California
I am a biologist and former investor who became homeless as a consequence of a particularly damaging and vindictive separation in which everything I had was lost except my dog which was abducted but escaped and returned to me. I was wealthy and experienced great fear and trepidation over the loss of my home and the consequences that would follow. I have no family and the damage of the relationship I was in had deeply damaged my friendships and destroyed my business. I knew I was to be homeless and for two years, I was. I would be lying if I told you it was not difficult, but there is, in the darkest days, a balance and in this case this was found in all that I have learned and in the role I had out there. Because I have an MD (I never worked as a physician, I worked instead in investments), I quickly became the go-to guy in situations that most certainly have ended in death had no one been there to perform the most simple of acts that, in moments of crisis when everything in a 90 second window counts, come too late or not at all because our own doubts and hesitations. On many occasions, words were the only buffer between life and death. I tell you this so that you will better understand the situation that my question concerns and that my words hopefully be believed because were I the man I was 6 years ago, I would have taken far too lightly what I about to relate and the reason for that would have been found in the stereotypes and assumptions we share about people based on things like where they live.
As I was in Air Force Intelligence during the early years of my life, I was given a voucher in the HUD/VASH program. I found what appeared to be a studio apartment atop a printing business. The person working with me at HUD told me that they would have to verify that the address was residential and soon enough, I was told that the building was zoned residential/commercial and I could move in. For 18 months my health was improving and I was able to concentrate on building a life again. That all ended when a zoning compliance officer knocked at the door and told me I had to move immediately. The building I was in was a commercial building. HUD and the VA put me in an apartment complex that I knew had been condemned for a few years. At that point I had no understanding of why and to be honest, I was just glad the transition would be seamless.
On arrival I noticed the general state of the building was dilapidated. I didn’t worry about it. I was more concerned about going back to living outside. However, the worries would come. Again, as there were a lot of poor and elderly veterans about, I fell into a role that was assigned to me by these people: doctor, counselor, reader for those who themselves could not, and general companion for the lonely. I began to notice patterns. Some took many months to emerge.
The first came, as they all did, from offhand comments about my small dog who goes with me everywhere. I noticed that without exception, these comments came from residents whose dogs had died. When I became concerned about this and more probing to the point where I had interviewed every resident here, the pattern became clear: every dog in the building dies at about their 2nd year of residency here regardless of age or any other variables save weight. If a dog was larger, say over 20lbs, it’s life expectancy was about 4 years. Since I have been here two years, every small dog has died and the larger ones belonging to owners here for at least 4 years are dying now. One resident had 2 dogs, unrelated to each other and both died with weeks of the other at 2 years in. In my talk with her I discovered that she had paid for a necropsy for each. One was 3 and the other 12 at time of death. The veterinarian listed, as the cause of death, “cancer throughout the body” in both cases.
Soon enough, I began seeing a second pattern: these fatalities crossed species and again, life expectancy patterns were dependent upon size. One resident bred rats before he became homeless. Living now in this building, he tried to start his hobby up by buying 10 rats. These should have lived 8 years on average. They did not. All ten died after about 6 months. He bought 10 more. Those also were dead on or about 6 months in.
Eventually, I met residents of other homes or buildings in the neighborhood and heard the same story from each: the building I was in was bought and was populated with homeless veterans out of a condemned status with no apparent work done on the building in spite of the fact the health department had condemned it.
Eventually, I met an individual who had a pdf copy of the health department letter which shut the building down. It stated that the building was “too dangerous for even transient occupancy” and that an owner’s idea to run it as a motel was forbidden. I called the local VA and told them what I had seen. They informed me that that information was “wrong”. My caseworker said something more revealing. When I mentioned the letter and asked whether the VA knew about it she said “of course”. I then asked her how it could possibly be that veterans of our military could be housed here. She said, “The County Health Department reconsidered this issue and reversed their position.” Never in my life had I been more astonished. I went directly to the county to see if any work had been done on the building to address whatever it was that had closed it in the first place. Records show that no work permit has been authorized at this address in 20 years. I spoke to my case worker & she stated that the VA already knew this and I was worried about nothing.
I have been here 2 years. My dog suddenly has fallen ill. He is coughing and his energy is gone. If he follows the path of every other dog that has lived here, very soon he will eat less and less until he stops. He will then stop drinking and he will die.
There are 100 people living here. Some months it’s more, but each month at least one resident dies. It’s an astonishing rate. And every one, except 2 out of all the veterans I am thinking of, died with an oxygen bottle in their room, struggling to breathe. These veterans, to the last, are taken directly to Neptune Society for cremation immediately. Their ashes are spread over a rose garden by the freeway. Not one has had a funeral. Not one has ever been mentioned in the paper. To anyone outside, I imagine they simply disappear.
One a month at least.
One day recently, I looked up in my room and with horror saw my ceiling for the first time. Of course I had seen it a thousand times. This time I saw what it meant. This building was built in the late 60s. The rooms have a popcorn ceiling. It’s hanging down in sheets in some rooms. In some it is covered with black mold. In some, there is a lot of both.
Dogs are sentinel animals. A person’s life expectancy can be calculated based upon the death of their dog. Typically, a dog has an 8 year latency period between exposure and death. Their owners have almost 40. That latency period can shrink based on several factors and one is ventilation. These are unchanged dilapidated motel rooms from the 1960s. We can’t drink the water here. We are not told why. I had it lab tested. It contains lead and pesticides and other very bad things which leads me to believe that if I had the money necessary for a lab to cast a wider net, the news would be much worse. Because the people working here are not trained in science, they don’t realize that the people they have told not to drink it, continued to cook with it. I have done what I can to stop this. At any rate, back to latency periods. The model dogs provide is a straight ratio: if they are dying in 2 years, their owners will die in 7 years or so depending on overall health. What I am talking about here is asbestos. I can no longer speak without becoming winded. My son is 28. He is on the autism spectrum. His pulse was 65 when we moved in. Today it is 80-90. My dog will die in 6 months. He is a young dog that should have been with me another 8 years. Instead, he is unable to walk more than a few dozen feet anymore and lies with his neck stretched out trying to breathe. His breathing has become load and reminds me nightly of my error in taking so long to understand.
I have been talking to everyone I can and the local VA seems coordinated in their unwillingness to help us or now, even admit what they openly spoke about earlier: the fact that this building was brought out of a condemned status for health reasons to kill at least 30 veterans since I moved in. My ceiling now has wet spots. Tomorrow I will inform the management about this and will likely receive what previous requests in writing have received: nothing.
The White House VA hot line calls local personnel and receives denials. The locals call me & ask why I’m bothering people. Before I became homeless, my word mattered. 24 hours later it was worthless. I am exhausted. I don’t even know if I have a question. I know I will die as will my dog and likely, my son. It took me too long to realize what was happening. I trusted my government to the point that my mind would not go, for too long, where logic said it must. I believed in America. And I still do. But I also believe that we have crossed the Rubicon. If we can do this to our veterans during a national crisis in homelessness because enticing landlords to appreciate the sacrifice made by American veterans in war and peacetime requires more than what this great people see in their own liberty and freedom, in 100 years it won’t be us running this country. It will be a people that still remember the value of the American dream. By then that dream will be called something else... something we do not yet know. But it will be a dream lost and then found because the people after which it was named thought that none save themselves could have it.
I don’t have a question. This does not mean that none will have an answer.
I am a biologist and former investor who became homeless as a consequence of a particularly damaging and vindictive separation in which everything I had was lost except my dog which was abducted but escaped and returned to me. I was wealthy and experienced great fear and trepidation over the loss of my home and the consequences that would follow. I have no family and the damage of the relationship I was in had deeply damaged my friendships and destroyed my business. I knew I was to be homeless and for two years, I was. I would be lying if I told you it was not difficult, but there is, in the darkest days, a balance and in this case this was found in all that I have learned and in the role I had out there. Because I have an MD (I never worked as a physician, I worked instead in investments), I quickly became the go-to guy in situations that most certainly have ended in death had no one been there to perform the most simple of acts that, in moments of crisis when everything in a 90 second window counts, come too late or not at all because our own doubts and hesitations. On many occasions, words were the only buffer between life and death. I tell you this so that you will better understand the situation that my question concerns and that my words hopefully be believed because were I the man I was 6 years ago, I would have taken far too lightly what I about to relate and the reason for that would have been found in the stereotypes and assumptions we share about people based on things like where they live.
As I was in Air Force Intelligence during the early years of my life, I was given a voucher in the HUD/VASH program. I found what appeared to be a studio apartment atop a printing business. The person working with me at HUD told me that they would have to verify that the address was residential and soon enough, I was told that the building was zoned residential/commercial and I could move in. For 18 months my health was improving and I was able to concentrate on building a life again. That all ended when a zoning compliance officer knocked at the door and told me I had to move immediately. The building I was in was a commercial building. HUD and the VA put me in an apartment complex that I knew had been condemned for a few years. At that point I had no understanding of why and to be honest, I was just glad the transition would be seamless.
On arrival I noticed the general state of the building was dilapidated. I didn’t worry about it. I was more concerned about going back to living outside. However, the worries would come. Again, as there were a lot of poor and elderly veterans about, I fell into a role that was assigned to me by these people: doctor, counselor, reader for those who themselves could not, and general companion for the lonely. I began to notice patterns. Some took many months to emerge.
The first came, as they all did, from offhand comments about my small dog who goes with me everywhere. I noticed that without exception, these comments came from residents whose dogs had died. When I became concerned about this and more probing to the point where I had interviewed every resident here, the pattern became clear: every dog in the building dies at about their 2nd year of residency here regardless of age or any other variables save weight. If a dog was larger, say over 20lbs, it’s life expectancy was about 4 years. Since I have been here two years, every small dog has died and the larger ones belonging to owners here for at least 4 years are dying now. One resident had 2 dogs, unrelated to each other and both died with weeks of the other at 2 years in. In my talk with her I discovered that she had paid for a necropsy for each. One was 3 and the other 12 at time of death. The veterinarian listed, as the cause of death, “cancer throughout the body” in both cases.
