- For many Americans, it only takes one event to cause a domino effect that ends in homelessness.

59% of Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless according to a survey by Charles Schwab.

Homelessness increased by 3% in 2019, the third straight year of increases, the long-term trends have been downward.

Overall, homelessness has decreased by 12% since 2007, the first year of collection of nationwide data.

Texas ranks fourth in total homelessness though, our overall homeless rate is nearly half the national average.

On any given night, there are 25,000 homeless Texans, that's nine per 10,000 compared to 17 per 10,000 nationally.

But what about West Texas?

We've seen homeless men and women asking for help at local intersections, or maybe pushing a cart down a city street, we wonder about them.

So tonight we ask, who are the homeless and where do they go for help?

I'm Becky Ferguson, and this is One Question.

(dramatic music) Tonight, we will talk to two West Texas men who have made it their mission to help the homeless.

First this evening, John-Mark Echols, he is a lifelong Midlander who went to college in Alabama, planning never to return to the Tall City, but a tornado in Tuscaloosa changed that, brought him home to the oil patch in a job in the oil and gas industry.

But that didn't really suit him, a serendipitous meeting took him down a different path to a church service under a bridge where he first encountered Midland's homeless.

Welcome John-Mark, thank you so much for joining us today.

- It's great to be here.

- I understand that even as we speak, they are laying infrastructure on your project.

And I want you to give us all of the big story about what it's called and how it happened and what's going on out there right now.

- Right, so we are the Field's Edge and we are a local Midland nonprofit that is building a permanent supportive tiny home community for the homeless.

And we have broken ground on our project out in Southwest Midland.

They are working on a city water pipeline right now, and we're in the middle of reviewing bids and selecting a contractor and hiring a construction manager on our staff to manage that project and looking to be finishing up that project next year and moving in.

- And when you say tiny homes, tell us what a tiny home is.

- Our tiny homes are 200 square feet, single occupant tiny homes since we are for the chronically homeless, which is by definition unaccompanied typically, and then average age range of 55.

And so there'll have their own little house for one person, and that's what a tiny home is to us.

- And when we visited earlier, you told me that the tiny home has a bed and then like a microwave oven, but it doesn't have a bathroom and it doesn't have a kitchen.

So tell me how you arrange for those things for those folks.

- Yeah, so that design is intentional because we really wanna promote interaction community.

We believe that homelessness is not solved by a house, but it's solved by relationships and community that's wrapped around somebody who needs a place to heal and belong.

So we designed our community to be a very interactive where you come outside of your home to do your cooking and use your restroom and do your laundry and everything so that you're interacting with your neighbors, you're building those relationships and finding home.

- So when the first homes are finished, which I think you said would be maybe next summer, how many homes where there'll be?

And then eventually how many homes will there be?

- So we have 23 and a half acres there, which will be room for up to 100 homes total, and that'd be 90 single occupant homes for the homeless, formerly homeless, by the time they move in with us.

And then there's one, in every group of 10 houses, they share a bath, kitchen and laundry facility.

And there's also a home that we have there for people who we call missional residents, and those are people like my family who will live there intentionally to be facilitators of community and just commit to living a lifestyle of service alongside our formerly homeless neighbors.

- How did you come up with this concept?

- There is a really awesome group in Austin called Mobile Loaves and Fishes, and they have pioneered this community first concept.

We heard about their work back around 2015 and went to visit and had no idea that it would be yes, doing it here years later, but they have really done something amazing there, and so we went to live there for a four-month internship.

I took my wife and we both worked there on site and had our daughter there with us too.

And they equipped us and just taught us so much about how to live in community and how to replicate their process here in our own city.

- These are just a sort of basic things, but the folks that live there will be paying rent.

Talk a little bit about that and then how folks will generate the income so that they can pay rent.

- Yeah, so we believe that it's really about the restoration of dignity and empowerment to be part of the Field's Edge.

And so we believe in the value of work, that it reveals and restores people's own perception of their dignity.

So by showing somebody that they are capable of working and earning an income and paying a rent to have that responsibility, it's healing for them, it helps them to grow.

