My soulmate and I have been homeless for more than five years off and on. We are now trying to get off the streets after losing our jobs, our home, and everything we owned. We have lived on the street for five years this time. So we filled out applications for a housing voucher last March and qualified in January. We have filled out applications for apartment complexes and are waiting to hear when we will be able to move into one.

There are so many barriers in getting a roof over our heads, such as: being a homeless person who has to pass a credit check and requests for a list of past landlords (there weren’t any because it was five years since we had rented, and most of the landlords are deceased and the places are not for rent any more.) Making phone calls, talking to these apartment complexes, finding a one-bedroom apartment only to find out they only have two bedrooms instead of having many one-bedrooms available. They are very hard to find in Traverse City. It is very frustrating being turned down every time I call and talk to these people. It makes me not want to call because we get so tired of being turned down. So we keep looking on our housing list for the places that take our housing voucher and start all over again making the calls, filling out the applications, and start over again waiting and hoping.

These phone interviews with the owners get so hard, we want to say, What is the point of this? We need these people to have some compassion. Sometimes I just want to sit and cry because I am so stressed out from the rejections.

To get a homeless person off the street, why do they have a credit check when it has been years since any of us were off the street and we have a housing voucher. It doesn’t seem right. We see the owners of these low-income housing units having them torn down to put up condos that sit empty because nobody in town can afford to live in them. Yet everyone says, Why doesn’t he or she get a place and get off the street? This is why we can’t…there is no affordable housing in one-bedroom apartments for families when their children are grown up and have homes of their own.

I get so upset over the housing situation, I just want to give up but I keep struggling on, keeping my head up, telling myself that we will find a place soon, that someone has something out there. Some people have houses sitting there empty when these people could take the time to rent them to people and help the homeless people get off the street.