Charmayne Shaw 23, sits on her bed at her Portland Apartment Tuesday. Shaw used a foster youth housing voucher to find housing, the program works specifically with young people who have aged out of the foster care system. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Press Herald
Before she moved into her apartment on Oxford Street, Charmayne Shaw had never hung up photos anywhere she lived. She’d never stayed in one place long enough for it to feel worth it.
But in this apartment, with its big living room window that looks out over the sloping roofs of the East End and where her cat, Nugget, likes to sit and paw at raindrops and bugs, she feels like maybe she can stay put. The walls are plastered with photos.
The 23-year-old has lived there five months thanks to a Foster Youth to Independence voucher. Her one-bedroom apartment in East Bayside costs $1,600 per month, but she only pays $355. The voucher covers the rest.
The special housing subsidy, known as an FYI voucher, has been available through the Portland Housing Authority since 2020. The vouchers are reserved for young people exiting foster care. The housing authority has had 17 of the vouchers in circulation since the program began, but will soon have funding for 13 more, said Brian Frost, the authority’s executive director.
The new funding comes from a $1.3 million U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant shared by more than 20 housing authorities around the country. The Portland Housing Authority received $189,000 to pay for the additional 13 vouchers. The grant funded a total of 107 new FYI vouchers in 15 states.
The vouchers are reserved for people ages 18-24 who were in foster care for at least a day after their 16th birthday and who have left or will leave foster care within 90 days. Frost said new funding will allow the agency to get 13 more eligible young people into housing before the end of January.
“We could get 100 more vouchers and probably have them issued within a month or two. The need far exceeds the capacity,” said Frost.
The new vouchers have become available during a freeze in Section 8 housing vouchers, a much more widely used type of voucher with fewer qualification requirements for people of all ages who cannot afford to pay rent themselves.
‘THEY GAVE UP ON ME’
Shaw has spent most of her life moving from place to place. When she was 8 days old she was taken from Lennox Island Mi’Kmaq First Nation and placed for adoption. She was adopted when she was 1 year old, but said her adoptive father had a drinking problem and she didn’t feel safe at home.
By the age of 9 she had started self-harming. She said she would pick at her skin until she bled. In the flat winter light of her new apartment, she rolls up the sleeves of her sweatshirt to reveal thin white scars crisscrossing her forearms.
Her parents weren’t sure how to help her so they sent her to residential programs where she said she was abused and overmedicated.
“I remember laying down one day after they gave me my meds and I felt this instant cold chill over me, like I thought I was overdosing, I thought I was dying because of how sedated I felt and how quick it hit me,” she said.
When she was 16 her parents terminated her adoption. From then on she circulated between foster homes and more residential treatment programs.
“I spent my 18th birthday at a foster home because I had nowhere else to go. I felt like I was just being passed around. Nobody wanted me. They gave up on me, I was too much for them. I thought I was always going to be a burden,” said Shaw.
Once she was 18, she had aged out of the system and had to find a place to live on her own. She stayed with a relative for a little while and then stayed in homeless shelters. By the time she was 19 she was living outside.
Charmayne Shaw 23, points out the window of her Portland Apartment as she talks about how much she enjoys the view. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Press Herald
Victoria Morales, executive director of Quality Housing Coalition, a nonprofit that helps create sustainable housing and provides support services for people using FYI vouchers, said young people coming out of foster care often face significant barriers to stable housing.
“Of all the populations that we work with, people coming out of foster care have the most barriers,” she said. “They’ve often been in institutional settings, had experiences with the juvenile justice system, and have a lack of family and community support.”
Those support services can include anything from helping voucher recipients apply for jobs and get to doctors appointments to showing them how to pay utility bills.
“The support services are crucial,” said Frost. “These are young adults living independently for the first time in their lives and who are probably coming out of an unstable housing situation. They are often lacking a role model for how to maintain stable housing. Without those services we wouldn’t have half the success that we do.”
Quality Housing Partners has two housing navigators, one full-time and one part-time, who work with FYI recipients. She said voucher recipients have almost all been able to stay in their housing, save a few exceptions.
Morales said without support, young people often lose their housing.
“You can’t just hand this group of young people a housing voucher and say good luck,” said Morales.
Shaw has lost housing in the past.
While she was homeless she became addicted to amphetamines, was abused by a romantic partner, got pregnant and placed her baby for adoption, attempted suicide, got sober, relapsed on pills, moved into housing briefly but got evicted, fell into a depression, got pregnant again. Her daughter, Ocean, will be 2 in February. Her daughter lives with her paternal grandparents right now, but Shaw hopes she can get custody of her now that her life is becoming more stable.
“I just gave up after I lost my housing the first time. I stayed homeless for a while. I didn’t really care, I was partying, drinking, all that stuff, outside. … That’s why I keep losing apartments because I self-sabotage. But now I can’t,” she says, gesturing toward a photo of her daughter, then to her cat.
Morales said it’s something of a miracle when eligible recipients find their way to an FYI voucher. She said there is very little coordination to connect people in foster care to FYI vouchers and the support system around them.
Shaw ended up with an FYI voucher because she happened to meet a caseworker at an encampment she was living in. She can keep using the voucher until she turns 25. She lost the first apartment she got with the voucher, but was able to try again. And this time, it’s sticking.
HOME
In the few months since you moved in, she found some free furniture on Facebook and friends helped her move it in. She printed photos and hung them on her living room wall. Her bedroom is draped in tapestries and more photos. She has pancake mix sitting on her kitchen shelf.
“This is the only place I’ve ever kept clean and hung photos on the wall. I want this to be my last place,” she said.
She adopted Nugget this fall, the orange tabby kitten follows her around and plays on her lap. His litter box is tucked neatly in the corner.
Charmayne Shaw 23, with her cat Nugget at her Portland Apartment Tuesday. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Press Herald
If she has a question about anything, she calls the housing authority and they’ll connect her with somebody who can help, whether it’s filling out paperwork or paying a utility. Shaw said this is the first time she’s felt supported in having housing.
The feeling of having a home is something she’d never known. Not growing up with her adoptive family, not in the residential care facilities, not on the streets or in shelters or staying with friends. But a few months ago, that feeling came.
She and some friends were recently making a food delivery for DoorDash, and Shaw had to go to the bathroom, she asked her friends to swing by her house to she could make a quick bathroom stop.
“I came in, unlocked the door, and I sat there on the toilet crying because I realized I didn’t have to go find a public bathroom,” she said. “It made me so happy that I didn’t have to go anywhere else. And it’s just becoming more and more like my home and I love it.”
Shaw said this is the first time in her life that she’s beginning to feel like, maybe, she deserves this.
“I deserve to have my own place. I deserve to be happy and stable. I shouldn’t have to fear what’s going to happen next, and I haven’t always known that.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
