Steve, a former Dowagiac veteran, knows too well the toll homelessness can take.
A truck driver since 1994, he was injured on the job in the summer of 2007 and fired shortly thereafter. He is still fighting denial of disability benefits.
He had been sharing a room with a friend. When his savings ran out in 2008, he found nowhere to turn.
Steve lived on the streets for three months, sleeping in abandoned buildings and “warm doorways to get out of the weather.”
He took shelter in a Kalamazoo mission for a year.
In 2009, he lived in a hunting trailer without running water at Kelsey Lake.
“A lot of people are really in denial about homelessness,” he said Wednesday evening. “It’s a nationwide travesty. It takes a toll on a person being homeless with no warm place to live.”
The experience tested his faith.
“I questioned why I had to go through all this stuff, but it made me stronger,” he said.
Steve served five years in the Navy before his 1983 discharge.
He is grateful for Veterans Administration assistance with medications and transportation when he needs to go to Benton Harbor, Battle Creek or Ann Arbor.
Steve, who will be 56 in August, said he mostly stays in his apartment because deteriorating health prevents him from walking far, like when he hitch-hiked during his homeless period to Decatur or Kalamazoo.
He qualifies for food benefits and Medicaid, but, as a single man with no children, housing seemed out of reach.
“I hated having to ask” for help, Steve said. “I’d always been self-sufficient.”
It’s not that he has no family, but his younger brother is with the Coast Guard in Nashville and his mother lives in a senior center in Buchanan.
“If it wasn’t for her (Cass housing specialist Jenifer Keller), I’d still be sleeping wherever I could find,” he said of his move into a Cassopolis apartment in February 2010 after his referral while being treated for depression at Woodlands Behavioral Healthcare System.
Keller, who grew up in Dowagiac, said homelessness “exists here, you just don’t know. They hide well, so people don’t believe it’s around here.”
She works in Cass County two days a week and in Van Buren County from the social services office in Hartford.