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.

When she first moved into her new home at the end of June this year, she woke up every two hours like clockwork. She also returned to her tent on Commercial Street several nights a week to make the transition to indoors gradual. “Now I’m in a purgatory of being uncomfortable at both!” she said. “A housing navigator comes every week and brings me food and checks on me. Alpha Project does things the right way. I was at their 17th and Imperial Ave shelter and they matched me with a place in a month.”

Rachel joined Lived Experience Advisors (LEA) shortly after moving inside. She uses her connections with LEA and other organizations like Stronger Women United, an advocacy group based in L.A., as a way of advocating for others. She has been learning to write letters to politicians and go to city council meetings. “They are going to let their most vulnerable stay on the street. I shouldn’t be the only one getting housing.” The effort also helps ground her in her new reality. “At LEA we do a lot of brainstorming, anything to make a positive change.”

Rachel said she was on the brink of homelessness for nearly five years before she finally ended up on the streets. When she did end up outside, she immediately found a group that shared a mutual trust, watching out for each other and their belongings. She met her former husband, Dominique McCoy among that first group of six near Petco Park. They stayed away from the Bottoms area, on 16th near the storage facility. During the winter the couple found a safe space in a canyon in Lemon Grove where Dominique built her a house with a porch. She meticulously kept the area clean, even when people would back their pickup trucks to the canyon ledge and dump their furniture, appliances and household trash because they were “too lazy to go to the dang dump.” Rachel would take old sheets, fill them with trash and carry stuff out of the canyon to dumpsters.

The couple still had to take the trolley back downtown for services like showers and food. One day when she was in need of some feminine hygiene products she was walking through the City College campus and several women dug through they purses to find something for her. She is grateful that now many of the organizations that offer food and clothing will offer feminine hygiene items and even Narcan. Rachel feels strongly about harm reduction and prevention programs. “I used to hand out condoms at the front door” of night clubs, she said. “I would have a box like a cigarette girl in a little costume. Because I believe I might want to do something with you. But I don't want to do it with everybody else through proxy. Every life is worth saving, no matter how bad.”

When police would show up, Rachel asked for a shelter bed, but there were never any available. Eventually police arrested Rachel, Dominique and the other few people living in their canyon. She was in jail for seven days “for being homeless.” Dominique was murdered in the county jail “by his crazy 18-year-old cellmate after breakfast one day. Dominque was resting and the cellmate came in and bashed Dominque’s head against the wall. He didn’t deserve it. He was a good person.”

That was right before COVID-19. A friend let her stay in his RV for a while, but managing the safe parking lots was getting expensive because they were required to move the RV every day and find a place to park all day. Eventually Mark got housing. Because of Rachel’s history of COPD, asthma, and a tracheotomy, she was able to get shelter in one of the hotels in Old Town during the pandemic. “Outside of Alpha Project those were the best shelters I’d ever been in. You had your own room, your own bathroom, TV, refrigerator, microwave, coffee, maid service, food, laundry service, medical staff. Of course they had housing navigators there and everything. But I mean, only a handful or so people got housed.”

Rachel dedicated herself to kicking methadone. She got into a program and onto Suboxone and other meds. “I was here because I didn't want to use heroin again, I didn't want to use fentanyl, I wanted to save my life.” She said the staff at the Alpha Project shelter were supportive and patient. “I let them know. My body was in distress. That’s how I lost all my teeth. And they treated me with dignity and respect and supported me through everything.”

Being in her own housing helps her to not only stay clean, but to support others trying to do the same. She feels for women on the street since they are constantly being targeted by predators.

For instance, when she walked through the East Village, men would drive up to her, thinking she was a hooker, and ask her if she wanted a ride. “You never get in someone’s car unless you know them. I know better,” she said, but isn’t sure some of the younger, more vulnerable women can resist an offer of food and shelter for the night. In fact, she said, “when I was in Alpha Project, every time someone got exited from Alpha project, they were told, Go find Rachel.”

The camping ban, she said, is making things worse because people are being scattered so they are hard to find when a housing navigator or social worker wants to locate them. They are also being driven away from where the services are. She looks forward to her weekly advocacy meetings, and doing things like delivering fans and electrical chargers to the safe camping tent dwellers. She attends church at Living Waters in East Village and helps pass out pizza and water every Sunday to the folks in the safe zone at Imperial Avenue and 17th Street. It’s her way of staying in touch with old friends, and it keeps her motivated to advocate for them. On a recent Sunday morning Rachel walked along Imperial Avenue between 14th and 17th streets. She stopped to try on a jacket from among the clothes being displayed on the sidewalk by an old friend named Keith. She ended up buying the jacket to support his entrepreneurship.

One and a half blocks later “Big Jerome” Silvels locked her in a bear hug. Silvels was one of the staff from Alpha Project that had helped her when she was at the shelter across the street. Turning up 17th Street she encountered many others, sharing news about the whereabouts and health of mutual friends from the street.

One focus of her advocacy is getting the city to provide port-a-potties in this area, and having them cleaned more than once a week. “I won’t use the port-a-potties down here. They are germ-infested cesspools. They only clean them once a week! They clean the port-a-potties at the tent shelter twice a day. How come they ignore this one? There is never any toilet paper. It’s disgusting. I’d rather pee in a cup,” Rachel said.

Rachel’s talk of running for city council doesn’t feel like just talk. She recently sat at a table with San Diego City Council President Pro Tem Monica Montgomery-Steppe during a fundraising event. She go over her fear of talking with important people, thanks to the councilwoman. Now Rachel wants to join her in the fight for recognizing those who are often at the margins of society, as members of the community worthy of inclusion. “I was never in politics but my father loved politics. Politics, football, beer. That's my dad. Yeah. That's my dad. And I hated politics. Yeah. And my dad would be so proud of me today,” she said. “He would be so proud.”