photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Lawrence resident Robert Williams is pictured at his former apartment at 2531 Redbud Lane. Williams has lymphedema, tissue swelling — usually in the arms or legs — caused by excess lymphatic fluid collecting in the body’s soft tissues.

Despite a seemingly broad swath of safety nets designed to catch folks struggling with housing insecurity in Lawrence and Douglas County, Lawrence resident Robert Williams is — for the time being — essentially homeless.

Williams had been crashing on a friend’s couch since the start of May, in the week or so after moving out of his last apartment. But more recently, he’s been checked in at LMH Health for about a week, partly a result of the stress of the past month. Williams has been struggling to find new, stable housing, and that hinges on the challenges he faces as a person with a disability.

Williams has lymphedema, which is tissue swelling — usually in the arms or legs — caused by excess lymphatic fluid collecting in the body’s soft tissues. The condition leaves him with low mobility, and he’s homebound as a result. Walking is difficult, and he uses a walker to move around his living space. His mobility issues make it difficult for him to address his comorbid obesity, exacerbating his overall poor health.

Williams’ last rental agreement was set to expire Thursday, April 28. But he told the Journal-World he felt somewhat blindsided because he claims his landlord never approached him about a renewal; instead, he was mailed a letter in February informing him that his lease wouldn’t be renewed. According to the terms outlined in the lease agreement that Williams shared with the Journal-World, a renewal agreement had to have been completed by Jan. 1. His rental company, Midwest Property Management, has not responded to any of the Journal-World’s phone calls.

Legally speaking, there isn’t anything preventing landlords in Kansas from opting not to renew a renter’s tenancy, according to the nonprofit Kansas Legal Services. Williams also claims he wasn’t given a reason why he wasn’t allowed to renew his lease, but that isn’t an obligation for landlords, either.

Williams’ condition meant he wasn’t able to vacate his apartment alone; he had to get help from friends and family, something more difficult on a weekday around work commitments. He had to negotiate for a weekend move-out date, and got set up with his temporary living arrangements at the end of April.

“I can’t move around very well, so I’m relying on others to do the work for me,” Williams said a few days before moving. “I can’t physically do it myself. So when you rely on others to do stuff, you’re kind of at their disposal, I guess.”

Even with the help, Williams still suffered a fall during the move, another contributor to his recent hospital stay.

Formerly a home construction worker by trade, Williams can’t do the work he used to, and he said the cost of living expenses makes it hard for him to afford college coursework that could set him up for a job working from home. Right now, he’s living on disability benefits.

Williams’ condition doesn’t leave him with many housing options, he said. His credit score and his income level aren’t high enough to qualify for many local apartment rentals, and assisted living facilities in the area are either too costly or may choose to deny admission to applicants who present relatively greater care needs. Even someplace like the Lawrence Community Shelter isn’t an option, Williams said, because of his condition.

“I’m slipping through the cracks of society here, you know?” Williams said. A few days later, after he’d moved out of his apartment, he added: “Everywhere I run, there’s a roadblock. … It’s like, if this is happening to me, it’s got to be happening to others. The system’s broken, and there needs to be some repair done.”

• • •

Though there are multiple safety net housing programs here in Lawrence, they’re in such high demand that they can’t accommodate a sudden, short-notice need for affordable and accessible housing. Williams told the Journal-World he’d already contacted one of them, nonprofit Tenants to Homeowners, and learned that it would take months for anything he could afford to be available.

Shannon Oury, the executive director of the Lawrence-Douglas County Housing Authority, said there’s also little that her organization could do to help with a case like Williams’.

That’s largely a result of the sheer number of households already on its own wait list — 450 of them. Those households wait an average of 18 to 24 months to be placed in housing, Oury said. She added that a very small percentage of people may qualify for special vouchers that speed that process up, but those are typically limited to people in specific circumstances like children aging out of the foster care system or victims of domestic violence, for example.

But at the end of the day, Oury said the Housing Authority simply wasn’t equipped to provide emergency housing for people experiencing unexpected housing instability on short notice.

“We have no mechanism, as much as we want to help,” Oury said. “We don’t have a mechanism for that. … That’s the rub — we have way greater demand than supply. So when you have people in crisis situations, it’s difficult to help them immediately.”

Williams’ problem isn’t a unique one, according to Daniel Brown, core services manager with Independence Inc. The organization serves as an advocacy resource for people with disabilities in Lawrence and northeast Kansas. Brown said through that work he could vouch that there’s a huge lack of affordable and accessible housing in Lawrence.