So we will have on-site opportunities for people to earn income through micro enterprise programs like gardening and art and landscaping, cleaning the bath houses.

A variety of things, we have an offsite program that we can talk a little bit more about in a little bit that does empower people to earn money also, and then they could work offsite as well, but part of our work will be case management to help them to figure out what it is that they wanna do and what their strengths are, and then to empower them to do it.

- A moment ago, you mentioned that this would be a place for the chronic homeless.

Are there other kinds of homeless people?

- There are several definitions of homelessness.

A chronic homelessness just means that they have been on the street for at least a year, they are unaccompanied, no children, they're not married or in a relationship really.

And they are the ones that have been homeless the longest and have fallen through the cracks and are really the most vulnerable of the homeless population.

So we fit into an area of service in our city that is really the most underserved.

There's some great organizations here that are serving families, women, and children.

You got all these great people that are fitting into those kinds of niches and needs, but our chronically homeless population really needs a place to belong, and so that's where we're fitting in.

- I think you mentioned to me when we were visiting the other day that there are lots of causes for homelessness, and I know when I see a homeless person, I immediately assumed that it's a person that has some mental health issues, but that's not always the case, you tell me.

- Yeah, it's not, statistically, only one in four Americans that are homeless, have a mental health condition.

And on the general population, it's one in five, so it's not that much different.

The difference is that it's untreated on the street, and so those are exacerbated also by the environment that they live in that's traumatic and stressful.

We know that under stress mental health is very challenging.

And so that's why you see that, and that's probably why it's a stereotype because it's just visible.

In our neighborhoods, those kinds of things are occurring behind closed doors.

So it's not altogether different, it's just that they need help, they need services, they need a place to be safe and have some sanity.

- That is what you call a trigger, mental health would be a trigger, what are some of the other triggers for homelessness?

- Other triggers would be loss of job, eviction, domestic violence, health problems, a number of different things that could trigger someone into homelessness.

- And you also mentioned a moment ago that mental health is taking place in lots of homes.

These other things that you mentioned are also taking place in lots of homes, so what's different about a person that is having those same sort of conditions that is still in a home and these people that are not in a home?

- Yeah, the difference is that they have a home to belong to, they have people around them that are supporting them through these difficult situations that occur in their life.

We all have challenges that we go through and I've been so fortunate to have a family that cares about me and loves me and would never allow me to fall into homelessness if there was anything they could do about it.

But for whatever reason, our homeless friends don't have that.

And so when one of these triggering events does occur, they lose their job and they've got no one that they can call and say, "Hey, could I stay with you for a little bit "until I figure this out?"

And that's the difference, and that's why at the root of homelessness is the disconnection of relationship and the loss of family and the absence of community.

And so that's why the Field's Edge purpose and main desire is to restore that so that they have a place to be and belong.

- I think that's so profound that notion that triggers happen outside of community, and so you don't have a place to go, that's really profound.

I wanna talk a little bit about the homeless in Midland.

How many folks are we talking about and how do we know how many folks we're talking about?

- We do account every year for the Texas Homeless Network called the PIT count, which means point in time.

And it's snapshot of a really a 24-hour window where we go out and take surveys of our people, both on the street and in our shelters in different programs.

So we do an unsheltered count and a sheltered count and then have a combined count of 237 this year, I believe.

And that's always a little bit low because we can't always find everybody, not everybody's willing to participate in that.

And yeah, it's just a, it's a really difficult number to capture because there are homeless people hiding in plain sight all the time.

- In my introduction, I talked a little bit about how you went to a church service under a bridge, and first encountered the homeless.

Talk about your journey and your family's journey.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So being a born and raised Midlander, and growing up in a family of people in the oil and gas industry, that was just the way of life for me, and I never realized that we had homeless people in Midland.

I knew that we had cycles in our economy, but I never realized that there were some that were not able to take advantage of the benefits of being in Midland.

So after coming back after college, I ended up getting invited, my wife and I were invited by her employer to a street church for the homeless.

