Tashawna Harris couldn’t get her car to start.

So the 27-year-old Oakland native, who was working as a security guard at an Alameda County building on Capwell Drive in East Oakland, started knocking on the doors of businesses for help.

Robert Waggener answered the door and after hearing about Harris’ plight, he called AAA. The wait gave Waggener time to talk to Harris, who couldn’t call to check on her daughter in child care because she didn’t have money to pay her phone bill.

He gave her $100 on that evening in September 2018, the first of many times that Waggener, 84, has helped Harris, a single mother of a 5-year-old. He has given her cash as well as a 17-year-old Cadillac with less than 100,000 miles.

Since her daughter, Angel, was born, Harris has struggled to maintain stable housing. For weeks at a time they’ve had to sleep in her car, huddling together to ward off hunger, fright and desperation.

Waggener decided he had to do more. Now he says he can’t stop.

“I got drawn into this thing little by little, because I couldn’t help halfway,” he said.

Waggener and Harris share an unlikely bond. They both want to ensure that Angel experiences more opportunities than obstacles in her life. Both cried as we sat in Harris’ living room one weekend last month and they recounted how they met. For me, their story is a reminder that it’s not just our elected officials who need to do more to rectify the systemic social and economic disparities that have forced people like Harris to live on the streets.

The responsibility to solve the crisis belongs to all of us, and Harris’ and Waggener’s story is an example of how one person is chipping in to help another.

I met Waggener, who grew up in Detroit the youngest of nine children in a working-class family, in August 2018 after he’d received a racist robocall that was disguised as an ordinary campaign message. We’ve kept in touch through email, and Waggener wrote me in early October after I published a column about BART looking to fill hundreds of jobs through training programs in low-income communities.

He was looking for a job for Harris.

Waggener raised three children as a single parent. He taught two of his children, Rex Waggener and Beci Anderson, how to be electrical estimators, a job that calculates the projected costs involved in electrical projects. In 1985, the three opened Beci Electric, an electrical contracting company. Their office on Capwell Drive is less than 2 miles from Oakport Street, where people living in their RVs, cars and vans often line the road that looks out on San Leandro Bay.

“The last five years in Oakland, every goddamn street is filled with vans and people parked on the street,” said Waggener, an Oakland resident of four decades. “How as a society can we deal with this disparity?”

Waggener’s daughter recognizes the disparity around us, but is also protective of her father.

“She calls and asks him for things quite often,” Beci Anderson told me. “He’ll go fill her tank up. In addition, he’s given her cash on numerous occasions.

“My dad has a history of being very charitable, which is good, but he’s brought people to live in his house before that he had no idea they ... were doing meth in his basement. So there’s a history of him being naive.”

Waggener feels he’s doing the right thing by continuing to help Harris, who can’t lean on family to keep herself afloat.

Harris told me that when she was a child, her mother used to sell the family’s food stamps to support a drug addiction. When she and her brother spent nights with their father, he wouldn’t let them take the toys he kept at his place because he said they’d be gone when they woke up.

“I used to cry thinking he was being mean about it, but it was really the truth,” Harris said. Her father moved to Dallas when she was 14. She lost contact with him about a year ago.

Most of her family, Harris said, lives in low-income housing. Not long after Angel was born, Harris’ mother was evicted from the Section 8 apartment the family was living in. Her mother has been homeless since, she said. Harris and Angel slept in a car until Angel’s father, Rayshawn La’Rue, took custody.

He was fatally shot in San Francisco in July 2016. He had Angel with him, Harris said.

Harris later moved in with her grandmother, who Harris said lived in the same Section 8 apartment at 40th and Webster streets in North Oakland for four decades. When her grandmother died earlier this year, Angel and Harris were forced to move again. They bounced around local motels. She and Angel spent several nights in the Cadillac that Waggener gave her.

“I don’t want to see that again,” Harris said, referring to being homeless. “It’s really scary. I try to be the best mom that I can so she don’t have to struggle.”

Harris moved into an apartment off Seminary Avenue in East Oakland on Aug. 1. Waggener said he gave Harris $1,500 for her portion of the deposit on the two-bedroom apartment, which costs $2,995 a month.

The rent is subsidized by a program administered by East Oakland Community Project, an organization that offers emergency and transitional housing in Alameda County. But the subsidy lasts for only two years, and each month the portion of rent Harris is expected to pay increases — $336 in December, $446 in January and up until she’s paying full rent.

There’s no way Harris, who makes $17 an hour working in a packing and shipping warehouse, will be able to afford the rent without public — or private — assistance.

That’s one reason why Waggener can’t stop.

“The little that it is, at least it’s something,” he said. “I can’t put this lady back on the street.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr