Homeless No More
Homeless no more: Long road leads man to assistance, home
By April Charlton/Senior Staff Writer/Times Press Recorder
a division of Lee Central Coast Newspapers
During one Nipomo native’s struggle with homelessness, he did everything he could to sleep standing up.
“I felt a lot of shame,” William Diaz said about the period of his life when the now 36-year-old often slept in a stand of trees behind the Nipomo Men’s Club in Olde Towne. “I wouldn’t want to sleep on the ground when I was homeless,” he explained, “because if I woke up on the ground, then I was officially homeless. I didn’t want to be that. At least if I was standing up, I was doing something … had somewhere to go.”
Diaz’s years-long on-again, off-again battle with homelessness started when his mother moved to Missouri when he was about 18; the troubled teen opted not to leave Nipomo. “I stayed, and once that happened, I was pretty much on my own,” Diaz said, noting that his mother wanted him to move with her. For the first three years after his graduation from Lopez High School — a time when most other people his age where attending college — Diaz lived in a 1969 Chevrolet Impala and tried to stay employed. “I couldn’t hold a job for more than two weeks at a time,” Diaz said. “It seemed like what was easy for others to do was really hard for me. I couldn’t deal with anybody. I would try to figure out what was wrong with me.”
Eventually, Diaz did seek help from Community Health Centers of the Central Coast, but his journey was a long and difficult one. Diaz believed many of his problems at the time stemmed from his age and an “attitude” that cost him multiple jobs and left him without the means to meet his basic daily needs, he said. When he awoke in the morning — on a couch at a friend’s or family member’s house and often on the streets — all he wanted to do was fall back asleep to escape what he saw — an endless, empty road with no future. “I would open my eyes and say, ‘What am I waking up for?’”
In 1998, Diaz’s father, who lived in Nipomo, took his son into his home, giving him a place to find refuge and sleep, eat and shower. However, life didn’t get much easier for Diaz, who struggled with physical and mental health problems that kept him from realizing his future was more than a life of homelessness. His father also died in 2005, and without a job, Diaz soon lost their home and found himself with nowhere to go but the streets, he said.
A year later, Diaz took part in a homeless enumeration study (see related story), and was introduced to Jan Stone, a case manager with Community Health Centers of the Central Coast (CHC). He didn’t, however, take the help that was offered. “The first time that I tried transitional housing, I withdrew,” Diaz said, adding he didn’t seek help until “it got to the point where I had to sleep on the ground.” “Even if I had money in my pocket, I couldn’t go into a store. I didn’t want people to see me, smell me. It was a cloud of shame.” After waking up one morning on the cold ground behind the Nipomo Men’s Club, Diaz made the decision to reach out for help; he borrowed change from a family member and took the bus to CHC in Grover Beach.
Diaz was given a bed at the Maxine Lewis Memorial Shelter in San Luis Obispo, signed up for transitional housing and assessed for his health issues. He also started seeing medical doctors. “It would have escalated and got worse (if I didn’t seek help),” Diaz said. “I can’t even imagine. I would have been institutionalized or not even here anymore.” Today, he has his own apartment in San Luis Obispo, regularly sees his doctors and started school at Allan Hancock College recently. Diaz hopes to transfer to Cal Poly to earn a degree in social science. After graduation, he plans to work with low-income and homeless persons, using his own trials to help others in need. “I think I understand what homeless people are going through,” Diaz said. “So many are misunderstood. People say all the time, ‘Why don’t you just get a job?’ It’s not that easy. It took someone to reach out to me.”