Place to get back on your feet
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Magdalena Szabo was a fashion stylist with credits in Playboy, Vogue and Glamour. She spoke five languages fluently, wore beautiful clothes, ate at the best restaurants and had a great view from her apartment on Queen Anne Hill.
Barbara Pineiro was a cashier in Renton, and her husband was a carpenter. They weren't rich, but for seven years they'd paid rent on a small two-bedroom apartment in South King County and had a comfortable life.
Randy Sotelo thought he was set with a stable union job as a painter and a home in Auburn that he shared with his girlfriend and their two children.
They never thought they would end up homeless. But disease, injury, shortsightedness or plain old bad luck turned them - almost overnight - into social-service statistics.
"Just like you, I looked at people, and I said, `Oh, just get a job,' " said Szabo, who immigrated to the United States from Romania 22 years ago. "But sometimes things happen, and they can knock you down so far that it is very hard to get up again."
On any given day on Aurora Avenue North, more than 80,000 drivers whiz past the Aloha Inn, a nondescript building except for its sign in turquoise and red. Most give little thought to the people inside the transitional-housing program, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary today.
Like most of the 3,000 people or so who've passed through the program - considered a model facility by homeless advocates across the country - Szabo had few other options.
"This is an absolutely wonderful place if you want to get back on your feet," she said. "It has made me feel human again."
The four-story, 66-bed Aloha Inn has a six-month program that offers shelter, job counseling, computer training, dental care, free bus tickets and a host of other services.
Residents set the rules, screen applicants and handle the budget. They work 15 hours a week on household chores, pay $5 a week in rent and save $60 a week toward their own place. More than 60 percent go on to find permanent jobs and homes, said staff member Dan Owcarz.
The program was formed after a group of homeless people set up and governed their own tent communities in 1990. After the success of Tent City, as it was called, the city lent $1.9 million to the Low Income Housing Institute to purchase the Aloha Inn and turn it into transitional housing.
"The first thing you need to get in here is you have to be honest with yourself," Pineiro said. "You have to be willing to save money, you have to be willing to be clean and sober, and you have to be willing to work. If you can do that, you can get in."
And if you can get in, said Julian Stefan, an interpreter and former resident who's had his own place for more than two years, you can get off the streets.
"If someone cannot make it here at the Aloha, where every bit of help is given to them, then they do not really want to make it," he said.
Illness, medical expenses
Szabo, 44, a concert pianist, stylist and fashion designer, found work relatively quickly upon arriving in California from Romania.
She designed and sewed costumes for movies and television advertisements.
But soon after moving to Seattle four years ago, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a painfully debilitating condition. At one point, she was on 21 medications a day and was confined to bed for months. "People who have never been sick like this don't know how that can devastate you," she said.
She had fair medical insurance and some savings but she ran through it and one day could not pay her rent. She was evicted.
She went from shelter to shelter until she heard about the program at Aloha Inn, where she's been for more than five months. Now she's living on disability insurance and looking for more permanent quarters.
Nomadic life not for her
As a teen, Barbara Pineiro spent a couple years on the street, sleeping in trailers and cars. While her parents seemed content with the nomadic lifestyle, she was not.
Now 30, she started working as soon as she could and within months had an apartment of her own in Renton.
Four years ago she met and married Jose Pineiro, a carpenter and construction worker. "We weren't rich, but we both worked, and we were making it."
Then just before Christmas last year, she suffered a back injury and was laid off, and he couldn't find enough work to make up the difference.
After a few months, her landlord of seven years kicked them out.
"He was nice about it for a long time, but we just could not get caught up," she said.
The two spent several weeks in cheap motels and getting by on casual temporary jobs. One day, they found they didn't have enough even for bus fare.
"We slept on the street for one night, and that was really scary," Pineiro said.
The next day, they heard about the Aloha Inn and moved in six months ago.
Now her husband has a permanent job as a packer with Pacific Rim, and she's working part time in a bookstore. Earlier this week, they signed a lease on a one-bedroom apartment on Capitol Hill. They signed up for cable television and installed a phone.
"When they gave us our phone number I was so excited," she said. "I have my own phone number again."
`It changes you for the better'
After 35-year-old Randy Sotelo and his girlfriend broke up, he was faced with a decision: Who should move out of the apartment?
"She said, `It's either you or me and the kids', and of course, I wanted the kids safe," he said.
He slept under bridges and caught rides from colleagues to his job as a painter before applying for a bed at the Aloha Inn and getting it.
Two months ago, Sotelo signed a lease on a two-bedroom condo with a view in Greenwood. He's working as a glazier, seeing his kids on the weekends and playing in a band, ANI Studio 213, with other current and former Aloha Inn residents.
"A lot of artists and musicians come through here," he said. "I don't want to have to do this again. But I'm not sorry that I know what it is to be homeless. It changes you for the better."
Former resident Stefan agreed.
"If I was the secretary of education, I would make everybody be homeless for a year. Then, you see what life really is, then."
Addiction costly
Just this week, Mark Giancola, 25, moved into the Aloha Inn. A few years ago, he had a $20-an-hour job at Microsoft, a nice car, a great apartment and plenty of spending money.
But experimenting with drugs led to addiction, and he lost just about everything. All he has left is a bag of records he hopes to parlay into a disc-jockey gig.
"This is the hook-up," he said. "I know I've got a place to lay my head and something to eat now, and I can spend my energy trying to set things straight. I don't have any more excuses."
Christine Clarridge can be reached at 206-464-8983 or cclarridge@seattletimes.com.