Man explores homelessness, poverty in S.C.

from Myrtle Beach Online

Man built new life in Charleston with $25 cash, bootstraps mantra
Josh Shaffer
McClatchy Newspapers

Adam Shepard hopped a train out of Raleigh with $25 in his pocket, carrying only a a tent, a sleeping bag and a young man's optimism.

He set out to prove that anyone willing to work hard and save money could make a happy life - the old bootstraps motto.

Just 23, Shepard set a goal: Find a job in a brand-new city, get a furnished apartment, a car and $2,500 in savings within a year.

He did it in six months.

Shepard believes his experience with homelessness and low-pay labor presents a countercharge to the idea that American society stacks the deck against the poor.

He concedes that he has none of the mental illnesses or addictions that fuel homelessness. He hasn't suffered from abuse, sickness or the hundreds of other forms that hard luck can take. He always knew that as a healthy, white, well-spoken college graduate, he enjoyed advantages that can help shed poverty.

But Shepard spent 70 days sleeping on the floor of a homeless shelter, and he estimates that 40 percent of the people sleeping alongside him were mentally ill. Probably half fit the stereotype of old, bearded men with whiskey on their breath.

The other half, Shepard said, were young men like him. When he came back to Raleigh last summer, he wrote a book with them in mind.

In the book, he presents two contrasting low-wage workers he met along the way: one who saves money and survives on Rice-a-Roni dinners; and the other who squanders money on lottery tickets and beer.

"If you're making $8 an hour, you've got one of two choices," he said. "You can cry 'Life is tough,' or you can say, 'Man, in two years, I'm not going to be doing this.'"

Tall and good-looking with a mop of brown hair, Shepard studied business and Spanish at Merrimack College in Massachusetts.

His experiment in poverty drew from reading "Nickeled and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America," the 2001 best-seller that chronicles life on poverty-level wages.

In the book, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich takes a string of low-paying jobs: waitress, house cleaner, hotel maid, Wal-Mart clerk.

She describes working for $6 and change an hour and being forced to take personality tests to land menial jobs, and she concludes that the working poor keep enduring their misery out of generosity and sacrifice.

The premise didn't ring true for Shepard. In the summer of 2006, he pulled the name Charleston out of a hat and headed there by train.

It's unwise to generalize about the poor, said Jeanne Tedrow, director of Raleigh's Passage Home, which finds mentors and housing for low-income families.

Poverty springs from many sources, and people land on the streets for dozens of reasons: something as quick and unforeseen as a layoff, or as permanent as a prison record or mental sickness.

"Every person has his own story," Tedrow said. "There are good people who are poor and there are mean people who are poor."

The National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C., released a fact sheet last summer that breaks down common traits.

Their studies showed 22 percent of homeless mothers had taken to the streets to avoid domestic abuse; 16 percent of single adults suffered from severe mental illness; those addicted to drugs and alcohol ranged between a third and two-thirds.

As many as one-quarter were homeless despite having jobs, the study said.

Shepard's youth and good health are important factors, Tedrow said, making it easier to be a go-getter.

"In the general population," she said, "whether you're affluent or not, there's always going to be people who are more ambitious, more able."

Shepard took his first job as a day laborer, picking up garbage, working on construction sites and hanging baby clothes in a new store.

He made about $6 an hour, but once taxes were subtracted - plus a $2.50 transportation fees and a $1 check fee - his hourly pay came closer to $4.

After a few weeks, he started filling out job applications using the shelter as his permanent address. Shepard left out his college education and contacts, and got no bites from employers.

It wasn't until he took the advice of a veteran homeless man and started asking for jobs in person that Shepard found work. At a moving company, he offered to work for free - a strategy that got him hired on the spot, pay included.

He bought a battered truck for $1,000 and moved into a duplex with a fellow mover.

That roommate became Shepard's bad example. He ate fast food, played the lottery incessantly and borrowed Shepard's truck for hours at a time. They had a fistfight over his borrowing habits, and Shepard lost badly.

In contrast, the roommate's cousin lived next door and also worked for the moving company. He and Shepard cooked meals at home, packages of chicken and boxes of Rice-a-Roni.

By January he had met his goal, but Shepard stayed in Charleston until May of this year.