Julie Hockman

It takes less than a minute of talking with Julie and looking into her eyes to know she is profoundly intelligent. Like many of the thousands of people living unsheltered on San Diego’s streets, the circumstances that caused her to become homeless are complex, personal, and often misunderstood. Her difficulties navigating the layered bureaucracy in place to get vulnerable individuals into housing and health care services are not unique, but in Julie’s case they are compounded by the myriad stereotypes heaped onto people with physical limitations.

The gravel in her speech is offset by a sparkle in her eye when she recites the assortment of pastries available in the day-old tray at Twiggs Coffeehouse and Bakery in University Heights where she is on a first name basis with the baristas. She commandeers a space there most days, blanketing the table with paperwork that chronicles her hospital visits, lists of medications, and appeals for housing assistance. She overlays those papers with letters of personal endorsement from lawyers, psychiatrists, academics and outreach workers, shuffling them around like puzzle pieces, hoping that in a different order the completed puzzle might reveal itself and transform magically into the key to her dream home.

She thought she had it worked out. She has an energetic case worker at PATH that found a suitable small home for her, one that would take her Section 8 voucher. But time was running out. Her voucher would expire in a month. And the landlord was still waiting for a check from the Housing Authority. Even though Amie Zamudio, co-founder of Housing 4 the Homeless, offered to pay for Julie’s rent until that check arrived and cleared, the landlord said no. Julie was forced to face the fact that what looked like a sure thing might just slide off the cliff and join the rockfall of other heartbreaks she has endured in her 64 years. As her move-in date came and went, her prescriptions ran out, and case workers stopped returning her calls. Ugly thoughts elbowed their way back into her mind, edging out the hope. She stopped caring.

Julie was lucky to survive her own birth. Being trapped in her mother’s birth canal deprived her of oxygen for enough time to cause brain damage. Her father was in the Navy so shortly after she was born the family moved from Oakland to San Pedro, and to Massachusetts soon thereafter. While they were on the East Coast her parents divorced, and her maternal grandmother died. Her mother moved back to California with Julie, her sister and brother to live on a boat in San Diego. Julie was seven when they all moved into a small cottage in Ocean Beach. Julie and her siblings finally felt they had a secure home. Then her mother started drinking, and bringing home boyfriends to party with.

Meanwhile Julie was getting initiated to her own cocktails - an ever-changing variety of drugs meant to regulate her behavior. At age nine she began a lifelong series of visits to institutions that were created for children that were not developing along a predictable path, and who could not be managed with existing medications.

“I went to hospital schools,” Julie said. “But they weren’t schools. They were locked institutions. There was no education. It was just crafts. I never want to see another craft.”

From that first locked hospital on Sepulveda Blvd. in Los Angeles with its heavy doses of thorazine, to a ranch run by a female minister in Lakeside designed to wean clients off their medications, Julie developed her own understanding of what felt normal, and what constituted malpractice. Contrary to what many people living on the street feel about being prescribed psych drugs, Julie wants nothing more than a regular prescription of the medications she knows will give her peace of mind and alleviate pain in various parts of her body. She currently wears patches for restless leg syndrome. She also suffers from sleep disorder which means she sleeps sitting up in a chair, for about 20 minutes at a time, if she’s lucky.

Her frustration with finding housing exacerbates her schizoaffective disorder and generalized anxiety. She can’t stay in a shelter because of her multiple health needs, like neurodevelopmental disorder, she said, and many places won’t let clients be in charge of their own medications. “My brain has chemical imbalances,” she said. “I need my meds.”

When staying with her sister in Missouri didn’t work out, she returned to San Diego and did find housing, but was evicted in April of 2021 when the landlord said her Section 8 check wasn’t covering the full rent. Her sister paid for her to stay in a cheap hotel in National City across from the naval base that was so dirty and full of roaches Julie ended up sleeping outside the hotel. She was robbed there twice of her expensive electronics, including a computer. She has been living on the streets ever since.

Julie is no stranger to the local hospitals. She said she has been locked in restraints at Mercy and tranquilized with ketamine then released 72 hours later at 3 a.m. wearing just a tee shirt and sweat pants. She is not alone, she said. “You see people in [hospital] gowns at bus stops all around Mercy Hospital with no shoes and only a bus token.” She learned from them to find newspaper and use it like a blanket to stay warm until morning when the buses started running and the sun came up. She has stories of being handcuffed to a bed and mistreated by security at UCSD Hospital in Hillcrest who wouldn’t allow her to bring her granny cart inside. She carries photos of the resulting bruises on her back, foot, and a broken eye socket. The only place she feels like she is treated with respect is at Coronado Hospital. She has high praise for the emergency room staff there.

Finally, as of June 2, Julie is able to now spread all of her paperwork across a clean carpet instead of a table at Twiggs. Since her cell phone had died, PATH staff were unable to contact her, so they arrived in a van to collect her and take her to her new home. She was able to get a ride and pull a box of photos from her storage locker and lay those on top of that paperwork: Julie at age two on a pony, Julie at age four with a stylish haircut, Julie with friends in cap and gown graduating junior high school, a photo of a friend who wrote on the back “know that you are amazing and people care about you.” These photos smile up at her from the carpet as she rocks back and forth in a soft easy chair - a gift and housewarming present from her PATH case worker. It is the only piece of furniture in her new cottage, the one she’d been waiting for. And none too soon - her Section 8 voucher would expire in two weeks.

“I slept the rest of that day and all night,” Julie said of her first day at home. She slept off and on the next day as well and didn’t leave until she was finally hungry. “It was heaven not to have to carry my basket around,” she added. She has already been to the food bank giveaway just a few blocks from her home.

Rocking in her chair, barefoot, dressed in green flannel pants adorned with pictures of a pug wearing antlers and the phrase Bah Humbug that she just bought at a local thrift store, Julie said her first goal is to find a new psychiatrist and get real medications, not the “comfort meds” like aspirin and acetaminophen she is currently taking. She hopes having a stable residence means she can now get shoulder surgery and start writing more. She loves the tile in her bathroom, the built-in shelves, the light through the windows and the friendly neighbor. She has the magical key to her dream home. “I never want to leave,” she said. “I’m going to die in this house.”