Part of my job is to attend meetings. Some of them are incredibly dull, some are informative and then there’s the outlier; the meeting that changes everything. I was a couple of months on the job when I met Meredith Tracy. After writing about the blessing box her husband had built with a few members of their church, she told me there was a new group forming in town to meet about the growing homelessness crisis in Newton.
In the Midwest, homelessness isn’t something we see or think about very often, but when I lived in Los Angeles it could be overwhelming at times. Thousands live on the streets of Los Angeles, and in one particularly tough neighborhood, known as Skid Row, the light of a hundred trash can fires twinkle in the night.
One of the things you become particularly adept at when you live in LA, is cold-shouldering the homeless. You never know what you’re going to encounter with the homeless, and mental illness and drug addiction are huge drivers in homelessness, with more than half of all homeless struggling with some form of addiction. Over the years, I’d gotten used to walking quickly, with my head down to avoid any form of contact with them.
After moving back to Des Moines full-time last year, one of the first things I noticed was that homelessness had begun to creep into the Midwest. It’s always been there, but now the signs were hard to ignore. Every morning as I headed into the office I’d see the same guy at the on-ramp, dressed in ragged clothes and holding a cardboard sign begging for assistance. Ignoring the problem doesn’t change anything, and homelessness continues to rise.
After meeting with Meredith Tracy, it was obvious homelessness was a problem in Newton as well. Tracy told me that she and her husband restocked their blessing box on a daily basis, struggling to meet the demand in the community. When I looked around the town, it was easy to see the signs that aren’t visible at first.
When I stepped out of the office in the mornings for the first cigarette of the day, I’d notice the “butt hut” in the alley was always open. The only cigarettes left swilling in the bottom were smoked all the way down to the filter. Someone had been coming by every night to look for discarded cigarettes.
One thing led to another, and it wasn’t long before I met Robyn Taylor, one of the most passionate homeless advocates I’ve ever known in my journalism career. Taylor, along with her friend Marilyn Terlouw had been going out night after night to look for the homeless and to see what she could do to help them. Together, Taylor and Terlouw formed Friends in Hope, an organization dedicated to helping Newton’s needy.
It was Robyn Taylor who first introduced me to Jason Purtilo. In and out of jail ever since he was 18 years old, Jason had been living on the streets when Robyn and Marilyn found him this spring. I asked Robyn if he’d be willing to talk to me about the homelessness crisis in Newton, and after some initial reluctance, he agreed. Together, Robyn, Jason and I cruised the streets of Newton as Jason pointed out different “traphouses” in the city, places where drug dealers and users congregate.
Homelessness is a bigger problem in Newton than most realize, Purtilo said. City officials may claim that Newton’s homeless population is close to 100, but Jason said many of the transitional homeless, people couch surfing from house to house, often don’t get counted. Jason pegged the number of homeless at 500, a huge number for a community with a population as small as Newton’s.
As a reporter, we don’t usually get involved. That’s not what we’re trained to do. We’re supposed to be objective, like the Silver Surfer, we watch and observe and report back. Still, I couldn’t help but be concerned about the city’s homeless population, long overlooked. I met with my editor, and I pitched an idea to create a special section about the homeless crisis, which is inserted in today’s paper. Any advocate will tell you, the first thing you can do is to get people talking about the problem. I hope reading this will spur conversations across the city about how to address this problem, and how to make the city a better place for every resident.
Even if it means sitting through more dull meetings.
Contact David Dolmage
at ddolmage@newtondailynews.com