Had you sat by Alizé Satberry a few years ago at Kearny High School or Herbert Hoover High School or one of several charters she attended, you might have noticed that her dresses were a few years out of style.
Maybe you flagged that she never seemed to come on a field trip.
But the fact that she, her mom and three siblings were bouncing from hotel to hotel and shelter to shelter? That probably slipped by. And she could just as easily have missed if you were in the same boat.
The thing is, it’s a crowded boat.
When Satberry and her family first got to San Diego in 2016, there were about 16,500 students countywide who lacked a steady roof, according to the California Department of Education. By last academic year the total had risen to more than 17,800, including children who’ve temporarily doubled up in houses with other families.
The problem has become so pervasive that Barrio Logan’s Monarch School, which only serves unhoused families, has started to train educators at other organizations about how to spot and care for families on the edge. In El Cajon, Carol Lewis, a leader of Little House Family Resource Services, said she’s getting calls every day about students who, say, are struggling to do homework from the cars where they sleep.
Ariel Taylor, a 20-year-old who as a teenager spent many nights in backseats, told a crowd at a November youth homelessness rally that she initially felt too ashamed to ask for help.
Shame came up more than once during interviews with several young adults who recently lacked a stable place to live.
The feeling certainly applied to Satberry. She’s originally from Texas, but her family lost their house when the rental aid they had been receiving fell through, leading to a long stretch of crashing with anyone who had an open room.
At one point, a friend asked Satberry how she wanted her birthday coffee. Satberry asked whose birthday it was.
It’s yours, the friend said. Satberry was 16.
The family tried renting a garage in Las Vegas, but it was extremely hot. They kept moving west until they arrived in San Diego, and soon everyone was staying at the Rescue Mission’s downtown shelter.
A few days in, Satberry went to 7/11 to buy a $5 pizza. Outside she saw a homeless man asking passersby to get him water. It was a super-hot, no-breeze day, and the guy even had some money, but everybody seemed to either ignore his pleas or yell at him to leave.
Satberry bought him a water. She also realized that looking homeless changed how you were treated.
That feeling was bolstered by what she witnessed elsewhere. You weren’t allowed to stay in the shelter during the day, so each morning her family would stuff everything they owned into trash bags and find a tree to wait under. The nearby Waterfront Park has several trees, but its obvious perks (playground, restroom) came with glares from strangers and one woman who shouted that the family’s bags made the place look “tacky.”
Satberry started spending more time in the park bathroom. She would put brown shadow under her eyes to hide the bags and head off cracked lips with gloss. Even then, Satberry worried people would notice her spending 10 hours a day on the same patch of grass, so she sometimes spent those hours hiding by the toilets.
The strategy worked with strangers. Satberry occasionally overheard people in the park talking about other homeless residents but not her.
Good, she would think. I blend in.
Life got trickier once she enrolled in school. Satberry’s sleeveless dresses stuck out in a sea of skinny jeans. Questions about where she lived had to be deflected. And so what if a school dance cost “only” $45? That’s, like, nine 7/11 pizzas!
Very rarely, Satberry might tell another kid that she slept in a shelter. But because she now didn’t “look” homeless, classmates had trouble believing her. Some seemed to find it funny.
Eventually she decided it was easier to not even try making friends.
To quote Alli Walker, another local 20-something who was recently homeless: The process of constantly trying to find a place to sleep is “a seemingly unending cycle of uncertainty” that creates “loose ends left to fray.”
Satberry drew more inward. An innocuous task like “go to Target” could send her spiraling. Would employees notice that she barely had any money? Might one accuse her of shoplifting?
Satberry loved her family, but squeezing together in random rooms night after night was akin, in her words, to living in a cabin during an avalanche. Everyone was too focused on survival to offer much emotional support. She eventually stopped going to school.
Satberry didn’t feel like a kid, nor was she an adult. Sometimes she felt like nothing at all.
A turning point for her was the first night in a shelter run by San Diego Youth Services. The facility in central San Diego serves kids as young as 12, and soon after arriving Satberry recognized some of the teens around her. They had all gone to school together without anybody realizing the others were similarly homeless.
The staff was another revelation. You could talk with them about your homelessness without fear of judgment, but you could also not talk about being homeless and still know that everybody understood what you were going through.
Satberry awoke in that shelter the day she turned 18. This, unfortunately, was a birthday she had no problem remembering. As a newly minted adult, Satberry could no longer stay in a facility for kids.
She moved in and out of a friend’s place, slept on more couches and signed up for another shelter. (The rest of her family had left the state.) Months passed. There are nowhere near enough shelter beds countywide for everybody asking for help, and while at a women’s facility near the end of 2018, Satberry was told she needed to be out by February.
Weeks before that deadline, a separate program offered her an apartment downtown. She could live there indefinitely. Rent would at first be free, and once she found a job Satberry should only have to pay a percentage of her income.
End of story?
If you’ve spent any amount of time living outside, you know this is not the case.
Satberry hadn’t been in her new studio long when she started to panic. Was there more paperwork to sign? She must have missed something. Satberry rushed out the door to find a building manager.
Breathe, the guy told her. You’re housed now.
Satberry returned to her bed, sat down and burst into tears. They weren’t exactly happy tears. When you’ve had to spend years jamming down emotions, there’s a lot that might geyser back up.
She ran her hand over a wall. She touched the refrigerator. She opened the bathroom door. This is my shower? I get to wash up whenever I want for as long as I want? She closed the door. Then she opened it again.
Satberry began having a recurring nightmare where she would return to the apartment only to find that somebody else had moved in and locked her out. She would wake up hyperventilating.
Years passed. Satberry is now 24. She lives in the same building, has a paid internship with San Diego Youth Services and, as soon as she can assemble some paperwork, plans to finish her GED. After that, perhaps she’ll apply to San Diego City College.
Nonetheless, she still repeats one mantra in her apartment: “This is mine.”
In November, Satberry helped lead a march downtown for National Homeless Youth Awareness Month. She did the same thing last year, guiding the crowd in chants, but Satberry had been the only one with a bullhorn and by the end her throat was ragged.
This year, she made sure multiple people had bullhorns. And while Satberry walked at the front, she kept her voice even, almost unemotional.
“What do we want?” she asked.
“Housing,” the crowd shouted.
The fight to get every kid in a tent to a home increasingly felt more like a marathon than a sprint, she reflected later. You had to conserve some energy.
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