Soon enough, I began seeing a second pattern: these fatalities crossed species and again, life expectancy patterns were dependent upon size. One resident bred rats before he became homeless. Living now in this building, he tried to start his hobby up by buying 10 rats. These should have lived 8 years on average. They did not. All ten died after about 6 months. He bought 10 more. Those also were dead on or about 6 months in.
Eventually, I met residents of other homes or buildings in the neighborhood and heard the same story from each: the building I was in was bought and was populated with homeless veterans out of a condemned status with no apparent work done on the building in spite of the fact the health department had condemned it.
Eventually, I met an individual who had a pdf copy of the health department letter which shut the building down. It stated that the building was “too dangerous for even transient occupancy” and that an owner’s idea to run it as a motel was forbidden. I called the local VA and told them what I had seen. They informed me that that information was “wrong”. My caseworker said something more revealing. When I mentioned the letter and asked whether the VA knew about it she said “of course”. I then asked her how it could possibly be that veterans of our military could be housed here. She said, “The County Health Department reconsidered this issue and reversed their position.” Never in my life had I been more astonished. I went directly to the county to see if any work had been done on the building to address whatever it was that had closed it in the first place. Records show that no work permit has been authorized at this address in 20 years. I spoke to my case worker & she stated that the VA already knew this and I was worried about nothing.
I have been here 2 years. My dog suddenly has fallen ill. He is coughing and his energy is gone. If he follows the path of every other dog that has lived here, very soon he will eat less and less until he stops. He will then stop drinking and he will die.
There are 100 people living here. Some months it’s more, but each month at least one resident dies. It’s an astonishing rate. And every one, except 2 out of all the veterans I am thinking of, died with an oxygen bottle in their room, struggling to breathe. These veterans, to the last, are taken directly to Neptune Society for cremation immediately. Their ashes are spread over a rose garden by the freeway. Not one has had a funeral. Not one has ever been mentioned in the paper. To anyone outside, I imagine they simply disappear.
One a month at least.
One day recently, I looked up in my room and with horror saw my ceiling for the first time. Of course I had seen it a thousand times. This time I saw what it meant. This building was built in the late 60s. The rooms have a popcorn ceiling. It’s hanging down in sheets in some rooms. In some it is covered with black mold. In some, there is a lot of both.
Dogs are sentinel animals. A person’s life expectancy can be calculated based upon the death of their dog. Typically, a dog has an 8 year latency period between exposure and death. Their owners have almost 40. That latency period can shrink based on several factors and one is ventilation. These are unchanged dilapidated motel rooms from the 1960s. We can’t drink the water here. We are not told why. I had it lab tested. It contains lead and pesticides and other very bad things which leads me to believe that if I had the money necessary for a lab to cast a wider net, the news would be much worse. Because the people working here are not trained in science, they don’t realize that the people they have told not to drink it, continued to cook with it. I have done what I can to stop this. At any rate, back to latency periods. The model dogs provide is a straight ratio: if they are dying in 2 years, their owners will die in 7 years or so depending on overall health. What I am talking about here is asbestos. I can no longer speak without becoming winded. My son is 28. He is on the autism spectrum. His pulse was 65 when we moved in. Today it is 80-90. My dog will die in 6 months. He is a young dog that should have been with me another 8 years. Instead, he is unable to walk more than a few dozen feet anymore and lies with his neck stretched out trying to breathe. His breathing has become load and reminds me nightly of my error in taking so long to understand.
I have been talking to everyone I can and the local VA seems coordinated in their unwillingness to help us or now, even admit what they openly spoke about earlier: the fact that this building was brought out of a condemned status for health reasons to kill at least 30 veterans since I moved in. My ceiling now has wet spots. Tomorrow I will inform the management about this and will likely receive what previous requests in writing have received: nothing.
The White House VA hot line calls local personnel and receives denials. The locals call me & ask why I’m bothering people. Before I became homeless, my word mattered. 24 hours later it was worthless. I am exhausted. I don’t even know if I have a question. I know I will die as will my dog and likely, my son. It took me too long to realize what was happening. I trusted my government to the point that my mind would not go, for too long, where logic said it must. I believed in America. And I still do. But I also believe that we have crossed the Rubicon. If we can do this to our veterans during a national crisis in homelessness because enticing landlords to appreciate the sacrifice made by American veterans in war and peacetime requires more than what this great people see in their own liberty and freedom, in 100 years it won’t be us running this country. It will be a people that still remember the value of the American dream. By then that dream will be called something else... something we do not yet know. But it will be a dream lost and then found because the people after which it was named thought that none save themselves could have it.
I don’t have a question. This does not mean that none will have an answer.
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