Fawnadina and Natalio
Fawnadina Hunter, 43, leans on her rake after smoothing out the patch of dirt around the large tent she shares with her husband Natalio “Junior” Aviña, 34, and their German Rottweiler, Oso. She sighs as she looks over at to the mound of trash her neighbors had piled up against the cyclone fencing that separates this patch of dirt from the sidewalk. She is also keeping an eye out for Junior. She hasn’t seen him or Oso since early morning. She fears he is with another woman or off smoking meth. She is thinking it may be time to call it quits on their 11-year relationship and return to her home near Porterville on the Tule River Reservation, where a niece is living in her house for now.
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Catie
Catie Profeta conserves water so she can have clean rinse water when she washes her hair and brushes her teeth. She shares food, money, clothes and other resources with others around her in her Hillcrest neighborhood, mindful to never block the sidewalk. Her degree from Whittier College is in Environmental Science, with a minor in Women’s Studies. When she was working Profeta always ended up the project manager, something she credits to her OCD tendencies. After a work injury left her jobless, then homeless, she is leaning on her analytical brain skills to suss out who to trust and how to be resourceful. She fondly remembers her Women’s Studies classes and professors as some of the most formative influences in her life.
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Henry is Home
Living outside for 15 years makes you forget certain things about the required responsibilities of living indoors. The transition was so challenging that Henry lived in a tent in the backyard for four months before a storm convinced him to sleep in the room he was assigned. Listening to the wind rattle the windows triggered memories of nights he’d spent in a tent or a car during similar storms. Being responsible not just for himself but for his dog Lulu made the difference. The key to success is changing your mindset, he said, changing your behavior. While he admits he doesn’t like dealing with change, the reward of finally having the security of a home with GLM Housing is well worth the personal work he knows must be done, especially when it means also adapting to a shared living situation.
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Chris
Chris is a family man. His fondest memories are of the times he and his siblings, cousins and father worked at his grandmother’s thriving board and care business in San Diego. After years of turbulent relationships, addiction, prison, health issues and heartache, all he wants is to be able to have his twin daughters stay with him during visitations. He has battled back the drug addictions, but still struggles with PTSD from all the violence he witnessed in prison and on the streets. That, and betrayal by family and spouses keep him emotionally fragile, but he has housing now and is determined to get his twin daughters back into his life.
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Snake
Topher, 48, aka Snake, sits on the pavement in the shade behind an old Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel in the Gaslamp, pouring alcohol on a pile of paper. Next to him, Otis, 84, is sipping a beer talking about Whitney Houston. Topher grew up in San Diego, got married, had a great job, then lost the job and the marriage. He found a cheap room at a downtown SRO, then after the pandemic he and several others were evicted. He was attacked with a wrench after only four months. He wears that wrench like a talisman against future attacks.
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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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