'Overjoyed to have a key to my apartment'

After years of housing instability, Pamela has a lease in her name

“Northeast, Southeast, then back to Northeast, so I moved around a lot,” Pamela recalls, thinking about the parts of Portland she’s lived in over the years.

For a long time, Pamela struggled to feel truly at home in the city she was born and raised in. She went 15 years without a lease in her name. For six of those years, she lived in Troutdale with the father of her daughter. While the situation was functional, it was far from ideal for anyone involved.

“Staying with my daughter’s dad, [I had a home] but I still felt homeless,” Pamela says.

Her adult daughter (who has since passed away) told her about a program through the  Portland Housing Bureau that could help her secure housing.

Through additional support from a Metro Supportive Housing Services-funded rent assistance voucher, Pamela qualified for an apartment at Renaissance Commons.

“I was just so happy, and overjoyed to have a key to my apartment,” she said. Once she got settled and the movers left, the first thing she did was take a walk around the neighborhood.

“I got to know the Kenton neighborhood. The park is right there. The train is right there. And it just felt good, to leave and go places and then know I’m going to my house,” she recalled with a grin.

“It took me a while to unpack once I was here because I was like, wow, okay, this is what you strived to do. And now it’s for real. So it took me like a year to unpack my stuff,” Pamela said.

After multiple years in her apartment, Pamela is finally confident in calling her apartment her home; after all, she has now lived there for longer than she did in her previous home. The lease still proudly displays her name. She plans to keep it that way.

– Story courtesy of Oregon Metro