They Found Their Homeless Loved Ones After Years Apart. But That Was Just the Beginning.

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The last time Julie Crossman saw her little sister, Nanie Crossman, it was 2019 and Nanie was moving out of Julie’s San Francisco apartment, destination unknown.

For the next six years, Julie worried — especially every time it rained. She assumed Nanie was homeless, but she had no idea where she was or how to find her.

“I just couldn’t sleep at night because I was so scared,” Julie said, her voice breaking. “I was really scared that she was just, like, cold and alone.”

Then, in January, Julie got a text from her half-brother. It was a link to a CalMatters article about unhoused people voting. And it quoted Nanie.

That article launched Julie on a quest to find her long-lost sister, rekindle their relationship and — maybe — help her get off the street.

It’s estimated more than 187,000 Californians are homeless. But no one counts the number of people like Julie, who stay up late worrying, compulsively Googling their sister, father or child’s name for a clue to their whereabouts. The people who scan every face each time they pass a homeless encampment.

Their numbers are likely far greater.

Some nonprofits that work in the homeless services sector say reconnecting with family is a crucial, and often overlooked, step in getting clients off the street. Even if a family member can’t offer up their guest room or couch, they might help their loved one find housing, access addiction treatment, sign up for benefits, or simply provide emotional support — reminding them that they are important and worthy of love. But the process of finding and reconnecting with someone living outside can be difficult, both logistically and emotionally, for everyone involved.

Once the person is found, it opens up a new question: What, if anything, can be done to help? The answer is almost never simple. Despite a growing effort by homeless service providers to reunite clients with their families, there’s little data to show how often those reunifications end someone’s homelessness.

And, as Julie found when she searched for guidance, few resources exist to help families navigate this terrain.

“I haven’t found anything,” Julie said. “It’s frustrating because this whole thing is happenstance and coincidence and lucky breaks but there’s not really a road map that I can find of other people’s methods, or things they’ve done that have been helpful.”

Two sisters reunite

From the CalMatters article, Julie gleaned one important fact: Nanie was living in an RV parked on a West Oakland street. It felt like a lucky break — Julie had since moved to Oakland as well. She emailed the CalMatters reporter to find out more.

Three weeks later, on a sunny Tuesday morning, she and the reporter stood outside a row of RVs on a trash-strewn side street next to a graffiti-covered warehouse wall. It had taken a few tries to get there. Police had forced Nanie to move from her prior parking spot a week and a half earlier, so Julie and the reporter walked up and down the nearby streets, asking other RV-dwellers if they knew her.

Eventually, they found an RV that had Nanie’s name sketched near the door. Julie was scared. She worried Nanie wouldn’t want to talk to her after all these years.

They knocked — no answer. Nanie wasn’t in her RV. But they soon found her in the RV next door.

“Julie!” Nanie exclaimed, stepping outside. The sisters threw their arms around each other in a tight hug.

“What’s up, dude?” Nanie asked when they separated, as if it hadn’t been six years.

“Nothing is up,” Julie replied, beaming. The resemblance between the two sisters, now both in their 40s, was obvious: Matching dark hair, pale complexions and smiles.

Julie and Nanie immediately launched into a remarkably ordinary conversation, updating each other on their lives. They discovered they both have cats. Neither has a driver’s license. Nanie described what it was like being homeless in San Francisco during the COVID-19 pandemic (she liked having the streets to herself) and talked about the time she spent living in Sacramento. Julie wanted to know about the logistical details of her sister’s life: How do you get clothes? What about food?

They kept it light. They didn’t unpack old traumas or air past grievances. Julie didn’t ask Nanie if she was using drugs or badger her about getting a job and moving inside.

Later, Julie said it took some willpower to tamp down her protective, older-sister instincts.

“I don’t want to judge her life where it’s just a fact of life. I just don’t think that’s a good way to approach it,” Julie said. “If it were me, I would just shut down. I would not want to talk to someone like that, who was asking me that kind of question.”

Julie presented Nanie with the offerings she brought: A few cans of sparkling water, wet wipes, socks and a fancy pen. She offered to do Nanie’s laundry.

“Nanie, I’m so glad to see you,” Julie said with a squeal, giving her sister another hug. “I feel like we’re just chit-chatting.”

‘It’s tougher than I even imagined’

Julie and Nanie were close as kids growing up in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. They invented games, such as using a Barbie boombox to record themselves reading children’s books in funny voices. As they got older, their conversations were so full of inside references that outsiders, including one of Julie’s former boyfriends, were left in the dark.

Nanie told a CalMatters reporter that after she became homeless, she avoided trying to find Julie. She was afraid her sister would be mad at her or judgmental — or worse, that she’d died in an accident and Nanie hadn’t known. Seeing her again was a big relief.

“I feel a lot less all alone out here,” Nanie said.

Julie walked away from their meeting with mixed emotions. She was relieved that overall, Nanie seemed OK. The fears she had — that Nanie might have physically or mentally deteriorated due to drugs, or been forced to do sex work to survive — seemed unfounded. Nanie was safe from the elements in her RV and had a community of friends.

But the meeting also raised a big question: What could Julie do to help her sister?

Nanie says she wants a relationship, not help. In the past, after moving indoors, she became depressed. In her RV, within her street community, she feels like herself.

“For now,” Nanie said, “I’m content out here. And I guess what I want from her is to understand that.”

Julie understands that as well as someone who hasn’t lived on the streets can — which is to say, not completely. She still wants to help, but she’s struggling with how. Part of her wants to open up her home so Nanie can shower, do laundry and hang out, while another part of her thinks she should instead set boundaries.

And then she feels guilty for even considering keeping her sister at a distance.

