
Haven for Hope's campus
A few months ago, a $100 million campus for the homeless called Haven for Hope opened its gates in San Antonio. (Not so fast: drop your deadly weapons and illegal narcotics, please, into the “amnesty box” here at security.)
Touted as the first of its kind anywhere, the crisp, college-like campus is a coalition of about 80 social service agencies, many of them located on-site to deliver direct aid to the homeless. For the first time, the homeless here have access to meals, housing, job training, counseling, medical care and other services in one place.
As reporters on the newspaper’s projects team, my colleague, Melissa Fletcher-Stoeltje, and I are tasked with covering Haven, from its opening through the inevitable hiccups and successes that are following.
I’ve met some interesting homeless folks with some interesting names: among them, Moose, Blessed and Brad Cain.
I’ve tried to keep up with Blessed and Cain, a challenging process. Blessed resisted living at Haven and disappeared onto the streets for a while before popping up unexpectedly and joyfully in Haven’s kitchen. Cain was the first man on campus, but he has since foundered against the structured way of life there. I wrote about his complaints and his anger problems. At the moment, Cain is no longer speaking to me.
I’ve also wandered through some interesting places, most notably Ghost Town, a stalled construction zone in which scores of homeless commandeered their own sparsely furnished condos.
Melissa and I, along with photographer Bob Owen (a force of nature in following this unfolding story), spent the night in Haven’s courtyard, where the chronically homeless come to shower, eat and sleep on mats — and sometimes to sleep off drug and alcohol binges.
I wrote about Haven’s struggle to assist the large portion of the homeless who are mentally ill.
And I chronicled a big problem at Haven — the rampant misuse of prescription medications aggravated by the lack of an ordered system at Haven to dispense them.
For more on this massive experiment in social transformation, click here for MySA’s orderly compilation of coverage.
From my end, there’s certainly more to come.