will not become homeless again. I will never rely on a man again,” Marcil said. She said she ended a bad relationship and moved her children from Fruit Valley.
She’s confident despite her tight finances that she will not lose the apartment; moving is too expensive and her children are starting at new schools.
Diversion strategies
On average, households receive $1,853 to move them from homelessness to housing, which the Council for the Homeless considers a smart investment compared with the cost of homelessness. Checks are made out to the property management company, never directly to the family.
This kind of work is known in the homeless system as diversion.
“Another way of thinking of that is catching people really upstream in their crisis,” said Charlene Welch, the agency’s development and community relations director. “You’re diverting them from needing possibly emergency shelter, definitely long-term housing support.”
Although not widely used by homeless service providers, Seattle-based Building Changes believes the strategy has a lot of promise and could save agencies money long term. Building Changes granted the Council for the Homeless $232,008 over three years to go toward diversion work.
This is Building Changes’ first grant to the Council for the Homeless, though it’s supported other Clark County agencies serving the homeless, such as Share and Community Services Northwest.
“Clark County is seen as a very innovative county in terms of the homelessness emergency response system,” said Luanda Arai, who is in charge of statewide grant-making and capacity building. “It’s in a unique situation where (the county) is big enough for these problems to be significant. … But it’s small enough that there’s a real rallying around the cause.”
Building Changes gave similar-sized grants to Spokane County’s Catholic Charities, the Opportunity Council in Whatcom County and HopeSource, which covers Adams, Chelan, Douglas, Grant, Kittitas and Okanogan counties.
There isn’t a consistent version of what diversion work looks like, given that it’s new and has to be tailored to a specific community and situation, Arai said. She said the agency doesn’t expect everyone to be successfully diverted, but even if half of the people who participate are diverted away from homelessness, it saves higher-cost interventions for other more needy families.
Families are called upon to help themselves out of homelessness with a one-time financial boost. Lopez is tasked with helping households identify the strengths and resources they have.
As of last month, the Housing Relief Fund has helped re-house 272 people or 116 households. That includes 52 households with children whose homelessness was ended.
Nathan and Marina Brazille, both 24, were living in a car and at friends’ houses before they got help from the Council for the Homeless. Their savings dwindled as they applied to dozens of places, each with $50 to $100 application fees. Nathan has been on his own since he was 15, but Marina had never been homeless before.
“We were desperate. We could afford it if we could just get into one. Getting into one was the problem,” Marina said.
She used to work at Nordstrom at Vancouver Mall, which closed at the start of 2015. With just Nathan’s income from working at Toys R Us and occasional remodeling jobs, the couple weren’t able to afford rent. They had to break the lease on their old apartment and move out, which blemished their rental history.
Once homeless, they learned Marina was pregnant. A week later, Nathan got into a car crash that left him physically unable to work.
“It was a series of unfortunate events,” said Nathan, who now gets around using a cane.
Among his complex injuries, Nathan has no reflexes in his right arm (his dominant arm) and herniated discs that push on his sciatic nerve and pinch his shoulder. He’s been denied disability benefits twice, he said. Other housing assistance programs turned away the Brazilles, telling them they could help once Marina had the baby, or if the couple separated, or if they had physically slept on the streets and not in their car.
Once the Brazilles found a place to rent in west Vancouver, the Council for the Homeless had a $2,500 check ready the next day to pay the deposit.
Marina’s new job as a receptionist at a salon in downtown Vancouver sustains the family. Their daughter, Rose, was born two months ago. They plan to live in their two-bedroom, $795-per-month apartment for a long time until they can fulfill their dream of owning a home in the country.
Marcil, too, would someday like to have her own house, maybe with a backyard and two bathrooms. She knows she needs to move up in her career first.
“I want to have my own mansion,” her son, Dakota added.
“His dream is to have his own fishing boat,” Marcil said.
And why is that?
“When you don’t have money, you can always get food,” he said.