“It’s tougher than I even imagined it would be,” Julie said.

Does reconnecting with family help?

Programs throughout the state offer bus tickets out of town to unhoused people trying to reunite with family or friends. That can result in people simply becoming homeless again in a new location. But proponents say that if done with the proper support, sending someone back into the arms of loved ones can be a lifesaver.

“We heal in community,” said Gabby Cordell, who runs the reunification program at the San Francisco-based nonprofit Miracle Messages. “We’re not meant to go through life alone. And everyone matters. Everyone is someone’s somebody.”

Using Google, social media and anything else they can think of, Miracle Messages helps unhoused clients find their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, or anyone else they are looking for.

The organization receives about 50 referrals a month — mostly for cases within California, Cordell said. She and her team are able to find and get a hold of the person they’re looking for about half of the time. Sometimes, the family member is thrilled.

“It’s astounding how often we get an, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been looking for him,’” she said.

Other times, the relationship has been badly damaged, and the family member isn’t interested in reconnecting.

The group also offers the reverse, helping people who are housed find loved ones living on the street. That’s much harder, Cordell said.

“Trying to find your brother is looking for a needle in a haystack,” she said. “Trying to find your brother who is unhoused is looking for a moving needle in 10 haystacks.”

The nonprofit has succeeded in arranging more than 115 of these more difficult reunions since around 2017, according to its website.

Nonprofit LifeMoves also offers reunification services across 17 of its homeless shelter and temporary housing sites in Silicon Valley. Only a small percentage of clients leave homelessness that way (the nonprofit doesn’t track exactly how many), said Heather Griffin, director of shelter and services for Santa Clara County.

It’s impossible to know how successful these efforts are. Neither LifeMoves nor Miracle Messages tracks what happens to people after they reunite with family.

‘That was hard:’ Another family reconnects after decades on the street

Ashanti Terrell lived a lot of her life without her father, Ashby Dancy.

He was on and off the streets of Oakland for most of her childhood, while she grew up in and out of foster care and then with her mother’s family. She lost touch with him as the years passed and she earned a master’s degree, launched a career in public safety and had three children of her own in Atlanta.

But as she got older, she felt a void. Her mother had died and her father was all she had left.

“When I was 18 years old, (I) graduated, I had nobody to go to my graduation,” Terrell said. “I wanted my dad to at least be at my graduation. I haven’t gotten married because I wanted my dad to be there, you know. I haven’t done a lot of stuff because I wanted my dad.”

Terrell had glimpses of her father over the years. Two years ago, he landed in subsidized housing in Oakland and she went to visit him. But he didn’t know who she was, she said. Whether that was because of drug use, mental illness or both, she wasn’t sure.

Last fall, Terrell got a call from a social worker. The social worker said her father was trying to get to Atlanta to see her, but got stuck in Texas and ended up in a hospital. Terrell started planning with her sister to help him. But when she called the hospital again, he was already gone. No one knew where.

She decided to pack up her life in Georgia, move to the Bay Area, and find him.

Then, while Googling her father’s name, Terrell saw him quoted in an October CalMatters article — coincidentally, the same article that helped reunite Julie and Nanie Crossman. The article said he was at a tent encampment in East Oakland.

Terrell went looking. She drove around the area at different times of day, hoping to catch a glimpse of her father. She asked the workers at a nearby Burger King if they’d seen him.

In March, Terrell emailed the CalMatters reporter for help. The reporter showed her where to find her father’s tarp-covered tent, sitting by itself on the sidewalk.

After that, Terrell started visiting her father, stopping by to check on him, talk and give him food.

On a recent Friday afternoon, she brought her 7-year-old son, Mekhi. Dancy gave the boy a fistbump and asked about his school, and about the family’s upcoming move to Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood. But then he started talking about the 22 kids he’d had with his ex-girlfriend (something Terrell is positive didn’t happen). He mumbled, making it hard for her to understand him.

Mekhi asked his mom if they could buy Grandpa some Burger King, and she said yes, promising to come back with a burger after they picked the other kids up from school.

“I just wanted to let you know that I’m here,” Terrell told her father, as they left. “As soon as I get myself together, I’m going to help you out.”

“I love you, sweetheart,” he said. And then to Mekhi: “Take care of your mom, OK?”

Terrell teared up as she and Mekhi walked away from her father’s tent. “That was hard,” she said.

He had admitted he was drunk, which disappointed her. Just like today’s Oakland — with its massive homeless encampment along East 12th Street — is unrecognizable as the city she grew up in, the man she just talked to is not the father who raised her. The father she remembers won trophies for boxing. He was a “big kid,” a gentle soul who ran around and played with her and her two sisters, did their hair in cute braids and took them camping.

“I don’t know who he is,” she said of the man in the tent. “I come from him, but I don’t know him.”

The last real memory Terrell has of her father is from July 1998, at the same Burger King across the street from her father’s tent. It was Terrell’s 8th birthday. She was in foster care, but was visiting with her parents at the fast food chain — her favorite — to celebrate.

She moved with her mother to Chicago and then Atlanta shortly after, and lost touch with her father, who stayed behind in Oakland.

Now, Terrell wants to repair their relationship. She wants him to get to know his grandchildren, and she wants to take him to visit his 86-year-old mother in Stockton.

She also wants to save him, before it’s too late. He’s 63, and Terrell is scared that if he stays outside, he’ll fall victim to fentanyl, or one of the many other dangers of the street.

Terrell imagines helping her father will involve rehab and an assessment of his mental state — if he’s willing. She wants to figure out why he lost his subsidized housing, and if he can get it back. But she’s not sure where to start.

“Maybe 20 years might be too late,” she said. “I don’t know.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.