Shayne Bertrand has lived in about ten states and dozens of cities during his lifetime, but up until a couple of years ago, he couldn’t remember the last time he had a home—unless you count the many shelters, years of couch-surfing, and nights spent on the streets.
When I first met Shayne in early 2021, he walked me through his rectangular, 600 square foot, box-shaped apartment—the entryway, the kitchen, and a living room beneath a window in the back. A desk, where his daughter, Rumour, liked to play Fortnite, was nestled near the door. The kitchen, with its small counter space, opened up to a carpeted area and an overstuffed couch with blankets and pillows strewn over it.
Shayne told me he often slept there because Rumour’s room was right next to it. He had his own space, his own bed, but he was anxious to be even one room away from her.
During our first meeting, Shayne and I talked for four hours. I hardly had to ask questions; he was the perfect interviewee, always giving more. I knew he would be this open when I heard him speak about his experiences for the first time, at a virtual panel I had moderated a few months before for The Corvallis Advocate, the newspaper that I worked for at the time.
Shayne had told the audience about his experience with homelessness in our small town, Corvallis, Oregon, as part of a program, CitySpeak, which seeks to open discussion on topics affecting the local community. At the time, I was struck by his ability to tell his story in vivid detail, seemingly without fear of judgment. He was always expressive as he relayed his story, smiling and laughing about his daughter, then becoming more serious and somber as he spoke of his experiences with drugs and living on the streets.
An estimated 582,462 people experienced homelessness on a single night in 2022 in the United States.
Near the end of our visit, Shayne showed me scraps of paper with words scribbled all over them: epiphanies about his childhood, his anxieties about Rumour’s future, solutions to homelessness, all laid out in front of me. Shayne was the first source I had spoken to in my two years of journalistic work who had shown me such vivid pieces of his life.
An estimated 582,462 people experienced homelessness on a single night in 2022 in the United States, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s most recent Annual Homelessness Assessment report.
The National Center for Children in Poverty reports that individuals who grow up in poverty are more likely to remain in poverty through early adulthood. This was true for Shayne, now forty-nine, while growing up and struggling to make ends meet alongside his mother, who was addicted to drugs and alcohol. His father wasn’t in the picture, and Shayne has never met him. “If you’re below the poverty line,” Shayne says, “that’s where you stay.”
Shayne revealed to me the intricacies of his tumultuous childhood in as much detail as possible. He has been homeless since he was seven years old, and though he can remember most of the places he’s resided, he struggles to remember specifics. Certain blocks of time are even completely missing. “Looking back on my childhood, remembering . . . between seven and ten, it’s blank,” he told me.
Cara Nixon
He can, however, recall a couple of random memories, like sitting in elementary school at the age of eleven and watching the Challenger space shuttle explode on television and later falling down a ravine, breaking multiple bones, when he was thirteen. These are flashbulb memories for Shayne, and he is unsure why he can remember these and not others.
Ages ten to sixteen are blurry, but Shayne recalls he was in a juvenile facility for two years during that time. He said he spent most of those years hitchhiking and running from the police. There is one memory that has stayed with him, though. “Sixteen was the last time I talked to my mother,” he says. “She spit in my face and didn’t want anything to do with me.”
Shayne grew up essentially parentless. Left on his own, he drifted into drugs and crime, and spent a few years in various prisons as a young adult.
Adulthood, too, has its blind spots in Shayne’s memory, as much of his time was spent getting high and trying to survive. He says he was self-destructive and often intentionally burned bridges with loved ones. Shayne’s experience with the West Coast shelter system began when, at age twenty-six, he traveled to the Pacific Northwest.
During the spring of 2021, Shayne, Rumour, and I took a road trip to visit the Oregon shelters where they had stayed over the years. At the time, Shayne didn’t have a car, so we took mine and drove for miles on Interstate Highway 5, as Shayne relayed to me more details of his life from the backseat, where he sat with Rumour.
When we drove through Salem, Oregon’s capital, Shayne quickly pointed out landmarks of his young adult life—a gas station where he often bought snacks, and streets lined with the homes of drug dealers.
