Mark, Rejected for Housing Again

News arrived to me through the Old Crow Book Club grapevine that Mark had lost the lottery to secure housing in one of the approximately 2000 apartment units across the county that had opened up this fall in a new intuitive to house the homeless that was two years behind schedule for implementation without any consequences for this inexcusable ineptitude.

Mark's sister and social worker had applied online for him six months ago.

(I find it very strange, stupid and discriminatory that a homeless man or woman in Oregon cannot apply in person to become housed. He or she can only apply online!)

Mark had received a letter of rejection in the mail (an address of a resident of the neighborhood where he receives mail) a few days ago. The grapevine informed me that upon hearing the bad news, Mark felt dejected and resigned to homelessness for the foreseeable future, possibly forever.

This has never been his desired outcome. He's not a homeless man who has chosen to remain living on the streets; he's a homeless man who has made the decision he does not want to live on the streets and has placed his faith in the system to help him.

That system has totally failed him.

Here we have an alcoholic man in his late 50s, born and raised in Oregon, who has been homeless since 2016 and recently suffered two heart attacks, who WANTS OFF THE STREETS, who has, with the assistance of friends, family and a social worker, made FOUR official attempts to secure housing, and has failed through no fault of his own each time.

What is there left to do? Give up?

It seems Mark stands on the brink of doing so and if he does quit, we'll never get him into housing because this process requires his participation.

Not long after hearing the news of the rejection, I went in search of Mark to check in on him and devise a new strategy. Frankly, short of bribing someone, if we could ever find anyone sentient in power to bribe, I had run out of ideas.

Mark was sitting in front of the grocery store selling the newspaper advocating for the homeless. It had rained the previous two days and his copies were soggy. I bought one and then broached the subject of the rejection letter. Mark seemed nonchalant about the result. I was not. I said we weren't giving up. He didn't really respond.

I asked if he had the letter and could I read it. He pulled a drenched piece of paper from his backpack and handed it to me.

The letter read, in part:

Dear Mark,

...we regret to inform you that your household was not selected in the lottery and your application will not be placed on the waiting list...

...please note, the application account that you created still exists and will accept changes. This does not mean that you are on the Housing Choice Voucher waitlist...

We want to thank you for your application and encourage you to check the 211 information website for available housing resources in our community...

Home Forward selected 2000 households through the lottery process to be placed on the new Housing Choice Voucher wait list. The 2000 households should move move through the wait list process in two years and then we will open the wait list again...

...we hope that we have the opportunity to work with you in the future...

(Note to readers: the author of this letter employed three different phrasings of wait list within the space of 200 words)

I read the letter twice and wasn't quite sure what it meant for Mark. He wasn't on a wait list because he had to reapply when the wait list opened up? But his application was already in the system?

Two years to move people into these apartments? And then the wait list reopens? I thought there was a housing emergency!

It was never clear to me or Mark or probably anyone on Earth if this was truly a random lottery or Mark's personal information was fed into a database and an algorithm generated and then he wasn't selected. It all raises an interesting question in a democracy that is never discussed as far as I can tell: who does have priority in receiving housing assistance? The elderly? Veterans? Those homeless people who are the most disruptive to others? Women with children? The mentally ill who have no ability to care for themselves? The drug zombies? Those who are already housed but ready to lose housing?

What about a man like Mark?

I asked Mark if I could keep the letter, dry it out, and reference it in a piece of writing. He agreed and here it is.

Mark certainly wasn't his usual voluble self during this conversation. I kept trying to pump him up with various coaching cliches that occasionally worked on me in my youth and when I employed them in my coaching career.

As for Mark as of October, winter is coming. He might not survive another one.