And I had no idea that we had homeless people, so I went with all the preconceived notions of, well, you know, they just need to go to work.

And that was the time back in 2012/2011, when, you know, the fast food restaurants were paying $20 an hour and would pick you up.

And so it didn't make sense to me that somebody couldn't just walk in and do that, but I didn't recognize the barriers that were in their way for them to be able to do that.

So after meeting people that were homeless, it just shattered a lot of those preconceived ideas.

And I was just really drawn into it really by my faith that was motivated to serve people.

I was a new believer, a new Christian, and I knew that I was supposed to love my neighbor, and I realized that these people were my neighbors, so how am I to love them.

And we just got drawn further in, and that's when we found out about community first in Austin a couple of years later and never anticipated this becoming a lifestyle for us, but it's been amazing.

- Well, we're very excited.

And in Midland, we appreciate that you're doing that and we appreciate your open heart, how do we help?

- We are about to open up a lot of volunteer opportunities coming next year once we start the real construction.

So we looking for people to come out and swing hammers, and we'll be looking for people to come out and decorate tiny homes and work in our garden and do lots of different things.

So if there's a way that someone wants to get involved, we can definitely accommodate it from any number of different skillsets.

We are also just continuing to fundraise for programs that we have where we've got a program called Glean Up, and we hire people that are currently homeless to pick up trash around the city in partnership with Keep Midland Beautiful and Christmas In-Action.

And we're trying to expand that program so we can empower more people.

We're just looking for people that wanna get involved in a personal way, also with the homeless, because really our mission is to lift them up.

And that requires relationship, and we wanna encourage relationships from our volunteers, from our donors to be really involved in the work of being with our people.

So if you wanna get involved, we'll figure out a way to get you in.

- Well, I think I will, thank you, John-Mark.

(John-Mark laughs) - Thank you.

- Appreciate your coming.

- Absolutely.

- Donny Kiker was working for UPS when a friend invited him to help feed some homeless folks in Odessa.

From that encounter came a passion for helping the homeless.

Kiker founded Jesus House in Odessa in 1999.

It feeds 100 daily and shelters some nightly.

Welcome Donny, thank you so much for joining us today.

- Thank you.

- I wanna start with how you came to serve the homeless, what's your story on that?

- Helped the guy feed on the back of a pickup truck in 1999.

And that's when the Lord really started dealing with my heart, and I called homeless bums and worthless, and you know, all the things that I hear still today, and I just didn't know better.

And Lord really just kinda cut me to the heart a little bit.

And a friend of mine asked me to come help him, I did, well, reluctantly for three weeks didn't but finally, I gave in and did, fell in love with it, and just been doing it ever since.

- So you are the Executive Director of Jesus House?

Tell us what Jesus House is?

- Jesus House was never a homeless ministry, it's a needs ministry, what's the need.

And when the Lord started laying that on my heart, we were gonna find people that needed help.

Well, homeless was the first ones.

And so we've been doing homeless ministries, we help widows, we help orphans, we help elderly.

I mean, we help anybody that's in need.

- A needs ministry, I like that.

So you have a soup kitchen, tell us a little bit about that.

- That's my passion right now, I love to cook.

It's just something that we been doing the soup kitchen for about 10 years lunch now.

We did breakfast for about three years before that.

So it's one of those times that you get to put a lot of love into the food.

And I hate to call it a soup kitchen, 'cause we don't serve soup, you know, but we do hot homemade meals.

We feed anybody that walks up to the door and says, they're hungry.

We were actually feeding later today because of the people, they were coming in brand new people in Odessa.

And I love it when they come up and says, "We heard about you, we don't know where to go, "who to talk to."

And we have all the information for them.

So it's kind of a help their need as they come into our city.

- How did they find you?

- I don't know.

It's like, well, Google, I hear a lot of Google, word of mouth, I guess internet.

It's just crazy how, we're not on the beaten path, we're kind of hidden, but it's amazing how they can find us.

- You also have housing for homeless men.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

- That's our man's transitional home, we're not a shelter.

That's the Salvation Army Door of Hope, places like that, we support them that way.

