Column: After years of helping the homeless, he became one after the Altadena fire destroyed his house
For more than a decade, his job has been guiding homeless people into housing.
Last week, social worker Anthony Ruffin lost his home.
Five days after the Eaton Fire destroyed much of Altadena on Monday morning, Ruffin, 56, sipped coffee and wiped his eyes at a Glendale diner as he described how he had spent most of his life of historically black communities.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez, a California native, has been a columnist for the Los Angeles Times since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and was a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.
“I would walk, knock on doors, say hello to people’s moms… go to people’s houses and get a sandwich from their mom,” Ruffin recalled. “'Miss Lee, how are you? Miss Phillips, can you make me a seven-layer cake like you did when I was little? Hi, Mr. King. Robert, across the street – I'll sit there for hours with him say.”
Ruffin grew up in a two-bed, one-bath house on West Palm Street, above West Altadena Street between Lincoln and Fair Oaks avenues, which he later bought from his parents house. As someone who faced so much hardship on a daily basis, Ruffin developed a morning ritual in which he would wake up early, sit on his patio, gaze out at the San Gabriel Mountains, and listen to the birdsong, all surrounded by the people he was known for as homeless. Plants named after attributable clients to whom he was particularly attached.
“This is my safe place,” he said.
Anthony Ruffin, Sieglinde von Devner and Janet Rowe (left to right) talk as people arrive at Leimert Park Plaza to receive COVID-19 vaccinations.
(Alseb/Los Angeles Times)
In the early morning hours of January 8, Ruffin and his wife, Jonni Miller, also a social worker who has long served the homeless community, had to evacuate and had no time to collect precious thing.
A handwritten letter written by Miller's grandmother to her on the day Miller was born was left behind.
So did the discarded cellphones, seven in all, on which Ruffin had stored photos of hundreds of clients, along with contact information and notes thanking him for his help.
A few hours later, they learned that the house and everything inside had been burned, along with much of their neighborhood and neighborhood.
“It was horrible,” Ruffin told me through tears as he tried to calm down near the hotel where he and Miller were staying.
Ruffin and I met more than a decade ago when he worked for a nonprofit called Hollywood Housing Projects. He served as the case manager for my friend Nathaniel Ayers, a Juilliard-trained musician who was homeless on Skid Row and known as “The Soloist.”
Those of us who knew Mr. Ayers have protected some of his property, including various musical instruments. Ruffin told me he had carried a pair of Ayers' drumsticks for years.
They died in a fire last week.
At Housing Works, Ruffin was mentored by Mollie Lowery, the legendary social worker who also assisted Ayers, and Ruffin adopted her motto for helping clients—” Whatever is needed, whatever is needed”.
In 2017, New York Times photographer Francine Orr and I profiled Ruffin and his work with the Hollywood 14, a group of severely disabled homeless people with serious physical and mental illnesses Those who can return. His regular clients include amputees, diabetics and drug addicts. “Some are partially paralyzed,” I wrote, “and many are ghosts, their former selves barely visible in the shadow of relentless psychosis.”
(Alan J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Ruffin often went out on weekends and in the middle of the night – as he still does – to check on his clients. He would kneel on the sidewalk, look them in the eye, drive them to appointments, visit them in the hospital, work tirelessly to earn their trust and work to get them into housing.
Ruffin said his desire to become a social worker had a lot to do with his biological father's struggles and homelessness. Ruffin said he never became close to his father until the last few years of his life, when his father worked as a legal brief courier in downtown Los Angeles. They eventually struck up a belated but “beautiful relationship,” Ruffin said, telling me that his father carried a briefcase with my story about his son's social worker.
In 1976, at the age of 8, Ruffin and his mother, Myrtle Williams, moved to the Altadena home owned by his stepfather, Carl Williams Purchased in 1972. Carl Williams, a truck driver from Texas, discovered that while certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles—Angeles—were no-go areas for black people, the west side of Altadena was a safe haven.
“We played football in the street, baseball in the street, went to school on the corner,” Ruffin said of his childhood.
He went on to say that the house was often filled with various relatives who needed a place to stay for a while, or even longer.
“It was a happy time because there was so much love in that house and people slept where they slept,” Ruffin said. “If you fall asleep on the couch in the living room or on the floor or in a bunk bed … that's where you sleep. There's space underneath the bunk bed, so someone's sleeping there.”
Ruffin said it was not unusual for black people in the neighborhood to insist on taking their last breaths in their own homes when their lives were coming to an end. Ruffin said they knew about segregation and housing discrimination, that it was difficult to find enough jobs to buy property and support their families, and “they wanted to die in the house they built.”
(Alan J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
After Carl Williams retired, his mother and stepfather decided to move to Hesperia. But they still want to keep the house in their family. So Ruffin bought the house from them twenty years ago and began renovating it, being careful not to change the layout or remodel the house but to preserve it as a tribute to all the sweat and sweat his parents had put into it. like.
“I worked two jobs to keep that property because I knew what it meant to my family,” Ruffin said Monday, pausing as he wiped away tears. “We really fixed up the house and it looks really nice.”
Ruffin said his mother and stepfather, now 76 and 83, are “devastated” by the destruction. So are all the neighbors, whose hearts are broken by the loss of their foothill refuge.
“I've talked to all of them,” Ruffin said. “Talked to Miss Lee. Talked to Miss Douglas, she couldn't stop crying.”
Ruffin and Miller also lost two of their cats and two chickens. As they escape, they manage to find their adopted one-eyed cat Maple (who was once homeless in South Los Angeles) and their rescue dog Nan (a ghetto street cat).
On Jan. 13, with their lives upended and their immediate future uncertain, Miller, who like her husband worked on Skid Row for the county Department of Health Services, returned to work. Ruffin had a day off today, like many of his other days off.
“I had to meet with a homeless man today and try to help him find housing,” Ruffin said of one of Skid Row's clients. “I did that on Friday too. I get to help people every day… I have my own problems but I'm lucky. A lot of people on Skid Row deal with addiction and homelessness and don't have what I have Some resources. I mean, I have a motel room now, but they don’t.”
Ruffin, like many who have lost their homes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, is scrambling to sort out insurance and temporary housing options. He had no idea what insurance would cover or how much it would cost to start over, so he set up a gofundme page and said he planned to share the proceeds with his neighbors.
But he knew exactly what the long-term plan was. He wanted to rebuild it on the same site to the same dimensions.
“There’s so much history there,” he said. “I want the exact same thing. That's all. Nothing less.”