‘The walls were touching my face’: Why is quadriplegic Sacramentan still living in a tent? | Opinion

After I wrote back in October about a woman with quadriplegia living in a hospital bed in a tent by the American River in one of the richest states in the richest country in the world, I thought her situation was surely going to change.

And it did: Now that woman, 40-year-old Holly Porter, is instead living in a tent at the Colfax Avenue homeless encampment known as Camp Resolution.

This is not because she so loves the fresh air that she won’t come inside, but because just as the system is not set up to help the most seriously mentally ill Californians, neither was it designed with the most physically vulnerable in mind.

“Our systems aren’t built for the people who need them,” said the homeless activist Niki Jones, who is helping to negotiate a deal between Sacramento and residents at the Colfax site — a deal that will hopefully include a guarantee of real housing for Porter.

Jones is right that great need tends to be a barrier to service rather than a shortcut to getting help.

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I do not want to think our safety net was designed for the ease and comfort of those who stitched it together. For service providers, too, it’s a lot more complicated than it needs to be. But prioritizing those who require the least help rather than the most is without any doubt cheaper and easier.

What Holly Porter is asking for is a roof and some privacy, since she can’t take care of her own bodily needs. And this would have to be in someplace accessible, where her mom and her dog Felicia can stay with her; is that really a peak too high to climb?

In October, she told me she wanted to live “anywhere that’s not here. I’m not picky.” When I stopped by to see her recently, she said, “I am not expecting a brand new mansion. A one-bedroom would be good” — enough space for her and her mother, who lives in the tent next door and takes care of her and their two dogs. The only “housing” she has ever turned down is a bed in a congregate shelter.

Porter is incredibly resilient; even after one of our recent rain and wind storms, she texted me that “it was a little rough and a little wet, but we made it through.” She does not want to be homeless, though, and should not be.

When I visited her again after the storms, she apologized for the mess in her tent, which was not really messy but was still not quite dry, either. “We had to take everything off the walls” she said, to keep her belongings from being soaked. That happened anyway, even with everything possible tucked into plastic bags and tubs. And as the wind and water tore through Sacramento, “the walls were touching my face for a minute.”

Imagine that you can’t move, your tent’s walls are down on your nose, and you’re out of your anxiety meds that the new doctor you recently had to switch to had not yet called in. Would you be as brave as Holly Porter? I can’t swear that I would.

“Lightning’s the only thing that scares me,’’ she assured me, “and I can’t see it from the tent. This winter’s been bad, but I adapt.”

Yes, she does. “Holly’s a savage,” said her friend Joyce Williams, who means this as a high compliment.

‘There doesn’t seem to be anywhere for that person’

She never even thought of going to one of the city’s warming centers, she said, for one thing because she couldn’t go off and leave her stuff, particularly her generator, which powers her electric hospital bed.

But why is she still unhoused? Porter does have an income now, which wasn’t the case before. Since her disability application was finally approved in October, on the fifth try, she has been receiving $1,040.21 a month. But that isn’t enough for market rate housing.

And she still hasn’t been able to find a place, despite being on “every waiting list in town.”

If you think that a homeless person who only has a little mobility in one hand, suffers from congestive heart failure and has been told she has a few years to live would surely be first in line for housing, guess again.

Those with disabilities as serious as hers are, on the contrary, among the hardest to place, according to Erin Johansen, CEO of the housing and treatment nonprofit Hope Cooperative and current chair of the Sacramento Continuum of Care. “There doesn’t seem to be anywhere for that person. Folks that can’t live on their own, there’s no place for.”

At 40, Porter is too young for Adult Protective Services.

With no significant mental health diagnosis, she doesn’t qualify for housing on that account.

Porter has long been told that she can’t get a hotel voucher because to qualify for that, you have to be able to take care of yourself.

With her mom as her caretaker, I’ve never understood why that couldn’t be made work. But her mother can’t be paid as her caretaker right now because both mother and daughter are homeless. And without that income, it’s of course harder for the two of them to get into a place.

MediCal pays for in-home support for those who are disabled, but that’s not 24/7. Porter does need someone who’s available most of the time, and so is too compromised for that to work.

A person who needs full-time nursing care can at least try to get a doctor’s order for that, but she doesn’t need constant medical intervention. So for that option, she is not compromised enough.

“She needs help with daily care, but that’s not what there’s a provision for,” Johansen said . “That’s why there’s a gap, and why we have so many folks in wheelchairs” living on the street. “That’s such a gap,” she added, “I’m surprised we don’t hear of more people dying” as a result.

WellSpace Health operates the Gregory Bunker Care Transitions Center, which offers care to homeless folks on a short-term basis, for example after surgery, but since Porter’s condition is not expected to improve, that’s not the place for her, either.

‘She should be housed by now’

She does have some factors in her favor: She has an Emergency Housing Voucher from HUD, and just recently qualified for enhanced case management through CalAIM, which offers no help with rent but would provide moving expenses once she found a place.

Porter’s new “housing navigator,” who works for her insurance company, Anthem, unfortunately “dropped the ball,” and didn’t get in touch with her when he was supposed to, according to Hope’s CalAIM program manager. But now that he has, her housing assessment is scheduled for Feb. 1.

And then? Housing “capacity is so stretched,” Johansen said, that finding a place quickly is far from guaranteed.

A further barrier, according to another HOPE supervisor who had been working on Porter’s case, is her dog and her mom’s dog. They’re pitbulls, which many landlords see as a reason to say no.

Her pets “are a big problem” complicating the search, Johansen said, though she also said it’s possible that if Porter got a doctor to certify them as emotional support dogs, owners might be barred from refusing her on that basis.

The bottom line, though, is that all of these obstacles put together can’t be the end of the story. “She should be housed by now,” Johansen said, and who could disagree?

While I was meeting with her about Porter’s situation on Wednesday, a new possibility occurred to the Hope CEO: Her organization does have a small amount of money from Kaiser, she said, that can be used for temporary housing for those in the CalAIM program while they’re waiting for something more permanent.

So if Johansen could just find a motel that is accessible, is willing to take two pitbulls and can also take Porter’s hospital bed, without which she’s intensely uncomfortable because the electric bed allows her to adjust her own position, well then that might work. She hoped to hear something back by the end of the day on Thursday, but didn’t.

Meanwhile, the city is still negotiating with the homeless community at the Colfax site about the possibility of leasing them the property and bringing in trailers where folks would live there.

And an important part of the discussions between the city and those living at Camp Resolution has been what would happen to Porter, who woke up unable to move after suffering a uterine inversion — a rare, potentially fatal complication in which the uterus turns inside out during childbirth — in 2020. The son she still grieves was already dead when she got to the hospital, but then she developed sepsis and only came out of a medically induced coma a month later.

“We’re talking in good faith,” with the city manager’s office and the city attorney, said Niki Jones, and have been “writing back and forth emails about her situation.” Of course, “that’s all just talk until there’s a solution that works for Holly. She has been working on accessing services for years.”

I can’t accept that there won’t be a solution, and now would be good.

Then we have to get to work on the bigger problem, which is that there are hundreds of other Hollys in our city, and a system that’s not set up to serve any of them.