But men that come in, they can't be addicted, they have to be off drugs.

If they're on drugs, they come to us.

We don't kick them away, we'll get them to a treatment facility, you know, work things like that.

But once they get into our program, they come and go, they get a code, the door, we locked the door at 10 o'clock at night, reopen it at 4:00 am, so they can come and go.

You know, the other times like if they get jobs, not they have jobs even late at night, we've worked with that.

Again, what the need is, we have a live in board member that came through our program.

He is only gonna stay two weeks.

He's been with us about six years now.

So that's his ministry, and as they stay there, guys get just about, they have to have, they save money.

These guys go get their own bank accounts and they just, the rent is so cheap and we furnished a lot of things for them.

The deal is to get them off the streets or off to another level of homelessness, so to speak, to get them back into a society where they can be on their own.

- And that's what you mean by transitional - as opposed to shelter?

- Yes.

We just had a guy graduate last month.

And he was with us six months, and even though he didn't get his own place, he got reconnected with his daughter, and his daughter needed the help, of course, with COVID going on, pay bills and things like that.

So he graduated from our program and helping her and kind of got a family back together.

- And I understand you have a project underway that will start, open in January, can you tell us about that?

- The women and children's center, that's our new thing.

Oh, we're so excited, this has been years of praying and working and being told no.

And people saying, they're gonna do this and back out on you.

And it's just been one obstacle after another, so we're fixing the open up January 11th.

We have a ribbon cutting January 5th with the Chamber of Commerce.

We are actually now taking applications for women with children that are needing to get out of ungodly situations, they're having to stay in right now.

Or if they're on the streets, I don't know of any children on the streets right now.

If I did, we'd be really involved in their lives.

But just in case there's some, we haven't found, we wanna talk with them.

We do have interviews they have to go through and things like that.

However, it's gonna be a very, very affordable place to live, having an auxiliary board with some great people on it that have just dedicated a lot of their time and energy to make sure this is gonna be very easy for these ladies and children to go through.

- So that's also a transitional program?

- Yes.

They can work, like same thing, have a code, it's the same concept with, as the man, just they're about five miles apart from each other.

- And you also mentioned a new project that you have called His Homes, can you-- - Affordable housing.

- Affordable housing.

- Good grief, why don't we build affordable housing in Odessa, Midland?

You know, not everybody can afford $200,000 homes.

We're building, and I just met with the architect today.

We're building 10 homes or 30 about 30, so they're like, there are one, two bedroom efficiencies.

You're not there to live there permanently, again, it's a help ministry, they again, come in the program.

So they're on their own, they can come and go any time of the day they want to, they have a lot of freedom.

They continually have to save money.

Saving money is a big thing with us, you need a nest egg.

So we're teaching people to not be dependent on other people.

So when they come into His Homes, they stay six month leases.

And as long as they meet the criteria and do the things they need to do, they can progress on.

The future of His Homes, and I've already talked with a lot of the leaders in Odessa is we take raw land or abandoned buildings, they gifted it to us.

We tear it down and renovate it into a home.

And then she'll have the opportunity with her children to purchase that home, again, her savings.

So if she doesn't have all the savings, then we'll work with a banking institution, and we already have several of those on the wings ready to do it.

And she pays that off, and she only pays what it costs us to build that home.

So if it's $50,000 and the values of 150,000, she only pays $50,000.

So then we'll teach her if you don't like it to be here, flip it and go buy another home somewhere else, better your life, that's what it's about.

- What are some of the reasons that people become homeless?

- Drugs, mental health is a big one.

We're actually working with Agape Counseling Services.

And I know you had Brynn on here, she's one of my church members, dear lady.

And so we working with them, but mainly it's the addictions.

And of course now it's COVID, losing jobs, financially cannot afford their rent or anything like that.

So now they're living in cars, and if they're have a car, they're blessed.

If not, now they're getting tents from us, sleeping bags, you know, thermals, those type of things right now.

So it's a tough situation.

- What is the source of your funding?

- Well, we just got a grant writer.

We've been basically depended on God the whole since 1999, you know, it's been good grief been 20 years or so now.

