What happened to Gypsy?
Gypsy explains her black eye and how she defended herself against an attempted sexual assault in downtown San Diego. The assailant had been taunting her for days, and one night he grabbed her and slammed her head against a wall and then the ground thinking that would subdue her enough to rape her. But she grew up tough, learned to defend herself. She is often running into young women who have just arrived on the streets, and offers them advise about who to trust and how to keep your belongings from being stolen. She has her own theories about why men feel it’s okay to assault women.
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Tara
Tara Chaffee, 43, said she has learned a lot about herself in the two years she has lived on the streets of San Diego. She is situated near San Diego City College because she has registered for classes and hopes to get back into the medical field where she had a career as a CNA specializing in patients with dementia. Living with the stress of constant, imminent police sweeps and the noise of street traffic, especially in the same spot where three homeless men were run over and killed by a drunk driver three years ago, keeps her from making the changes that she needs to make in order to take those life changing steps.
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Mike
Mike has been reliving a trauma every day for the last three years. His notebook is an angry testimonial to his near death experience, and a memorial to the friends who died that day on the Ides of March 2021. “I was talking with Randy,” Mike said, “and then he was gone.” He wipes away tears with his shirt sleeve as he recounts the memory.
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"I'm your Destiny"
Destiny Jones, 62, feels she is finally emerging from the broken and torn pieces that constituted her childhood and early adult years. Overcoming the depression, anxiety and bipolar diagnoses that generated from multiple childhood abuses, and the addictions she used to deny everything, she has found her voice and her soul in music. Now she wants to help others find their self-worth.
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DaVida
At age 65, she has been living on the streets for 52 years; most recently six years in San Diego, three years in Oceanside. Her father threw her out when she was 13. “He told me to ‘get the fuck out. You’re old enough to find a place, get a job.’ So I moved in with friends but I still went to school.” She got her GED eventually in prison, on her birthday. “They see you but they don’t see you,” DaVida told me about that people passing by on the sidewalk bordering Balboa Park.
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Unhoused United
At an intersection where most drivers roll up their windows and lock their doors, Sadri, 23, bounces out of the car and pops the trunk. Two men who had been quietly smoking cigarettes in the shade across the street immediately gravitate towards Mesean Sadri and his open trunk. Slowly, others leave the shade to get in line for a slice, a bottle of water and a kind word. “I thought I was already empathetic,” Sadri said. “But being out here made me a lot more empathetic, a lot more understanding, a lot more educated.”
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Rachel Hayes
Rachel Hayes knows she’s a strong woman. After spending eleven years homeless, establishing safe camping sites and building trusting communities of friends in and around East Village, Petco Park and a canyon in Lemon Grove, Rachel has navigated her way into permanent housing. Free from the daily struggle to survive on the streets, she is leveraging her new situation into time spent advocating for others - helping them secure resources or manage paperwork. She is considering a run for city council.
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Serenity
Serenity Rubalcaba, 20, takes her time gathering belongings and carrying them from one side of the street to the other, stepping over the trolley tracks that run down the median of Commercial Avenue in San Diego’s East Village. The sidewalks are getting hotter quickly with the summer’s first blistering heat wave. A San Diego native, she attended Clairemont High School, leaving just five credits shy of her diploma. The insecurity of being bounced around foster care homes and juvenile hall made it difficult to concentrate on her studies. And then there’s her daughter.
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Tamme
At 35, Tamme Jackson is an old soul. A single woman on the street, she is surrounded by men in the solid block of dark blue tents . Merlin, one of the many older men walking by, stopped and asked if she had any alcohol. She rummaged around in her tent and handed him a clear plastic water bottle with the remnants of a faded pink liquid. “It’s vodka with a splash of tajin. There’s not much left but you can have it,” she offered. There are a lot of new faces lately,” she smiled. “You need references to be part of our club.” She gets sad again when talking about the daughter that CPS took away. “We were housed,” she said. “Just not to the standards of CPS (Child Protective Services).”
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Isaac Rim
Izean “Isaac” Rim, 71, was in the room where it happened when the late homeless advocate Waterman Dave won his lawsuit against the city for unlawfully disposing of people’s personal belongings. The resulting funds went to creating the initial Transitional Storage Center, which used clean, empty waste bins in a secure, central location (at that time on 10th Avenue across from the downtown library) to provide individual storage spaces for unhoused individuals. Isaac has taken on Waterman Dave’s watchdog role on the city’s streets.
