Dwayne is Housed
- Town Bizness Team
- Apr 16
- 5 min read
The Town Bizness team met Dwayne when a volunteer told us about a cheerful guy who was detailing cars for cash at the self-service wash on 27th Street. We went over and had a chat as he made Town Biz-mobile shine, scrubbing with his nerve-damaged hands balled in fists. He was living in his truck across the street, and we got him into our meals rotation that day. That was in 2023. In August 2025, Signe sat with him while he signed a lease.
When Signe started Town Bizness, getting people housed wasn't really the goal. She knew how brutal and difficult the system was, and didn’t think she had the resources to tackle it. So Town Bizness focused on helping people with immediate needs, getting to know them one hot meal and Gatorade at a time. Doing this, we found that even with little money and no staff, showing up consistently for people can make a huge difference. Getting someone into stable housing in Oakland is exceedingly hard, but we’ve done it.
Dwayne's Story
Dwayne was working as a chef, living in an apartment with his wife and son. That life was upended when he had multiple strokes within a few months and lost complete use of both hands. He worked for as long as possible, but ultimately lost his job and couldn’t access Social Security Disability. Just a few years later, his wife was diagnosed with cancer and passed away. He couldn’t make ends meet and moved into his truck, still grieving.
Like most people who meet Dwayne, we loved him right away. We stopped by every week, bringing him his favorite BBQ meal whenever we could. Later that year, he was involved in an accident and woke up in the hospital with his legs paralyzed. After the hospital, he was moved to a medical respite facility. (Medi-Cal covers recovery care for homeless folks who are ill, to stabilize people and help get them housing lined up. That’s called respite care.) In the respite facility, he worked hard at recovery and eventually regained some use of his legs. He could stand and take a few steps with a walker.
The Housing Queue
The waiting list to get stable housing in Oakland can take years. Every unhoused person gets assigned a priority score based on things like age, health, and how long they’ve been homeless. The higher your score, the bigger priority you get on the waiting list.
Dwayne’s score should have been high, but his score had never been corrected to reflect his health situation, so he didn’t qualify for anything. We didn’t find this out until after he’d already been discharged.
Nowhere to Go
Medi-Cal cut payment for Dwayne’s respite care once his doctors said the limited use of his legs was probably as good as it was going to get. Since he was “stable,” he didn’t qualify anymore. They had been promising that he’d have housing lined up, and instead, they gave him two days to leave. Angry and feeling hopeless, he called his friend at Town Bizness. As a friend, Signe tried to help. She looked at every option. The community cabins were full, (and also in disrepair), emergency shelters couldn't take him, Medi-Cal nursing homes were full, and he didn't qualify for another respite. He was going to be in a tent, on concrete. Signe remembers looking at him and knowing that in his condition, sleeping outside, he would die.
Town Bizness Stepping Up
We’d done it before, gotten people into a motel for a temporary break when they really needed it. So we came to the Town Bizness community, and with $10 and $25 donations, we got him into a motel. We paid someone to help him eat and get dressed, and when donations fell short, we covered it from our very meager reserves.
Signe went to work doing the housing work herself. Town Bizness doesn’t have city contracts or grants to fund that work, but nobody else was doing it, so she figured it out as she went.
She got him a housing navigator, we got his disabilities properly documented, got him on the Section 8 waitlist, and set up Medi-Cal home visits. (These things only take two seconds to list out, but each one came with a truckload of paperwork and red tape.)
Every month, Town Bizness scrambled for motel funds, and donors came through. Seeing how hard the community was fighting for him shifted something in Dwayne, too. He started to believe it could be possible. Looking back on this change now, he says that's when he finished"waiting to go," and started thanking god every day.
A Hard-Fought Win
Signe worked every contact she'd built over the years and tried to call in every favor, following up over and over, hitting dead ends everywhere. Eventually, one of those calls landed with Lindsay Partridge at Operation Dignity, who was able to do the crucial step of getting Dwayne's housing score corrected to move him up the priority list.
Months later, a match came through. We still had to qualify him, which meant documenting his chronic homelessness in detail. We documented every visit, every meal, everything. Finally, it worked!
Signing the Lease
In August 2025, Signe sat with Dwayne and they signed his lease, after he’d been houseless for more than ten years.
“I just came from signing my lease next door, and I just wanna thank everybody. I thank god, first of all. And I wanna thank people who contributed to me getting off the streets. I haven’t had my own place for years. It's such a lovely day. I thank you, and I appreciate it. Thank god. Town Bizness is doing it.” – Dwayne, August 2025
Operation Dignity covered six months of rent upfront, his security deposit, and basic furnishings. He has a TV, microwave, comfy bed, a fridge, a bathroom with lights that come on automatically. When Signe came in to visit him two months after move-in, he raised both arms in victory. He had friends in the building, he was all smiles, and looked so healthy. He’d gained eight pounds.
What We Learned
Dwayne’s situation isn’t unusual. Except what usually happens is that people come out of the hospital or respite right back onto the street, because they don’t have someone fighting to navigate the bureaucracy for them. Our houseless neighbors cycle through systems that don’t talk to each other, trying to meet complicated requirements that demand impossible things (reply to an email, order a birth certificate). “Falling through the cracks,” implies that the system works most of the time, and fails for some people. But if you’re homeless, it’s the other way around. You have to both get wildly lucky and fight incredibly hard to get the system to work.
Because we’d been working with Dwayne for years, we had the relationships and the documentation to make his case. We’re already doing this work with others. The relationships we forge, starting with hot meals and hand warmers, are actually the glue that make people trust us and stick with us long enough to help them ultimately get into permanent stable housing.
If you’ve been part of Dwayne’s story at any point, by donating, sharing, or just following along, you’re part of why it’s possible. Thank you for being part of the Town Bizness community.
He has a place that’s his, with a door he can close.
