Back on Its Feet, Family Grateful for Aid

Jim McHenry felt the walls of the Buena Park motel room closing in when he picked up the telephone and called Irvine Temporary Housing.

For three years, McHenry, his wife and three children had called the $180-a-week room and kitchenette at the Gaslite Motel their home.

A mechanic who had repaired heavy farm equipment, he had packed up his family and moved from the economically troubled farm belt to California. He and his wife both found work in Orange County, but rents were too expensive. So they settled into the motel to save money to buy a place of their own.

But last December, McHenry, 43, suffered a heart attack at the same time the couple’s teen-age daughter, Serena, was undergoing a series of unexpected operations to correct a congenital bone abnormality.

The couple had no medical insurance, and their paychecks could not keep up with the rent, food and clothing. The medical bills devoured the family’s tiny nest egg and pushed them to the financial edge by spring.

“It was the lowest point in my life,” McHenry said. “How do you choose between your daughter’s comfort and shelter for your family?”

His wife, Sharlene, 34, “pleaded with me to spend a quarter and call ITH,” he recalled. “I’ve got a lot of pride. But my marriage was in trouble, the rent was due and my life was unraveling. . . . So I dialed.”

The call, he said, saved his life.

Within weeks, the family had applied for and received a 90-day stay in one of five apartments that nonprofit Irvine Temporary Housing offers to homeless families.

They were placed in a two-bedroom apartment, and ITH provided most of the meals. The McHenrys, like many in the program, paid $250 a month for the apartment, which normally rents for $1,000 a month or more. Paying rent is not mandatory but is encouraged to prevent dependency.

McHenry said he needed to pay something to restore some self-respect.

“Living in the motel made me feel like half a human,” he said. “I was working, working real hard, but we were going nowhere. . . . I had failed. That’s all I could think about.”

By September, the McHenrys had “graduated” from the program, having saved about $3,000 and established themselves in Irvine. They rented a three-bedroom condominium on a quiet street in Irvine’s Deerfield neighborhood. The children, ages 11, 12 and 15, were enrolled in local schools, and Jim had a job at UC Irvine repairing lawn mowers and tractors. His wife, Sharlene, found work in the city as a sales clerk at Mervyn’s Department Store.

“We’ve started a new life,” said McHenry, who is angry at the recent criticism leveled at Irvine Temporary Housing.

People caught up in the debate about whether the service should expand by converting a vacant dog kennel into a shelter for homeless families are missing the point, he said.

“It doesn’t matter whether you sprinkle people around the city or house them in one location,” he said. “What’s important is they get some help. How many of those people complaining about ITH have ever lived day to day, hour to hour? It’s scary living on the edge.”

Operators of Irvine Temporary Housing say that the McHenrys are typical of the homeless or displaced families in the program. They are not Skid Row castaways, but families whose troubles are rooted in unemployment, divorces or serious illness. Many of the applicants in recent months have been single women with children.

Jim Palmer, the group’s executive director, said 56 families have been admitted to the program since it began in 1984, and more than 70% of those are now making it on their own.

The goal, Palmer said, is self-sufficiency.

The McHenrys have achieved that, but Sharlene McHenry remembers when she “kept wondering where it was all gonna end in that motel room.”

Now, she said, the children have their own rooms. And if she can’t sleep at night, she can go to another room and read or think, a luxury that many take for granted.

“I used to have trouble sleeping because I was scared about what was happening to this family,” she said. “Now I wake up at night and just ponder how lucky we are.”