Just a Place to Call Home : Housing: Patricia Hicks and 15 other homeless people will, thanks to Westminster, get temporary quarters and help finding work.

Patricia Hicks calls it the cleansing of her soul, these past eight months that she has spent homeless on the streets.

But the cold nights spent huddled in a sleeping bag with her dog, Sandy, are about over. Finally, Hicks, 43, will again enjoy hot baths, a bed and clean clothes. And more important, a chance to work again.

Next week, she will move into a temporary home in Westminster thanks to city officials, who decided to provide up to three months of housing for some of the city’s homeless.

Hicks and 15 others will live in two houses rented by the Westminster Redevelopment Agency and managed by Shelter for the Homeless, a nonprofit organization that operates in Orange County. Most are former residents of an encampment Caltrans shut down last month near the Beach Boulevard exit of the San Diego Freeway.

The 16 will also receive free food, utility services and the use of a telephone, and they will be given job training and help in finding work.

City officials describe the $10,000 effort as an investment in turning around the lives of homeless people.

Hicks agrees. “They have opened the door for me,” she said. “Now it’s up to me. If I blow this, I have no one to blame but myself.”

On Thursday, at the abandoned fire station where she has been staying, Hicks was preparing for the move. There was not much to pack: a pair of Levi’s, T-shirts, a Big Bird stuffed toy, a sleeping bag and a Little League banner fished from the garbage that her dog uses as a blanket.

“You learn to live with what people throw away,” she said.

She said her slide began in 1991, when she lost her job of 13 years as a purchasing agent with an air conditioning and heating company in Anaheim. Hicks said she had no savings because her mother had been ill for several years. By the time her mother died in 1990, Hicks said, she had been spending more than half her take-home pay on her mother’s medical bills.

Hicks said she has had one job since 1991, as a $5-an-hour motel desk clerk. She lost that job after less than a year and was unable to find other work, and she then was evicted from her apartment last October.

“All my friends forgot who I was,” she said. “I asked for help, but my half-sisters and half-brothers said, ‘Things are rough all over, Sis.’ ” (Her father died in 1987.)

“Once you start a downhill slide, the longer you are on that downhill slide, the harder it is to pull yourself back up,” Hicks said.

She said she knew she had hit bottom the day she found herself scavenging for aluminum cans and plastic bottles along Beach and Garden Grove boulevards in Garden Grove.

Pushing a grocery cart, Hicks would walk 10 to 12 miles a day looking for aluminum cans, plastic bottles and other recyclable things from dumpsters, she said.

The $3 to $5 she made redeeming them would be enough for “my sodas and a little food,” she said. She said enjoys beer occasionally but insists that she is not an alcoholic or drug user.

Employees at Ralphs Grocery store on Beach Boulevard would give her money, clothes and food from time to time.

“I cared about her very much,” said Lorita Langea bookkeeper at the store. “She’s very intelligent; she seems like a good person. I liked her dog.”

When Hicks came down with a cold during a rainy week in March, Ralphs employees contributed money for a motel room, Lange said.

“The only difference between myself and anybody else is that they have roofs over their heads and have jobs, and I don’t,” Hicks said. “I’m still a human being.”

There were days when she was ready to give up, she said. But having her cocker spaniel helped her keep going.

“I’d get down in the dumps sometimes,” Hicks said, “but Sandy would lie down next to me, we’d play ball and I would feel better again.”

Most shelters don’t accept homeless people with dogs, Hicks pointed out, so on many a rainy night Hicks stayed outside getting wet rather than leave her pet.

She said she slept wherever “the police didn’t bother me.” She moved from place to place until some of her homeless friends invited her to join them at the abandoned fire station on Goldenwest.

The station had become the home of about a dozen homeless people evicted from the San Diego Freeway encampment. City officials had condemned the structure as unsafe, but they decided to provide the homeless with temporary housing rather than send them out into the streets.

Hicks says she is grateful for the opportunity to leave this life behind. Within a year, she has promised herself, she will be back on her feet.

“I’ve learned about myself a whole lot,” Hicks said of the past eight months. “Some were good, some were bad,” she said of the things she learned. “I don’t want to go through it again. But, yes, I’m a stronger person now. I’ve learned I’m a survivor.”