‘You have to focus ... on that one person in front of you’

He was working for St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church when JOIN started its outreach program in 1996. He liked the idea of helping homeless people, so he applied.

“Back then, nobody really knew what outreach meant. I said, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ They said, ‘Make it up as you go along,’” he said. “It fit me well. Just go talk to people? I can do that.”

This was before urban renewal transformed the Pearl District, and before the creation of a broad network of social service agencies to help homeless men and women.

“Parts of downtown were pretty scary back then,” Alaalatoa said. “None of us really knew what we were doing.”

Yet parts of the job were easier.

“Vacancy rates for apartments were really high. The market had completely overbuilt and then there was this downward swing, so we were able to take advantage of that,” said Rob Justus, who created JOIN and hired Alaalatoa. “If Lio could find you, he could get you into an apartment.”

Today, JOIN has nine outreach specialists including Alaalatoa, but the mission hasn’t evolved much. Homelessness is a complicated problem requiring a complex network of solutions. Alaalatoa’s job is simple: build healthy relationships among a population that lacks them.

“Homelessness is a symptom of other problems, and most of those, I think, boil down to broken relationships,” he said. “Broken marriages, broken families, broken ties to parents or siblings.

“A lot of people on the street have absolutely no one who cares about them, no one who thinks they matter. So I want to show them that I care, that I think they matter. Then they’ll start thinking that way themselves.”

He meanders through the Pearl, dodging affluent young pedestrians out for dinner or drinks and pointing out one restaurant whose manager allows homeless people to sleep on his loading dock in exchange for sweeping the floors after closing. He steers past Lincoln High School, where the bright lights of the football field are on and several dozen young women scurry through a lacrosse practice. “Nobody is going to be sleeping over there yet.”

From Goose Hollow, he heads back into downtown, slowing in front of the main branch of the Multnomah County Library. He hasn’t seen Judy, an older woman homeless for more than a decade, in days and worries.

He finds her tucked into a sleeping bag on the sidewalk a block from the library, across the street from the new downtown Target. She shakes her head at him before he even speaks.

“Judy, dear, do you need anything tonight? Water? Socks?”

More head shakes. With most of his “friends” Alaalatoa lets them take the initiative. With Judy, small and fragile-looking, he’s more solicitous — and slightly irritated. He’s frustrated, with her refusal to accept even the smallest sort of help but more with the broader system that allowed her to land on the streets in the first place.

“Everybody has been trying to get her indoors for years, but no,” he says, pulling away from her corner. “She has a very strict routine, and she’s only going to go into an apartment if we can find her one downtown. This is her ’hood, you know? This is where she’s comfortable, where she knows how to survive. But she looks like somebody’s grandma, and she’s sleeping outside.”

Since starting its outreach program, JOIN has helped 5,000 homeless men and women return indoors. Alaalatoa’s office bulletin board is studded with baby pictures and other reminders of people he’s helped. Landlords groan when he calls — “I get a lot of, ‘Oh. It’s you,’” he said, laughing — but they work with him. They know Alaalatoa will find a way to pay if one of his charges can’t make the rent next month. They know he’ll show up to do the cleaning and repairs himself if a tenant trashes a unit.

They have his business card, too.

“Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes a person can’t get over their addiction. Sometimes they’re just not ready to live inside four walls,” he said.

He tells stories of men and women who struggled to adjust to life indoors: The man who spent the first six months sleeping on the floor of his new apartment rather than the bed, the guy who took his shopping cart inside with him, the one who slept in the doorway of his new home for weeks before finally moving inside.

“These are people who have spent 10 years, sometimes 20 years, just surviving,” he said. “Even with help, getting used to stability is hard. That’s why you have to keep going back.”

Most nights, he hands out between 40 and 60 cards. One man had 39 of Alaalatoa’s cards in his pocket when he finally asked for help getting sober and indoors 11 years ago.

Under Alaalatoa’s guidance, the man spent almost six months in rehab. JOIN found him a job mopping floors at Legacy Emanuel Hospital. He still works there. He’s married and owns a home.

“He did the work,” Alaalatoa said. “I was just there when he was ready.”

Thus, his evening patrols. He goes out year round, with occasional breaks to recharge by fishing or playing his bass guitar. When his two kids were younger, he’d sometimes take them along during summer vacations and spring breaks. He keeps two cell phones, one for work and one for personal calls, the better to ensure that when he’s not working, he’s really not working.

“This isn’t a job as much as a lifestyle,” he said.

His last stop this night is West Burnside Street, the neon-lit stretch just shy of the bridge that serves as home to several shelters and as a popular nightly camping spot for men and women who either can’t get an emergency bed or don’t want one. More than 50 people line the sidewalk on either side of the street, and a dozen crowd around the back of the van as Alaalatoa opens it.

He hands out more doughnuts, more water, more blankets, more cigarettes and more business cards. As his friends disperse, he sighs, chucks his own cigarette to the pavement and rubs it out with his heel. He’s been patrolling for four hours this evening.

“I make my own hours,” he says. “That’s one benefit of the job.”

It’s also a frequent reminder of how challenging this work really is, even for someone who knows the city’s hidden corners as well as he does. The reality is that Alaalatoa could stay on the streets from sundown until sunup seven days a week, and not find everyone who needs help. He knows.

“Sometimes I go home feeling pretty good about myself because maybe I got one or two folks to talk me. Then I come back out the next night, and there are 100, 200 new people I’ve never seen before, 100 or 200 more homeless people,” he says. “You have to focus on the individuals, on that one person in front of you. If you look at the big picture, it’s overwhelming. It’s too big a problem to even try to solve.

