This story is the second of three looking at Rock Hill's Rapid Rehousing Program.
Thomas Cunningham has no intention of losing his new home, even if he knows he can’t stay forever.
A minor miscommunication had panicked him, and he feared he might be asked to leave. Chasy Hunter assured him all was good. But she remembers him calling her and saying he’d do whatever it would take to stay, because he was “not losing this house.”
Hunter is the outreach coordinator for CACH, the Catawba Area Coalition for the Homeless, in Rock Hill. Her job is to guide people like Cunningham through the city’s Rapid Rehousing Program (RRHP).
Put another way:
“I am creating that soft handoff between the unsheltered person to the housing navigator,” she said. [“I’m] also creating those good, quality relationships with potential landlords.”
Put yet another way, Hunter’s job is to reduce barriers for people who are ready to exit homelessness.
That wording is important – ready to exit homelessness. Not everyone is. Many people who live unsheltered have jobs and know where to find temporary shelter, like in a motel. But also may not know how to navigate the process of getting an apartment or setting up a bank account.
Part of RRHP is, through navigators, teaching vulnerable people how to be ready for a life of regular bills and credit scores and relationships with landlords. Clients in the program need to be able to demonstrate a steady income or the ability to pay through a year of being housed.
See Part 1 of this series for more on how RRHP works over a full year.
Thomas Cunningham fit all the criteria needed to enter RRHP. He was partnered with four other adults, each of whom rents a room in a multifamily house in Rock Hill’s Southside neighborhood.
I met four of the five – one gentleman chose to not be part of this story – in their shared kitchen on a hot and sunny August afternoon. All four – Cunningham, Gerald and Scarlett Adams, and Roger Boone – have been living together since March. All four take living here very seriously, because they are all fresh from a lot worse.
Gerald Adams, who’d lived on the streets for about 18 months, receives kidney dialysis. Scarlett, his wife since February, is nagged by breast cancer treatments that depleted her money. Boone, who spent two years in and out of hospitals and shelters, is recovering from a stroke. Cunningham was lost in the city’s shelters and on the streets, unable to find work because of his belongings.
“You have to take everything with you in the morning,” he said of leaving the shelters. “Everything that you have, you have to take it with you. I had a big black bag and two backpacks.”
The problem he kept running into was that possible employers know what carrying all your possessions in bags represents.
“You're done before you even get the interview,” Cunningham said. “You might get the interview, but as soon as you step in there and they see them backpacks and them bags, it's over with.”
For Cunningham, being able to unpack his stuff and leave it in a room of his own is enough to make him take staying in this house seriously. So when he couldn’t get his online rent payment to go through, he called Hunter to tell her he needed to get it done.
The problem was easily corrected and Cunningham hasn’t had an issue since. And this speaks to the relationship RRHP’s administrators have with landlords.
“We're asking you to overlook criminal histories,” said Melissa Carlyle, executive director of CACH. “We're asking you to overlook substance use disorders. We're asking you to overlook prior eviction histories.”
The owners of the house where Cunningham, Boone, and the Adamses live are David and Rachel Chwaszczewski. They are willing to work within those parameters. We will meet the Chwaszczewskis in the third part of this series.
For Roger Boone, this willingness to roll the dice on people is a legit blessing.
“I couldn't never get nothing going,” he said. “I was on a walker. I had a stroke.”
When the chance to enter RRHP came to him, he said, “this was a godsend, man.”
For the Adamses, their shared room is somewhat of a honeymoon suite, although God still factors in large.
“She gave me three rules to date [her],” Gerald said. “Believe in God first; [Scarlett] had to be second; and no relations until she got married.”
Since he first saw her at church, those were easy conditions for him to agree to. They married just past Valentine’s Day. They would have married on Valentine’s Day, but Gerald had a dialysis appointment.
Before we headed outside for a group photo – that included a surprise kitten who’s become a kind of mascot for the front porch – I asked everyone how they see their futures playing out, once their year in RRHP ends. They could be eligible to reup for a second year, but that will be determined, as would terms, next spring.
But past then, and somewhere in the not-too-distant future, all four residents said they expect to be able to be on their own and all able and willing to pay their fortunes forward to a new crop of RRHP clients.
Their optimism is partly due to the break that low rent and a stable home is giving them and partly due to the life skills and financial literacy education they’re getting through RRHP.
Maybe Gerald Adams said it for everyone, considering they all agreed when he said this:
“This first year, [I want to] possibly get a car. The next two to three years after that, just save enough where I can get a house, pay the whole mortgage. And then I can sit there, in the middle of the house and say, ‘Ahh.’”