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Julie Hockman
It takes less than a minute of talking with Julie and looking into her eyes to know she is profoundly intelligent. Like many of the thousands of people living unsheltered on San Diego’s streets, the circumstances that caused her to become homeless are complex, personal, and often misunderstood. Her difficulties navigating the layered bureaucracy in place to get vulnerable individuals into housing and health care services are not unique, but in Julie’s case they are compounded by the myriad stereotypes heaped onto people with physical limitations.
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Moses Miramontes
When Moses first ended up on the streets five years ago, people thought he was a push over because he was quiet and didn’t fight back when people robbed or assaulted him. “I felt like I was painted in blood and dropped off in the middle of the Amazon forest in the middle of the night.” Moses landed on the streets after discovering his wife was cheating on him. “Man, she took everything. I didn't even get a paperclip. She just threw me out on the street and moved in her boyfriend that night.” He credits the constant support and encouragement from his daughters with giving him the fortitude to not only survive, but to become a support for others.
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Phyllis and Taz
Leaning against the bed that takes up most of her 400 square foot apartment, Phyllis can’t resist handing over another rawhide chew to her emotional support dog Taz. As the four year anniversary of being “inside” approaches, Blanck confesses that she still feels suspended in limbo. “I’m having a rough time, to tell you the truth,” she said. “There’s no sense of community. I am not part of the homeless community, and I don’t feel part of the housed community either.”
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Mike and his ukelele
Quietly sipping hot coffee and reveling in a fresh bear claw pastry, Mike waited his turn to get a hot shower courtesy of the portable shower unit parked behind St. Paul’s Church, courtesy of the Voices of Our City Choir. The 29-year-old Ohio native carries an umbrella to ward off the coming rain. He said it was a lot easier to deal with than the blizzards of snow he grew tired of in Ohio and then later in upstate New York. All of that was in sharp contrast to the heat he endured on his multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan while serving in the U.S. Army as a cook.
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Art and Soul
Art gives our spirits a chance to soar, to reflect on and reframe the situations we are dealing with. Everywhere I meet up with individuals experiencing homelessness, I discover artists - painters, musicians, crafters of jewelry or pottery or textile arts, singers, poets, and sketch artists. It speaks to the perseverance of the soul and lifts up the creative voice. Here are some of the artists I photographed that ended up featured in San Diego Magazine.
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Ghost Rider
Ghost Rider, aka David Lloyd, 65, was born in Iceland. His mother died in childbirth. He quit high school a month before graduation, but got his GED in jail at age 18. His father and brothers joined the military but recruiters wouldn’t take him because he was the “last son”. His father died in 1985 from complications due to exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. He got married young, but his wife was killed by a drunk driver when their daughter was two. After raising his daughter he took off hitchhiking across the U.S. and Canada.
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Bella and Amber
On a quiet stretch of 16th Avenue downtown, Bella Roberts pushes a red shopping cart to collect trash from the sidewalks and turn the full bags in for a cash reward. Her girlfriend Amber Logan sits beside their belongings on the other side of the street, watching a friend’s cat, and organizing their belongings so they can move before the city crew arrives to wash down the sidewalks. Bella and Amber have been together, more on than off, for six years now. Amber feels especially protective of Bella, having seen what can happen to women alone on the streets in San Diego. She has had to “rescue” Bella when she had a “manic episode” at one point.
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Kathy Shely
Kathy Shely has a naturally positive demeanor and upbeat outlook on life. After working as a social worker for the county for 22 years, then caring for her terminally ill mother for more than three years, being out on the streets doesn’t deter her from gravitating towards connecting people to what would improve their quality of life. Once her mother passed away and the state swooped in to take possession of her mother’s house, Kathy found herself on the street, having to fight to keep her sanity and dignity, even physically having to fight when she refused to have sex with someone in exchange for a cigarette or bottle of water.
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Aaron
A second generation San Diegan, Aaron grew up in Pacific Beach. Both his parents were junkies, he said, but his father got sober before Aaron was born, hoping to persuade his mother to do the same. But it didn’t work. When Aaron was about a year old, his mother started taking him with her to drug deals. “Her rationale was, ‘Who’s going to shoot the lady with the baby?’ That was her mentality,” Aaron said.
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Moses
Moses’ mayoral campaign slogan is simple. “You cannot fix a city if you do not love the city.”
That’s why, Moses said, he’s going to one day run for mayor himself. He loves San Diego and wants to see it prosper, and believes a first step would be renovating historical landmarks that made it a tourist hub to begin with. But he also believes that in order to really start improving the city you need to start with the “weakest link,” which he thinks is people like himself — San Diego’s homeless. “How are we going to move up another step if they stay at the bottom?” he said. “We can’t move up because they're going to be like that ball and chain.”
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