“Let’s call it a night.”

Robin Lloyd in the bedroom of the Portland Rescue Mission's new Connect program. It's a temporary home for women getting off the streets, a place to rest, recover and start working toward a better future.

A path back to society

The number of homeless women is increasing, and the support system is just starting to catch up

The suite on the second floor of the Portland Rescue Mission feels in many ways like a college dormitory, right down to the evening traffic jam in the bathroom, the afghans and fleece blankets on each bunk bed and the occasional sound of after-hours giggling.

The women who stay in this dorm, however, range from their early 20s to well past retirement. Instead of being bonded by class schedules or future jobs, what connects them more than anything are the horrors they’ve experienced while homeless.

“If you’ve never been out there, you have no idea how rough it can be,” said Robin Lloyd, a 54-year-old Clackamas County woman who was among the first residents of the Rescue Mission’s new Connect program. “We’ve all been there. We all know. That’s how we can help each other.”

The number of women on the streets is rising, an unintended consequence of the recession and federal, state and local governments’ emphasis on helping chronic homeless adults and veterans, two populations that tilt male. Women made up a quarter of homeless population counted by Multnomah County housing officials and advocates in 2007. They represented almost 40 percent in 2013, and experts estimate that the biannual point-in-time counts tend to undercount women.

The support system for homeless women hasn’t kept up: There are still far more emergency beds for men than women, and beds for women without children are particularly scarce. But the number of services is slowly increasing. The Portland area’s largest shelter for women, the Salvation Army’s Female Emergency Shelter, moved into bigger downtown space and underwent a $2.64 million upgrade in 2013.

And last year, the Rescue Mission started Connect. The three-month residential program gives up to 16 women at a time a chance to acclimate to being indoors, find a case worker and get on waiting lists for more permanent housing.

It’s also a chance to decompress: Studies show that almost half of all homeless women suffered domestic violence, and a quarter had been sexually assaulted.

“Asking women who have been homeless to go out and get a job on Day One is a lot,” said Deanne Gillock, the program’s interim director. “There’s a whole lot of brokenness we have to help these women with.”

So far, 52 women have either been in or are currently residents in Connect. Twenty-three have successfully moved into transitional or permanent housing. On a recent night, a rotating group of between four and eight Connect residents gathered in the program’s living room, a small space made homey with couches and a TV, to talk about how they became homeless. Their stories differed in the details, but shared some basic themes: They’d made one or two bad choices and suffered one or two bad breaks. Once things fell apart, they lacked the support or skill to put them back together again.

My mom died, my sister died. Suddenly everyone I loved is dead, and I just let go.

I was living with my 15-year-old, and we had to split up to get indoors.

I’m not made to sleep outside. So I prostituted myself.

I was into the drugs, because they made my pain go away.

I am amazed I got to this point. I should be dead.

The way the system is set up, you cannot get help until you are literally helpless.

“I was what you’d call a really normal person,” said Lloyd, a small blonde woman and the only Connect resident willing to give her full name. (Several said they were on the run from abusive spouses.) “I raised kids. I was responsible and respectable. I never thought I could be homeless. That was somebody else.”

In 2006, her daughter was murdered. In 2010, her mother and mother-in-law both died. In 2011, her husband of 27 years “got a Harley and a skank and kicked me out.”

She fell deeper into a drug problem and ended up sleeping outdoors. “I did things I didn’t think I was capable of,” she said. “I became a person who just didn’t care about anything.”

Last year, she was arrested and charged with possession of a controlled substance — meth. A judge required her to get clean, and she wound up at Central City Concern, a nonprofit that runs housing and recovery programs for homeless men and women. Central City suggested a stay at Connect.

“A lot of what you do at Connect is just getting used to being indoors, to being safe,” Lloyd said. “When you’re homeless, you get so used to doing what you have to do to survive another day that you’re not thinking about getting up at a certain time or looking for work or taking care of yourself. Those are skills you have to re-learn.”

Connect residents follow a fairly strict routine: Women wake at 5:30 a.m., eat at 6:30 and are usually out the door by 8 to look for work, attend addiction recovery programs or job training classes. They also help other homeless men and women, including hosting a Friday morning women’s only movie and clothing give-away. Recent showings included “Miss Congeniality,” “School of Rock,” and “Up.”

“It’s a break for people,” Lloyd said. “It’s a chance to come inside, sit down, be warm, eat something, not worry about anything for a couple of hours.”

In that regard, the matinees are much like Connect itself — a temporary respite rather than a permanent solution.

Lloyd finished her three months late last year and has moved on to a six-month transitional housing program run by Central City Concern. She’s applying for jobs at grocery stores and fast food chains — places that might hire an older woman with a felony on her record — and is on several waiting lists for permanent housing. She believes her time at Connect saved her life, not to mention put her back on the path toward being a mother and grandmother to her kids and grandkids again.

“It was only 90 days, but I learned so much in that time,” she said. “I got my faith back. When you’re homeless, you’re not thinking, ‘There’s a God. He’s got a plan for me.’ Now I don’t exactly know what is next, but at least I’ve got my faith back.”

Coming next

Police in certain suburban towns used to have an easy answer to homelessness, a bus ticket to Portland. The rise and spread of poverty has made that impossible. In Oregon City, civic leaders face a chicken-or-the-egg question: What came first, the homeless shelter or the homeless people? And in school districts across the region, teachers, administrators and staff find themselves suddenly serving as the only source of help for a rising tide of homeless families.