What They Couldn't Take from Jasmine

"I used to cry. It used to be nothing but tears," Jasmine says. "But now it's liberation."

She's twenty-four, and she wants that understood before she tells you the rest.

Growing up in Arizona, she carried one stubborn idea: Houston, a place where a young Black woman could build something and be seen doing it. At twenty-two she rode a Greyhound to Texas and into an apartment she'd rented sight unseen.

Work was hard to find. She lost the apartment, regrouped at her brother's in Indiana, saved, bought a car, then drove eighteen hours back to Houston to live in it until she could afford a place. "This is where I want to start my businesses," she says, "and just shine my light."

The car was her transportation, her housing, and her income.

She'd been back five days.

She was DoorDashing on a Saturday night, parked outside a McDonald's, when she was robbed. "You have three people on you at once," she says. "One's grabbing your phone, the other one's grabbing your keys, and the third one jumps in the driver's seat." There was a gun, no time to think, and one thought arrived whole: Is it really worth it?

She let it go, and with it her clothes, her birth certificate, her ID, and her mother's ashes.

The car was eventually found. Getting it back was its own slow cruelty: pay to unlock it, pay the impound lot as the days and fees stacked up, pay to tow it to the dealer for a new key fob. All of it right after her monthly car payment, all of it money she didn't have. For five days she tried. "But I had to accept it. It's done. It's over."

That is how fast a young person loses housing, and how far out of reach it sits once it's gone.

She never recovered the ashes. So she found another way to keep her mother. "I talk to her. I celebrate her birthday." She catches her own goofiness mid-laugh and stops cold. Oh my gosh, I'm just like her. OK, hi Mom. Her mother isn't in a container that can be taken at gunpoint. She's in Jasmine's laugh.

In that parking lot she borrowed a stranger's phone and said three words: "I need help." One call led to another, then to Covenant House Texas, whose Houston program serves young people eighteen to twenty-four. "I knew I would be with my peers."

A safe bed that week. Then a clubhouse internship, a job at a downtown law firm, business classes at Houston Community College.

"I'm victorious within my story."

That is what housing buys: the floor under a young person while she builds. Covenant House provides it across the United States, Canada, and Latin America, from a crisis bed on the worst night to an apartment a young person can actually afford.

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