He often hopped from job to job there and still struggled with homelessness. The most recent data from the City of Salem shows that homelessness continues to be an issue for the area, with roughly 1,300 people documented as unsheltered.
At one point, Shayne stayed in housing provided by the Union Gospel Mission of Salem Men’s Mission (UGM), a Christian faith-based homeless shelter located on Commercial Street. When the three of us stood in front of the building, it was impossible to ignore the blue words in the windows: “Helping men, women, and children break free from homelessness through the transforming grace of Jesus Christ.”
Shayne said the shelter was a depressing place to live, and while staying there, he felt like he had to compromise his own beliefs to receive assistance. “It was just one of those places where I felt like it was a way station on your way to die,” he recalls. “It’s an insane asylum mixed with an [Alcoholics Anonymous] meeting mixed with despair.”
UGM declined to comment on Shayne’s experience there.
Shayne’s life changed a short while before his daughter was born, when he decided to get sober. He stopped doing drugs at the height of what he calls his self-induced craziness. “There were really only two options that were left for me,” he says, “it was dead or dead. That’s it.”
Cara Nixon
For two weeks, Shayne locked himself in a motel room. He paid for the room upfront and hardly left it while he went through an intense withdrawal period. Only the housekeeper was there to periodically check if he was still alive.
Homelessness and substance use are sometimes interconnected. According to the Addiction Center, “The end result of homelessness is often substance abuse, and substance abuse can also contribute to homelessness.” Obtaining accurate and current statistics of substance use among homeless populations is difficult, but in the early 2000s, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimated that about 38 percent of people experiencing homelessness were alcohol-dependent, and 26 percent abused other substances.
When his daughter was born, Shayne was there to take her home from the hospital—alone. His partner was still doing drugs and considered unfit to care for their child. With a smile, Shayne told me he named his daughter Rumour, partly because the doctor mistakenly thought she was a boy while she was in her mother’s womb. The “rumor,” Shayne says, was that she was a boy, though he had a feeling she would be a girl. Then, a couple weeks after she was born, the song “Rumour Has It” by Adele was released, and thus Shayne’s daughter became Rumour Adele Bertrand.
With a premature baby and no home, Shayne found solace at a nunnery called St. Joseph Shelter in the town of Mt. Angel outside of Salem. The facility was the best he’s ever stayed in, mainly because there was a lack of violence or drug use. St. Joseph looks like a school, old and industrial, with blue tile to brighten it up against the gloomy backdrop of Oregon’s moody weather patterns. It wasn’t necessarily inviting, but it wasn’t off-putting, either.
Rumour was a month old when they arrived there, and Shayne says he fought with the Department of Human Services for two years about going back to work. He didn’t feel comfortable leaving his daughter alone with strangers for twelve hours each day.
According to the nonprofit Green Doors, 60 percent of women experiencing homelessness have children under eighteen, and 65 percent live with at least one of their children. This is significantly higher than men experiencing homelessness—41 percent have children under eighteen, and only 7 percent live with at least one of their children. This means it is often more difficult for single fathers to find organizations who will take them and their children in, because more resources, such as emergency shelters, have been built for single mothers.
From St. Joseph, Shayne and Rumour were luckily able to move into Beaver State Apartments in Mt. Angel on a housing grant that required them to pay only 25 percent of their rent. They stayed there for almost three years.
While staying at those apartments, however, Shayne and Rumour left for a summer so Shayne could work on a friend’s avocado farm in California. Shayne paid the three months’ worth of rent ahead of time with the help of the housing grant, but when he and Rumour returned, the sheriff was locking up their place.
The landlord told Shayne his lease stated he couldn’t be gone from the apartment for more than forty-five days. Shayne tried to reason with him, but the landlord said he could only appeal it in court, and then Shayne would owe about $2,000, which was money he didn’t have.
Shayne’s attempt to earn more money, and to provide for his daughter, who had turned four by then, resulted in them both losing their home. Shayne and Rumour hit the road again. From Mt. Angel, they went to Monmouth and were able to stay with a friend for about a month. Then they went to Albany, where Shayne found a room in a roach-infested flophouse, where they only stayed for about a week, leaving after they witnessed a violent brawl in the yard; a boy from the flophouse found them on the streets not long after and called Community Outreach, Inc., or COI, in Corvallis. “It took a thirteen-year-old kid to help us out, because none of the adults, none of the staff, none of the people who were supposed to help, would make an effort,” Shayne says.
