Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Barry Eckermann, daughter Clarissa, and long-time girlfriend Debbie, with the family dog, have been staying at the Sunnyvale Armory Cold Weather Shelter for the past several weeks. Barry works full-time as a glass blower, but the family can't afford a place to rent in the Bay Area. They are saving to rent a truck so that they can take their belongings and move back to Illinois.
Armory provides homeless limited respite
Buliding shelters over 100 people per night, but for how long?
By Daniel Hindin
In November things were going well for Barry Eckermann. He had one more mortgage payment left on the house in which he lived with his long- time girlfriend, Debbie, and their 2-year-old daughter Clarissa. He had just signed a solid contract with a well-known company that does the lighting for the TV show "Nash Bridges," making $24 an hour.
Things were going so well that Eckermann went back to his hometown of Rock Island, Ill., to load up a truck with enough furniture to fill his new house. Back in Illinois, his parents pleaded with him to stay there, but he was determined to live in the Bay Area near his two children of whom his ex-wife has custody.
"I should have listened to them, but things were going so well," says Eckermann, looking off into the distance as he finishes a free dinner handed out by the Sunnyvale Unitarian Universalists.
Eckermann is sitting at a long wooden table on a rickety metal folding chair inside the Sunnyvale Armory. Basketball nets hang from the high ceiling at either end of the rectangular building. One hundred and twenty five blue mats--the kind school children use for tumbling exercises--line the cold concrete floor.
In a few hours, 125 people will be resting on those mats. Perhaps some will be sleeping, and others will be awake, wondering how they ever ended up there and how they can avoid ending up there in the future.
For now, they watch an old TV with the bunny ear antennae that rests on one of the tables. Two giant red X's flash on the screen as the irritating noise that comes with a wrong answer on the "Family Feud" echoes throughout the armory.
These people are not the traditional version of homeless with whom everyone is familiar. When people hear the word "homeless," their minds immediately create a certain picture.
"They think it's lazy and crazy people--people peeing down their legs," says Maury Kendall, communications manager for the nonprofit Emergency Housing Consortium--a division of United Way Silicon Valley that runs this shelter. He points out that this stereotype may provide a certain comfort to people--it's a way to distance themselves from homelessness.
Most of the homeless do not fit this description. Most of them work hard all day. They're proud of what they do. But when work is over, unlike most of their co-workers, they have no house or apartment to which to return.
What separates these people from their co-workers? Often times, it's one stroke of bad luck, one missed paycheck. One day they own a home, the next day they're struggling for a meal. For some, it happens so quickly, it's hard to come to terms with it.
Eckermann says, one stroke of bad luck led to another ... and another. He calls it "a vicious cycle."
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Two-year-old Clarissa Eckermann, plays on mats lying out on the floor of the Sunnyvale Armory Cold Weather Shelter. The mats will serve as beds for her family and 123 other people later on that night.
When Eckermann and his family returned to California with their furniture, they found, because of a legal technicality, that the house they had one more payment left on wasn't theirs anymore.
"I thought it would be easy to find another place," Eckermann says.
But as Kendall says, "It's not the money, it's the market."
Eckermann soon found that it wouldn't be easy to find another house. And that opened up the floodgates.
"If you don't have a house, you have to get a storage unit to put your furniture in. You've got to go stay at a hotel. Motel 6 at $550 a week is the cheapest I know of unless you go to a place with hookers and drug dealers. But I've got a 2-year-old girl and she's so nice and sweet. And if you stay in a motel, you have no kitchen. So, now it's $20 a day minimum on food, which adds up to $600 a month. It comes down to which bill do you pay--there's not really a way out of it."
Scraping to keep himself and his family going, Eckermann found himself behind on child support--$25,000 behind, to be exact.
"Now I look like a deadbeat dad," he complains.
Trying to catch up on those payments, Eckermann found only one remaining bill that he can ignore for a while--a bill for housing. However, Eckermann and everyone else staying at the armory now face another problem. The EHC only runs the place as part of its Cold Weather Shelter Program, from November through March. As of March 31, they're out.
Further complicating Eckermann's situation is what he perceives as the "I don't care" attitude of people in California toward people in his position.
According to Kendall, Eckermann's situation is far from out of the norm in Silicon Valley these days.
"This place was designed as a temporary shelter for transients and street people," Kendall says. "Now it's low-cost housing for working class families. It's supposed to be a gateway concept, but there's nowhere to send them."
Kendall says the EHC is pushing to form a permanent shelter in Sunnyvale. But, for now, no such place exists and funding is hard to come by.
"After we're gone [from the armory], this place will be empty. But we just don't have the funds to make it year round," Kendall says.
EHC provided 869 people with over 13,000 nights of shelter at the Sunnyvale Armory this year. Fifty-nine children were served in Sunnyvale in contrast to only 11 children at EHC's similar program in Gilroy.
EHC relies on community support to help end homelessness. They seek donations of goods, services and volunteer time. For more information, visit www.homelessness.com, or call EHC at 294.1400.
Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
