Moses

Story by Jakob McWhinney

Photos by Peggy Peattie

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.”

“So we need to lift up the homeless and bring them out of this,” Moses said.

He supports proposals for safe parking and camping lots with on-site security, which have been floated by officials and advocates recently, but believes the best way to help individuals experiencing homelessness is to build new permanent shelter and housing options while simultaneously creating jobs for them. Moses lives in a tent pitched near the former downtown public library, in front of which individuals have been camping for over a year and thinks abandoned buildings like this one are the perfect opportunity.

He sees lots of potential among people living on the streets and said he’s known individuals who formerly worked in varied occupations from masons to surgeons to soldiers. He thinks the city should tap into that potential workforce to begin to retrofit and renovate abandoned buildings around the region to act as shelters or new housing.

Another part of his campaign platform is to build the world’s first 5-star homeless shelter. Not only would it provide a plethora of individualized wraparound services to its residents, but Moses believes it would also serve as a psychologically empowering message that the city values its residents who are temporarily houseless.

For Moses, it is vital to ensure these new shelters and housing maintained the family dynamic many individuals living on the street had developed. Their street family was the only that many of them had ever known, he said.

“Nobody's ever called me (and said) ‘hey, come and eat breakfast,’” Moses said.

“But this, right here, the streets – they call me and yeah, some people they take from me but a lot of them, they give to me. Just like the streets.”

He urged governments and organizations to make an effort to hire current or formerly homeless individuals at shelters, or as homeless outreach workers. Life on the streets is a constant struggle, he said, and individuals who’ve experienced what that’s like are more effective in these roles, and more likely to gain trust from the people they serve.

“The mentality out here, it's different, “ Moses said. “This is a whole world where it's like you're being dropped off in a jungle, covered in blood in the middle of the night.”

Police adjacent outreach workers, like San Diego’s Homeless Outreach Team, or HOT, should also ditch the police gear, he said, “because nobody wants to talk to a cop.”

Moses has lived on the streets for a number of years, after a messy divorce during which he lost custody of his daughters. Last April he was stabbed in his legs five times while sleeping in a tent.

The knife hit an artery in one of his legs, and Moses said surgeons spent four or five hours trying to stop the bleeding, during which he “expired” twice. He pulled up his pantlegs to reveal deep, jagged scars on each leg. He can’t really explain it, but said his surgeon told him he’d “come back” by himself.

These days, Moses said he walks around smiling. Despite how awful it is that he and so many others now live on the streets of San Diego, he still believes “hope is here,” and that he will make it out of his current situation. And when he does, he intends to take his campaign all the way to the White House.

“I walked all my life in defeat, I walked all my life depressed. I'm tired of that,” Moses said. “Now I want to walk happy.”