Before the sun was up one misty morning in mid-January, Joshlyn Caldwell, age 51, roused the five unhoused people she let sleep in her north Houston apartment—a man, a woman, and a young family of three. The men helped Joshlyn, who has been disabled since a 2010 car accident, limp down the stairs from the second story, and everyone piled into her dark gray SUV, arriving a little before 9 a.m. at the Beacon, a nonprofit downtown that connects people to homeless service providers across the city. The line in the courtyard outside the housing office was around nine people long, with one person receiving service inside. This made Joshlyn nervous. Next to the office door, a sign stated the housing department sees the first 20 to 30 people for assessment, depending on the number of available assessors each day. But sometimes it’s less, she told me. “It depends on how they feel.”
The Beacon’s wide, red-brick building is enclosed by an iron fence and sits adjacent to a Catholic church and the old Houston cotton exchange, now tenanted with bond agencies and attorneys’ offices. Every morning, men in neon-green shirts pick trash off the Beacon’s sidewalks, stepping over people camping there, occasionally asking if an item belongs to someone before tossing it. Joshlyn has spent many mornings here advocating for unhoused people lost in the housing application process, not as an official caseworker—in fact, she was homeless herself until 2016, when the Beacon connected her with housing. But when service providers go AWOL, she’s often the one wrangling the documents necessary to land an apartment.
After the group had been at the Beacon for 20 minutes, Josh Davis, a housing assessor, stepped into the courtyard outside the housing office with a clipboard, and the line of people converged around him, including Joshlyn and her five clients. There was Raymund Hollins, 46, who said he had lived in his car for a year before Joshlyn found him; Desiree Hill, 50, who called Joshlyn immediately after being released from the psychiatric hospital; and Passion Clark, 19, with her boyfriend, Jaseven Hill, and their 2-year-old, Mackenzie, fast asleep in a pink jumper. Everyone leaned in with palpable urgency, waiting in silence for their turn to ask about their case.
