Roxy lived in an abandoned van on English Avenue, a corridor in the shadow of the Georgia Dome synonymous in Atlanta for poverty, drugs and misery.
The young woman left Ohio in search of adventure but found herself - in a long, sordid and all-too-common story - addled by crack and pulling tricks in a scary, foreign landscape. Roxy is one in a woeful cast of characters put forth in “The Garden and the Ghetto,” a recently published book written by Jeff Deel, who has worked for more than a decade with his brother, Bruce, on the frontlines of poverty.
Asked in an interview whatever became of Roxy, Deel shrugged. She drifted off into the ether of life, he said. No storybook ending here. The Deels, through City of Refuge, a homeless transition center for women in northwest Atlanta, have saved many people. But not Roxy.
“There’s a lot of failures,” said Deel, who included tales like that to show “the power of contrast, to let people see the importance of decision-making along the way.”
The book sheds a glint on a gritty life-on-the street environment where they work each day to save those who are drowning on dry land. This comes at a time when they say homelessness is growing while the money needed to fight it is shrinking.
The Deels know life can be brutish and short. But they see hope in the 165 residents (66 single women, 35 moms with 64 kids) living in City of Refuge, a campus-like transitional housing facility erected in an old 210,000-square-foot distribution center. It is one of metro area’s newer and larger facilities created to house homeless women. The large women’s facility came about in 2008 after throngs of homeless women and children crowded the overflow area of Gateway Center, the city’s intake facility for the homeless, sleeping on mats.
Several women with children came to City of Refuge last week to be interviewed to see if they can qualify to enter. The women bore grim concerned looks, while their children ran about the large bay area, playing and shouting, seemingly oblivious to their families’ precarious state.
Through the years, the area’s infrastructure to help the homeless focused more on men.
“Women were getting the short end of the stick,” said Bruce Deel, a 52-year-old minister’s son who came to that neighborhood in 1997 when he was asked to take over the closing of a small church there. Instead, he found there was a desperate need in the area and instead expanded that mission exponentially.
Last year, 569 women and children came through City of Refuge. Some are single women living in common sleeping areas. Others are moms with children sleeping in motel-like rooms at the facility. They stay four months, sometimes a little more, learning job, budgeting and parenting skills. The time in a comfortable, safe environment gives them the opportunity to heal and rebuild.
“We teach them to be independent. It’s all about personal responsibility,” said Bruce Deel, a stocky, white-haired man in a flannel shirt and jeans.
The economy has devastated an already reeling community and Deel thinks it’s worse now in many ways than when he came 15 years ago. Many of his residents have a back story of drugs or mental illness. But new people are coming. “Many are first time homeless. Many are economy-related or bad-choice-in-men related.”
Barbara McGaughey, 41, with two young girls, matches the first of those two categories. Sanchez Haynes, 34, the second.
“I left a domestic violence situation in Detroit,” said Haynes, who has an 11-year-old daughter. “Some days are better than others. But I know I’m going in the right direction.”
There since August, Haynes said “a clock is in my head counting down” the time until she must leave by year’s end and restart her life. She looks for jobs - just about any kind will do - and is scouting out potential communities in her new city. She knows she must stay focused and positive.
“When I cry, it’s in the middle of the night,” she said. “I can’t let my daughter see it.”
Haynes said her daughter “is sad but she has to cope. It’s a lot to ask of a child. It motivates me even more. She doesn’t deserve this.”
McGaughey, a medical assistant, lost her job in 2006, had two baby girls and then lost her house to foreclosure. “My kids’ father dropped me off at Gateway in July,” she said, her voice trailing off.
She, too, hopes to quickly get a job and start saving money to reboot her life. “I want to go back to DeKalb. Better neighborhood, better schools.”
Bruce Deel said the need for places like his is growing, but the money is shrinking.
In 2010, the facility had revenue from grants and donations of about $4.1 million, including a $700,000 capital campaign. This year, Deel said it will be closer to $2.5 million.
The competition for dollars is fierce and, he said, “homelessness is not the flavor of the month right how. We built a very cool facility but sustaining it is more difficult. I’m surprised the energy in Atlanta has wavered a bit.”
Deel, who has 48 employees (including 12 former clients) and hundreds of volunteers, hopes to build a school at the facility at the same time he must make cuts. Previously, the City of Refuge had a community resource center providing food, clothing, counseling and other assistance for the surrounding neighborhood. But now those resources are mostly limited to the women and children at the center.
“People ask. ‘Have you helped transform this community?’ ” Bruce said. No, he tells them, the community is pretty much the same, possibly worse. “But there has been a transformation in individual lives.” Hopefully, he said, those changes will ripple out in the community.
But the need to transform lives keeps growing. Vince Smith, executive director at the Gateway Center, the network set up by Atlanta to oversee efforts to combat homelessness, last week had 150 women and children were sleeping in mats in the emergency overflow area. And nights have not yet gotten cold.
“It’s only September,” Smith said. “And that leaves me concerned.”
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