And He just walks it in the door.

He walked our grant writer in the door, and I'm starting to write a book, people are not gonna believe, it's called "Overwhelmed", God's already gave me the name for it.

And so I've got the first chapter kinda halfway done.

And it's the stories that are gonna be in this book, people are gonna think it's not real, but these are real life stories that have happened to us.

- Tell us a story.

- Well, Cowboy Chuck, Cowboy Chuck, this is a story I'll never forget.

This is when you finally realized I needed humbleness.

And so we had our transitional house going, we do not make anybody go to church, we offer it, we offer other churches to come pick them up.

Those type of things, so the guys that were staying in our program house ran over to the church, said there's a guy looks dead in the alley.

And of course we run out there, and I looked, I never met this guy.

And I looked and he was laying flat on his face in the cliche alley.

And you know, we're dressed for church, we're about an hour away from church.

And I remember God telling me, don't let him see your shoes, let him see your eyes.

Well, the only way to do that, to get down with him.

And I laid down in the dirt and I'm looking at him and pat him on the back, "Are you okay?"

And he had aspirated out of his mouth, and he had his bowels have went everywhere and he just passed out drunk, and he woke up and he saw me and I asked, you're okay?

And we pick him up, we dust him off and the guy says, "You know, I got cloths that'll fit this guy."

And the guys that ran our program house basically adopted him, got him over, got him showered, got him changed, got new clothing on him.

He came into the service, we just offered it to him.

He sat on the front row, gave his heart to God and then he leaves.

And so we're thinking, okay, we're gonna see him again?

But he came back that night, and we had a night service at the time, came back in and nobody recognized him.

He went to the Salvation Army, got a haircut, got cleaned up, got even some different clothing.

He looked really good, and I mean, he didn't look back then, but he walked in, we're like, "Who's this guy?"

And when he talked, we knew him, his name was Chuck.

So anyway, Chuck hung around, Chuck helped us cook, Chuck did some wonderful things.

And then we got a phone call from Hobbs that his daughter was looking for him.

And somehow one of the TV shows air it or whatever.

And they saw it, and so he rekindled back with his family, went back to Hobbs and you know, we still had a great story, but he ended up back in Odessa, back on the streets and froze to death.

- [Becky] Oh gosh!

- And so which got us very active in making sure people don't freeze to death in Odessa.

You don't hear about people freezing an Odessa, you know, but fortunately he did.

- Well, Donnie, thank you so much for the work that you're doing and for visiting with us today, we really appreciate it.

- Loved it, thank you so much for having me.

- You may already be helping the homeless in Texas.

If you opted into the statewide in homelessness fund when registering your vehicle, that fund was created by the Texas legislature in 2017, and it provides grants to cities and counties for services for the homeless.

Citizens may opt in when registering their vehicles.

But there are many local opportunities to help.

Our painting this evening comes from American painter, Paul Burlin.

Paul Burlin had a long and successful career of eight decades, though his work did not turn to abstract expressionism, the style which is arguably his best work until he was in his 70s.

The youngest at the landmark 69th Regiment Armory Show of 1913.

Burlin created quite a stir showing alongside the likes of Monet, Picasso, Manet, and Degas.

Paul Burlin was born in 1886 in New York City.

From 1900 to 1912, he attended the National Academy of Art, as well as the Art Students League while living in Santa Fe between 1913 and 1920, Burlin became fascinated with primitive art and particularly the rich culture of the Pueblo Indians.

He became quite involved with the local tribes and he began incorporating the colors and distinct geometric qualities of the native work into his own, as well as painting portraits of Indians.

You can see this and many other fine works of art at Baker Schorr Fine Art Gallery here in Midland.

Finally, thank you for joining us for One Question.

We will be back each Monday at five following Basin Life with Krista Escamilla where we will answer the questions you want to know from the people who know.

If you have a question, send it to us at onequestion@basinpbs.org, coming up on Basin PBS, BBC World News America with Katty Kay, followed by PBS NewsHour.

I'm Becky Ferguson, goodnight.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music)