By DEBORAH RUDACILLE
Thomas Hutchinson expects the knock on his door any day now.

Hutchinson and his partner Gwendolyn Tucker, who is seven months pregnant, are slightly over $3,000 in arrears on the rent for their Caroline Street house and on February 18th a Baltimore judge signed an eviction order.

“I’m expecting the sheriff to pop up any day,” says Mr. Hutchinson.

He and Ms. Tucker got behind in their rent when he lost his job in November. Hutchinson, who is 57, says he has been working hard to rebound from his past – he’s an ex-offender with a history of chemical dependency – but that struggle is especially hard right now.

He did not find work again until early February and by then, the amount owed had grown far beyond his ability to repay the debt.

Tough time to need a hand
Like many people seeking services these days, Mr. Hutchinson has found that city and state service agencies are swamped, and that the non-profit providers they have referred him to are similarly stretched. Eligibility requirements pose another obstacle. “I’ve got so much of a run-around,” he says.

He has been to a Baltimore City Family Investment Center office at Edison and Biddle Streets, where a counselor told him that he does not qualify for their eviction assistance program because “it’s only for women with kids.”

Ms. Tucker’s approaching due date notwithstanding, “for a guy without kids, I’m not a candidate.”

He’s talked to a counselor at the Maryland Department of Human Resources Eviction Prevention Program. “She was very courteous and kind,” he says, “but the avenues she gave me were, let’s say whimsical.”

The state will give him $600 toward his back rent—but only if he first comes up with the other $2,400 from other sources. “Well, if I could do that, I wouldn’t need them,” he points out.

The only person who has offered real help so far, he says, is Pastor David Brown, Sr. of the Spirit and Truth New Testament Christian Church on West North Avenue. “Pastor David has given me a job. That’s a realistic solution. Now if I run across a room or an apartment I can show that I have the means to pay for it.”

How he fell behind

The chain of events that led Mr. Hutchinson to his current troubles is common enough in Baltimore city. An ex-offender with a history of chemical dependency, he was enrolled in an intensive outpatient treatment program which required him to attend group meetings three times a week.

Working two jobs at the time—one with a cleaning company and another in construction—he wasn’t always able to attend the meetings. “The program advocates that you become self-sufficient and responsible,” he says, “but if you say that your employer needs you, they say that the program comes first. You’re caught between a rock and a hard place.”

After missing three of his court-ordered counseling sessions because they conflicted with work, Mr. Hutchinson was terminated from the program and given a two-week sanction—meaning that he was sent back to jail. By the time he was released, “I had lost both jobs.”

Only break so far
Hutchinson is now back in the program, down to one counseling session per week and working for Spirit and Truth Management, Inc., a commercial cleaning company run by Pastor Brown. The company is a franchise of Multi-Corps Cleaning Systems. Mr. Brown has been a franchise owner for 8 years, servicing churches, warehouses, banks, office-buildings and stores.

Brown says the he often hires “people who can’t get a job because of their past mistakes,” he says. “I look at myself as a stepping stone to help people who need a chance to build a foundation.”

At present Mr. Brown has ten employees to service twenty accounts. Now and then, he finds himself short-handed, which is how he came across Hutchinson. “I had a boatload of work that week” and he called Goodwill Industries, which has a program to help ex-offenders find employment. Mr. Hutchinson just happened to be in the office at the time and jumped at the chance to work half a day.

He has been working full-time for Brown ever since.

“It was a blessing that Pastor David came around,” Mr. Hutchinson says. The job at Spirit and Truth Management has, he says, “enriched my life. But it came too late to resolve this [eviction] situation.”

Where will they go, if evicted?
Hutchinson is actively looking for some type of housing, even if only a room but he hasn’t found anything yet. Meanwhile, he is afraid that Ms. Tucker could lose their child, due in June, “if we are constantly shuttling around.”

Right now, “the clock is ticking,” he says. “I take my phone to work with me every day so that if the knock comes, my partner can call me and I can get back and salvage whatever. They say they don’t put your stuff on the street anymore, but who knows where they’ll take it.”

As for the agencies tasked with helping people in his situation, he says, “The state says we do have an eviction program in DSS but unless I qualify [by raising the rest of the back rent] the best they can do is say you can go to a shelter or a hole in the wall I guess.”