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>> I never thought I'd be homeless.
I felt like it was us against the world.
Coming to San Francisco we had all these high hopes.
We were like campus is a great place.
It's beautiful.
We're so excited, you know.
We had all these hopes and then we came out here and it's just like damn, it's really hard.
Housing has been pretty difficult to come by.
I first moved out here and I found a place with a friend who lived off campus.
But then she got evicted so we both had to leave or pay like $1000 just to stay another night.
So we're just kind of like walking the street, one of our friends offered
to let us keep our stuff at her house while we like moved around, back and forward to school
and we were able to spend some nights with her but not all the time.
Sometimes we wouldn't have anywhere to go so we would just kind of wander around school,
wait until our friend would be like hey, you can come over.
It was really difficult.
>> Ever since I graduated high school at the age of 18 I was actually homeless.
What's kind of led to me to this point was stress, I think, the amount of stress of working
and going to school at the same time was taking its toll on me.
So by this year I started living in the homeless shelter.
The weight I was carrying was just too much for me.
Even the semester before I was having some trouble.
I take medication.
And I was living in a living room, which was stressful.
I worked the logistics out for me and coming home late and from work and trying
to manage my health on top of my school and academics and music.
>> In 2001 I experienced homelessness for the first time as a pregnant young woman.
I also struggled with drug addiction and all the other issues that come along
with it, incarceration and all of that.
It put me in a spot where I had to access the shelter system.
And off and on I was in transitional living and then I would go from here to there living
on the streets, staying in like a flea bag hotel to like being out all night.
It happened from like 2000 to, I want to say 2007 like off and on.
>> Yeah I used to go to this gas station and eat.
There's a lot of like just fast food and just things that I used to come to eat
and just hang out outside, at night mainly.
And then down the street on Shotwell [phonetic] I used to go and take the back alleys
and my friend had a tent behind and I used to go and stay there sometimes, yeah.
>> We mostly just like slept in the library.
I saw a lot of people like sleeping in the library so I didn't think it was like a weird
thing and it was just kind of like, ok, I'm tired.
I'm just going to go take a nap in the library, also the break room at work.
My roommate and I were both homeless but we didn't have like the same
schedules so it was kind of like, hey, where are you?
And then after work we'd kind of be like hey, like where we going to go?
So it was a lot of like empty time.
And we weren't like freaking out about school and like getting our work done.
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I think upstairs like by the new third floor they have just like rows and rows
and so we would just kind of like sit there and sleep.
After midnight this is closed so we kind of just like stick
to here, like research, backpack down.
>> I remember sitting on this spot, just kind of people watching.
So yeah I was just walking around campus, anything to keep us busy, yeah.
>> Using public bathrooms sometimes, going to the library a lot of the times.
Back then they didn't have the [inaudible] so I didn't have that resource.
There's only very limited places in the city
where you can take a shower and the lines are very long.
And so just being able to like go to the thrift store, go to St. Anthony's
to get clothes, things like that.
>> Right now I live in a place called Larkin [phonetic] Youth Services.
It's a homeless shelter for kids ages 18 to 24 and it's located in the Tenderloin neighborhood
of San Francisco right on the border of Van Ness and Ellis.
My family and I all live together in a house in Palo Alto so I was always granted
with the privilege of having, you know, a room to come home to after school.
I was inexperienced with a ton of like stress from at a young age like that
where you don't have a place to go to, like a home base,
but it's more recent towards the start of college when we all decided in my family to move
out of the house, was when I started experiencing that experience.
>> It was not only scary, really heavy.
We had to much clothes.
We were unprepared so we packed too much of the wrong stuff
so yeah it was definitely stressful having to lug all our stuff around from place to place
and all our valuables we had to always keep on us
so it's a little stressful, my laptops and stuff like that.
I think actually the whole time we felt unsafe.
We didn't not have a moment where we were just like awe, like you know?
We're just kind of always alert.
We both work downtown pretty late so then we'd just
kind of be like shuffling around with nowhere to go, kind of just endlessly wandering.
>> I think not only finding but keeping a job is hard.
I work here and I see people that do have jobs and they'll come
in the morning early, 4:00, 5:00,
to sign up for a bed and then they'll come back at 7:00 to pick up their reservation.
And I wasn't working when I was homeless.
I can't even imagine working full time and not being able to like lay your head
down or rest and put up your feet.
It must be hard.
>> It's draining, it's like taxing on yourself and your mind, your body,
you have to be very limited in what you carry around.
If you have a chance to have a locker here that will help too
but there's only certain hours that you can have access to it.
But I see people day after day have jobs.
>> It's definitely got me to think about that extra time to spend with friends,
you know, take care of my health.
I don't have to spend money on being in hospitals the rest of my life.
I can spend money on practicing guitar and maybe promoting myself, maybe devote that money
into like investing in my profession.
>> We went to the psychiatrist.
It was a time when we were just like really stressed out with school and everything.
And my friend, she gets depressed so we both went to the psychiatrist person and we talked
to them and they had told us about like homeless shelters but we didn't
really feel that we belonged in a homeless shelter.
It wouldn't have been a good fit for us.
So we didn't use those resources.
My freshman year was kind of just like going through all that and I was just kind
of like, is this what college is like?
But towards the end of that
I found some friends and that's what really helped.
>> I was hospitalized towards the end of the year.
And then the doctors through Keiser were able to find housing for me through the insurance.
They were helpful in locating me to Larkin.
It's really tough to get in, like you've got to call every morning.
You don't pay rent there but you've got to like do the foot work to get a bed there
and then maintain that same amount of work to continue to live there.
So it was through my medical provider, thankfully, that I have the place.
Otherwise I would have been me like digging through phone books or like the internet,
going to the library every day trying to find like somewhere to live.
>> There was a vicious cycle that I just couldn't get out of.
I wanted to get out but I just didn't know how.
I didn't know how to start.
I didn't know who to go to.
I didn't know like what first step to take.
And that was super hard for me.
I knew that I wanted something better for me and my family.
So I was able to work with a really good case manager and I applied
for all the housing options, which are very limited.
But they had this community housing partnership that was available to 44 of the families
that were in the shelter and I was able to get in one of those and I'm still there now.
And because of that I'm able to pursue my education because I'm not worried
about all the rent that I am paying you know especially now in San Francisco it's crazy,
ridiculous amounts of rent.
Being in a supportive environment where I'm only paying 30 percent
of my income just makes it so much easier.
I am able to go to school and then work towards my goal of being self-sufficient.
>> People think of a college today they think of them in a dorm or somewhere
at a party getting drunk or something like that.
They don't think about the other side in finding a place,
they just expect us to have a place and we don't, especially if we live off campus,
there's not a lot of help out there for us and the housing is really competitive.
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