"I worked for group homes for the court building right here, for the public defenders next door, for the D.C. Court of Appeals right over there," he explains, pointing to a trio of dull gray buildings across the Interstate from where we stand on 2nd Street NW. "I used to come through here and see these people [at the shelter]. I had good jobs …"

Then things took a turn for the worse. It's hard to say exactly what it was that sent his marriage of 12 years into a tailspin and landed him out on the streets, but Malik figures some combination of his wife's infidelity and his own abuse of drugs and concomitant depression are to blame. Before long, Malik was himself in need of counseling. "The choices that you make sometimes can be the wrong ones," he says.

Stints in shelters and out on the street—the longest he went without a roof over his head was three months in Atlanta, where he'd gone in search of work that never materialized—were broken up by live-in relationships with an assortment of women. But they never seemed to last. "Some just turned tragic," Malik says, and offers his last relationship as a case in point. Sharing a cramped apartment in a rundown section of D.C. with various relatives didn't make things easy, especially when his girlfriend's 25-year-old son moved in—"a real beater." "Beat his girlfriend up and her brother the next year, at Christmas," Malik says.

Of course, the son had demons of his own: Malik could see from the start that he was bipolar. But Malik has little sympathy for the son, since he refused to take his medications and drank instead. Not long after their final run-in, when Malik decided to pack his bags and leave, the son was picked up by the police and sentenced to three years in jail. Malik doesn't know the charge and he doesn't seem to care—"I'm just glad to see he's locked up."

As for lessons learned, Malik says he's always had a knack for attracting—and being attracted to—women with mental-health issues. If his past experience as a counselor is anything to go by, such struggles are par for the course in the high-poverty, high-stress neighborhoods with which he is familiar. Besides, "When you work around these people, you trying to help them," he says, and he doesn't just mean in the professional sense. Then he offers the textbook response: "You can't do that, though—doesn't work." Having ridden the roller coaster one too many times, he is determined to learn his lesson and move on, even if it means being alone. "I'ma take care of me now," he says.

Speaking of moving on with his life, that's what he plans to do in a few months' time when the shelter is projected to close and he has managed to accumulate enough in disability payments to get into a place of his own. Although things are looking up for him, he's worried about what will happen to the hundreds of other homeless people who call the shelter home and don't have a place to go. "I see people come in here all day," he says. "They come from the prison, [police] let 'em out on that corner .... I see it every day." Free and subsidized housing arrangements can be made through the D.C. Housing Authority, he says, but in a tight market where rents are climbing fast and funding lags behind, the waitlist often takes years to clear.