Room to breathe
Jenny Valdez was homeless until last week.
Valdez doesn't fit the stereotype of homeless people that many of us carry around. She works full time as a housekeeper at a local hospital. But that wasn't enough to keep the mother of five afloat in the Boston housing market. She lost her apartment six months ago and moved into a shelter in Hyde Park.
"I can't afford to pay a lot of rent," she explained yesterday. "I was paying $1,350 in rent, plus the lights, the gas, the telephone, a lot of stuff. Yes, I was evicted."
Even the best of shelters is no place for a family of six, which is where Travelers Aid Boston enters the picture.
I wrote in December about the agency's plans to rehabilitate a three-decker on Columbia Road to be rented to homeless families at below-market rates.
In the past six months, those plans have come to fruition, as I saw first hand yesterday. It didn't come cheap -- the total cost of the project was a bit over $400,000 -- but the housing sparkles.
Three families moved in on May 1, including four adults and 13 children. All of them came from temporary stays in shelters. The rents on their three- and four-bedroom apartments range from $650 a month to $750 a month, and are subsidized by the state and by Travelers Aid Boston. By chance, all three families have roots in the Dominican Republic.
Richard Ring, the agency's executive director, sees this as more than a one-shot deal. While he stresses that he is not knocking the area's family shelters, he believes the permanent solution to homelessness lies elsewhere. "What I believe is that families shouldn't be in shelters in the first place," he said yesterday. "Their issues should be dealt with [by providing] housing."
Ring is hardly alone among advocates for the homeless in holding that opinion, but he's managed to do something about it. Rosie's Place, which had operated the building as a rooming house, sold it to Ring's organization for perhaps half its market value. State Street Bank and Key span Energy made contributions or donations. The McCormack Firm, a law firm owned by former city councilor Michael McCormack, adopted the project, with its associates contributing money, services, and even new furniture.
The cooperation from so many sources is a tribute to Ring's credibility and the organization he has built at Travelers Aid. "There's an enormous amount of good will in the community," Ring said. "People want to help." Ring hopes the house will be the first of many, and says he is looking for another property to buy.
This is a bold move at a precarious time for nonprofits. Raising money is tough, especially for small agencies like Ring's. Many have consolidated, and some have disappeared. More than one person suggested that fewer agencies would be preferable to dozens that chase the same donors year after year. Everyone could write a check to the United Way or the Boston Foundation and feel that they have performed their civic duty.
Not surprisingly, Ring disagrees. He maintains that every organization brings not just its own agenda, but its unique approach to addressing the problems it is devoted to. Something will be lost, he maintains, if modest-sized agencies are allowed to wither or pressured to join forces.
It's not likely that the problem of homelessness will be conquered one restored three-decker at a time. But it is obvious that families are better off in permanent housing than in shelters. It is obvious that homelessness is an area in which any promising new approach should be welcomed.
"There's a lot of people in shelter who really need a house to live," Jenny Valdez told me. "I'm a single mom, I work 40 hours a week, and I can't afford to pay thousands of dollars for rent, plus expenses for my kids."
Her family now has room to breathe, literally and figuratively. That's not a small thing, not to a family that was living in a shelter less than two weeks ago.
"What we're really doing is providing opportunity and hope for people," Ring said.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 
