Emmy McLarty, 54, sings in a choir and develops websites. She has deep red hair and stylish glasses. She keeps up with family on Facebook, watching the latest videos of her cousin’s toddler grandson doing what toddlers do.

“Hearing my cousin on FB who drives me absolutely crazy telling me about the 20,000th thing her grandson did keeps me focused in real life and not where we are now. It might drive me up the wall, but it helps!”

'Where we are now' means homeless.

A San Diego native who married her high school sweetheart, she lived comfortably in Santee for 17 years, seven of those caring for a father-in-law with Parkinson’s Disease. She was too busy to even eat dinner out on weekends. And then her father-in-law died. Three months later she was laid off, and so was her husband. With a big severance package, depression and too much time on her hands, Emmy began to drink.

“I had a lot of PTSD issues, they all started to rear their heads, and so I started to drink,” she said while passing out water to other homeless people in East Village.
We decided to move out of San Diego. We listed our house, thinking we’d have seven or eight months to think about what to do. “It sold the first day. So we did what any sane couple with two dogs and no kids would do. We put all of our stuff in storage, took the dogs, got in the car and drove across country for three years.”

That was in 2011. It was very eye-opening, she said. “We saw a lot of the country. We planned to stop in St. Louis, but it wasn’t for us.” They split up for a while. She came back here because it was zero degrees in Ferguson, MO. when she left there and it was 75 degrees here. “I kissed the ground and said I don’t care where I’ve got to live, I’m not leaving San Diego again.” He floated around as well, stopping in Colorado.

She went through rehab for alcohol in Escondido. After the rehab, she still couldn’t find anything affordable, but got herself housed in an SRO downtown. That was where Emmy almost died. She suffered a stroke, lying unconscious for a while on the floor, then flopped between her bed and the floor for three days before someone heard her yelling. She lived in a care facility for a year. When they let her go, she had no place to go, so they released her to the street with her walker and her purse. Emmy quickly ditched her walker, even though she needed it, because she felt she’d look vulnerable: an easy target. She learned to walk without it.

She decries the claims that there are resources out there, but the homeless just don’t want help. “I checked in with St.Vincent’s for seven and a half weeks every day before I got in.”

Before Emmy got into a shelter, she had wondered why so many people preferred the street to the shelters. But she soon learned “anyone who doesn’t think there are drugs and alcohol in the shelters has another thing coming. Those people in there are crazy, and you’re stuck with them from 10 pm till 4 am. I’ve pretty much been in all the shelters. Some are good, but some of them, your PTSD will kick in pretty quick with some of the things going on in there: people screaming, yelling at each other, no humanity in some of them.”

She lived at God’s Extended Hand for three months. “I would walk around all day long. With all this red hair, It’s like I don’t fly under the radar. I always smiled at people. They would tell me their stories. I don’t remember names, but I remember their stories. I started to make friends. The people who were really hungry, who couldn’t make it to breakfast. So I would volunteer to serve breakfast at GEH, and fill tupperware with food, and take it to those people. Dad always told me that ‘Food Is Love,’ so I felt food was a good way to help people.”

A self-professed Daddy’s girl, Emmy was heartbroken when her father died.

“I came from a very close-knit family: with three older brothers, anytime anybody needed anything, people were just there; boom, to help. But then my father died, my mother was still alive, had a long battle with lung cancer. My brother was living there, they closed ranks.. no one was allowed to talk about her cancer. All this was taking place when we were thinking of moving after our lay-offs, so we weren’t part of the decisions and things going on with my mother. So then when my mom passed away, my whole world just shattered.”

But still she tries. She sings in the Voices of Our City choir. She still maintains websites for clients, though that becomes difficult when her phone is stolen or she can’t find a way to charge her phone. Besides using it for work, Emmy also relies on her phone for storing personal photos and connecting with the real world.

“Without it…. nothing but isolation, isolation, isolation. Only being able to see the people that you’re walking around… this becomes your whole life, your entire stratus. And that’s not right. You’ve gotta see people outside of here to keep you in the Here and Now.”

For now, she has a bed at one of the temporary “bridge” shelters, so she has a way to shower and to keep her phone charged. A self-professed advocate for the homeless, she learned about the rights homeless people are often denied. She wants to get herself into stable housing so she can focus on creating more realistic interfacing between San Diego’s homeless and the resources available to them.