When he spoke to the Journal-World May 5, Brown described another example of housing insecurity: an elderly couple he was working to help who’d recently left an assisted living facility. As of that interview, the couple were living in a hotel because they had no other permanent housing option they could afford.

“A lot of the subsidized housing options in town — pretty much all of them — have a wait list of some kind,” Brown said.

Brown said that’s exacerbated, in part, by income discrimination. He said outside of subsidized housing, landlords can choose not to accept credits like Section 8 vouchers, making their rent price unaffordable for folks who are suffering from housing insecurity.

The most direct solution would be to simply build more accessible and affordable housing, Brown said. And that means it hits both criteria, not just one; Brown said trailer homes, for example, tend to be more affordable, but they are not typically accessible for folks with disabilities. They can sit high off the ground, meaning an accessible entrance is usually a very long, often expensive, ramp.

By and large, though, there isn’t a catch-all solution in Lawrence right now beyond that.

“A lot of folks we’re working with, they don’t have friends, they don’t have family; they’re alone and they don’t know what to do,” Brown said. “So what do you do to help those folks? We don’t have solutions, sometimes, to all those problems, so sometimes we just exhaust all those options.”

Gabi Sprague, Douglas County’s human services program manager, said her work specifically targets these blind spots in the county’s goal of preventing homelessness and seeks to build bridges between the individual work of area housing organizations.

Sprague said one of the biggest barriers for those organizations is the prevalence of private interests; much of Douglas County’s housing stock is owned by landlords. On top of that, she agreed there’s a sizable need for more housing for folks like Williams.

“With disabled populations, we need 381 units, I think, at the cost of like $67.7 million over the next 10-ish years to develop those units and keep them running,” Sprague told the Journal-World last week. “So it’s difficult to meet an immediate need when the resources aren’t immediately available to us, and it’s really a structural issue where disabled folks have an SSI — Social Security disability income — that is well below the federal poverty level. Rent costs are rising at an incredible rate, which is not something we can control.”

Sprague said to meet those myriad challenges, there needs to be a two-fold response. First, she said there needs to be a culture shift among landlords, nonprofits and communities in general that housing people is a greater need than the business side of rental housing.

The second part of that answer, she said, is installing accountability measures at a systemic level. That can look like a lot of different things, but Sprague said she’s currently working on the tenants’ right to counsel, which guarantees tenants facing eviction the right to legal representation in a similar manner as in criminal trials. An ordinance granting such protections was passed by the City Council in nearby Kansas City, Missouri, late last year.

Establishing tenants’ right to counsel here could be especially impactful. Sprague said that nationally the number of landlords with legal counsel in eviction cases vastly overwhelms the number of tenants who have such counsel.

“I think that, oftentimes, the laws in Kansas are codified in such a way that landlords can get away with discrimination and it not be called that,” Sprague said. “… In Kansas law, there’s no protections for people receiving a nonrenewal. A landlord or a tenant could give 30-day notice at the end of a lease — or on a month-to-month lease could give 30-day notice — and the lease is then void, or the month-to-month tenancy is then void after 30 days. And a reason doesn’t have to be provided; that can just be at will.”

While tenants’ right to counsel wouldn’t necessarily affect nonrenewal situations, Sprague said it could be effective at preventing eviction, a problem in itself.

Moving forward, Sprague said she encourages community members to get involved with the conversation — create a tenant rights organizing group, talk to elected officials, and show up to the table where people are talking about these issues. Community agencies should get involved in those conversations, too, she said.

“I believe collective impact is far more effective than insular, singular entities’ work,” Sprague said.

• • •

Williams said that in the past few weeks people close to him have said he should focus on himself. But he’s 12 years clean from alcoholism, and told the Journal-World that he can’t simply ignore that if he’s experiencing housing struggles like this, then surely others in the community are as well.

“I can’t do that … and I think that’s part of my recovery, trying to be here for the masses, trying to make changes,” Williams said. “Part of my damage that I did in my drinking … I’ve had to make amends for that, and part of that is trying to help the community as best as I can, too. So of course I’m going to think about the other person who, very much like me or even worse than me, makes too much money for help from one organization but (doesn’t) make enough money to be over here. They’re caught up in this same vicious cycle.”

He was still sticking to those principles last week, as he prepared to transfer from LMH Health to a rehabilitation facility in Kansas City as part of his recovery from his recent fall.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m really just more concerned about our community and that our community can find a better path forward,” Williams said.