When we visited the flophouse, it had been turned into an upscale duplex; Shayne hardly recognized it.
COI is a shelter that provides transformational and emergency housing, case management, youth services and more. The first time they stayed there, Shayne felt dehumanized by its case management system, had issues with the staff, and was faced with an ultimatum regarding his cannabis usage. (Shayne has Crohn’s disease and has used cannabis for the past seven years to cope with flare-ups). The organization doesn’t allow cannabis usage in its shelter without a medical marijuana license, which Shayne could not afford.
So Shayne and Rumour left to live at a friend’s house for about a year. Because the friend lived in Section 8 housing, a form of government rent assistance, they were once again forced out with only two weeks to find a new place to stay. They ultimately went back to COI.
But their second time at COI was not much better than their first. Shayne felt like the shelter’s rules were degrading and sensed that he was being targeted by certain staff members. He says other residents had similar issues, but nothing was done about it, and Shayne was nervous about speaking up. “The implication is always there—you don’t do what we say, then you’re out,” he says. “Those are the only two options: compliance or get out.”
COI does not comment on individual clients’ experiences, but confirmed COI is a clean and sober facility, allowing THC but requiring an Oregon Medical Mairjuana card, for the safety of their clients.
After he and Rumour were asked to leave COI the second time, Shayne was eventually able to receive help from Corvallis Housing First (CHF), a shelter specifically focused on obtaining housing for houseless people in the area. He and Rumour have lived in an apartment provided by the group since 2020.
Unlike other shelters he’s stayed in, Shayne said CHF humanizes its residents. In Corvallis, where homelessness is a growing issue that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, CHF takes a holistic approach to case management, as its executive director, Andrea Myhre, explained to me in an interview.
Shayne has been chronically homeless for most of his life, and because of these systemic problems, he feels he is likely to continue struggling until he dies.
“We’re not just dealing with health issues or mental health, we’re looking at the whole person and all of their needs,” Myhre says. “Everybody’s situation is different, and they come with unique assets and needs, like all humans.”
Though CHF provides some of the best services they have ever received, Shayne and Rumour still struggle on a daily basis. This, according to Shayne, is because the entire homeless assistance system is constructed to “maintain” people experiencing homelessness, rather than move them up or forward in society.
Shayne has been chronically homeless for most of his life, and because of these systemic problems, he feels he is likely to continue struggling until he dies. Eventually, Shayne dreams of owning a plot of land on the outskirts of town and being able to pass on wealth to his daughter. “I feel like I’m running out of time,” he says. “I have to really simply understand that I’m not going to achieve my goals—now I have to alter them and accept something else.”
On a day-to-day basis, Shayne lives in constant fear about money, housing, and, most of all, that something could happen to Rumour. “I’m just really scared that there’s just one little stumbling block that’s going to set us back again. Every day I deal with it, it sits right there at the back of my head and just eats away at me,” he says.
When we first met, that stumbling block was employment and a car—Shayne had lost his job because his car broke down. The cost of fixing it was too high for him to manage. Since then, Shayne has struggled with finding a well-paying job, but he has stable housing through CHF.
Cara Nixon
Shayne sees the system as needing to move away from punishing individuals for being homeless; it should, instead, help and reward them when they meet their goals. If this could happen, individuals experiencing homelessness could move up from a place of maintained struggle to one of growth and security.
In addition, Shayne says it’s necessary to humanize those who are experiencing homelessness. Often, houseless individuals are pushed to the fringes of town and hidden from society, causing the housed community to forget they exist.
This is particularly important in the Pacific Northwest, where homeless populations continue to grow. Washington State has the fourth-largest population of homeless people at 25,211, while 17,959 people in Oregon experience homelessness. Around 62 percent of people experiencing homelessness in Oregon are also unsheltered, the fourth-highest rate in the country.
Despite his experiences in shelters, Shayne doesn’t believe they are the main factor driving homelessness: “The issue isn’t how we home the homeless,” he says. “It’s that people are homeless in the first place.”