Bruce Armstrong thought it was going to be an awkward call.
It was the summer of 2020, and the San Francisco venture capitalist had responded to a newspaper ad placed by Miracle Messages, a Bay Area non-profit seeking volunteers to alleviate the social isolation of people experiencing homelessness.
The ask seemed simple enough: sign up to become a “phone buddy” for an unhoused San Franciscan, offering support in the form of calls and conversation.
That’s how Armstrong found himself dialing a number, unsure exactly what he’d say. On the other end of the line, Nathaniel Todd scrambled through his belongings to answer the buzzing phone provided to him by the non-profit.
“How can I help you?” Armstrong began, stiffly. “Can you find me a woman?” Todd replied, half joking. Both broke into laughter.
From the outside, a friendship between Todd and Armstrong may have seemed unlikely. They occupy two worlds that are emblematic of San Francisco but rarely collide. Todd, 64, is a slightly built African American man who had been living on the streets, shelters, and in and out of prison for years. Armstrong, 62, is a white partner at one of the city’s best-known venture capital firms and invests in some of the hottest technology companies.
But over the past three years the pair have forged a remarkable bond that, they say, has changed them both for the better.
Through his connection with Armstrong, Todd has found emotional support as well as practical guidance to save money, find work and ultimately transition to his own home. “I just felt I had a true friend,” says Todd of their relationship. “He has really been there for me.”
Armstrong, meanwhile, has found companionship and counsel, turning to Todd for advice when tackling challenges in his own life and personal relationships. “I have few friends and Nathaniel is among them,” he says.
It’s the kind of story groups like Miracle Messages hope can point the way forward as California grapples with a seemingly intractable homelessness crisis.
Miracle Messages’ founder and chief executive officer, Kevin Adler, says the program connected phone buddies from across the world with 14 unhoused people across the Bay Area in that summer of 2020.
While initially conceived as just a peer support system, in 2021 the program was expanded through fundraising to include a guaranteed income scheme offering $500 a month for six months , which Todd was enrolled in. They say the scheme has been highly successful, with most of the people who took part in the pilot, including Todd, now in housing.
The combination of guaranteed income and a support buddy can be “very powerful”, says Adler, because having a friend for support can help unhoused people stay accountable and on track to turn their lives around.
“We are often inoculated from the loneliness and shame of poverty,” he tells me. “Friends do what friends do – they provide support.”
Confronting loneliness and childhood trauma
After years of being estranged from his family, staying in unstable housing and being incarcerated, Todd was feeling lonelier than ever as the pandemic-induced quiet summer of 2020 set in.
A few months earlier, he received a room at La Luna Inn, near San Francisco’s Presidio, as part of a city program to shelter unhoused people during the pandemic. He stayed inside the room for months on end, “alone, afraid, depressed and drinking like hell”. He’d sit on his bed staring at the vintage posters that hung on the wall, replaying his years of being unhoused, knowing he never wanted to go back.
“I would see everybody going back home at 5pm,” he recalls of life on the streets. “I had nowhere to go. I hated it. I walked the streets all night.”
After that first phone call, Armstrong and Todd began speaking every few days. Soon, they began meeting up every week to walk from Todd’s hotel to Chrissy Field, a park alongside the San Francisco Bay. They watched the boats go by and the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, sitting by the water and sharing their thoughts about those scary, quiet months. Todd joked about his need for a girlfriend. Amid the banter, deeper conversations emerged.
Armstrong told Todd about his family struggles, including an ailing 91-year-old father living in Los Angeles. Nathaniel goaded him to visit more often, prompting Armstrong to travel for regular lunches during his father’s final months. When his father died, Todd’s was among the first calls he got.
With Todd’s help, Armstrong also reconnected with his son, from whom he had been estranged for more than a year. “He had been through so much, I thought he would know,” says Armstrong of heeding Todd’s advice. A single text sent at Todd’s urging – “How are you? – broke the deadlock.
Despite the obvious gaps between their background and income – Armstrong drove a Tesla, Todd got around the city on foot – the friendship blossomed. Todd had a way of cutting through these differences with his unfiltered advice, while Armstrong’s constant presence and support kept them going.
Slowly, Todd began to reveal unspoken traumas. On a warm August afternoon, more than a year after they met, Armstrong had found Todd drained of his usual witticisms. When Armstrong tried to make him laugh, tears fell from behind Todd’s sunglasses. He told Armstrong it was the anniversary of his younger brother’s death.
For the first time in years, he began to speak of that day in 1966. His mother had taken Todd, then seven, his younger sister and three-year-old brother to visit a friend’s apple orchard. “It was the first time I had seen a yard with a pool,” Todd recalled. His mother left to pick apples and before he knew it, his brother had fallen in the swimming pool. Todd didn’t know how to swim. “There was nothing I could do but watch him die.”
The grief transformed his family. Todd said his mother cried endlessly and snapped at him; when he snapped back, she hit him. At 13, Todd ran away from home and began slipping into crime. At 17, he was arrested for attempted robbery.
He ultimately spent more than a dozen years in and out of Bay Area prisons, his sentences extended longer because he missed parole. Stints outside prison were spent on the plaza outside San Francisco’s city hall, peddling drugs. He struggled with alcohol abuse and also drifted between jobs, never staying long enough in any to make a home in a city with rapidly rising housing prices.
Armstrong understood that afternoon by the bay that his brother’s death was part of what had held Todd back. Grappling with the root causes of trauma opened space for healing. Armstrong began accompanying Todd to doctor’s visits to deal with niggling aches that Todd had put off for years. He encouraged Todd to apply for jobs in carpentry and security to help him avoid falling back on the street.
Armstrong also accompanied Todd to set up a bank account in order to access the guaranteed income he received from Miracle Messages. Complications arose when the money in Todd’s account was garnished by the state for back taxes he didn’t know he owed. Armstrong lent a hand by accepting the monthly $500 to his own account and passing it on to Todd.
By the summer of 2021, San Francisco officials began planning to wind down the Covid hotel scheme and offered to help Todd find a new place. Armstrong was around to absorb the anxiety of the protracted search.
One day, Todd called: he had found the perfect spot – a city-subsidized studio apartment in a condo on the slope that rose gently from the city’s Union Square.
Cash payments: a path out of poverty
Guaranteed income programs, offering no-strings-attached payments to low-income recipients, are catching on across the US. This year could test their wider appeal, with efforts to establish the first state-backed guaranteed income programs for the homeless under way in Oregon and Washington.
Winning support is often hamstrung by concerns from the public and lawmakers that free cash will be misspent without resolving the underlying issues of poverty. The data from these programs, however, points to a different reality. Sean Kline is the associate director at the Stanford Basic Income Lab, which runs a dashboard that tracks how recipients across more than 30 programs spend their money. He says that payments are mostly used for groceries, bills and other daily expenses. In the case of a groundbreaking 2019 program in Stockton, California, recipients bought food and medicine, and paid off debts.
“The point of [guaranteed income] is that we should not presume we know what people need,” says Kline.
Miracle Messages is unique in pairing a buddy with the cash payments, which Adler believes is the key to its success. Sidhya Balakrishnan, director of research at the Jain Family Institute, which evaluates guaranteed income projects across the world, says offering such services could help income get better absorbed. “We need to try different models to know what works best,” she says.
In May 2022, Miracle Messages had expanded its income and buddy program in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. This November, a study found that the 69 homeless people who received $750 per month were less than half as likely to report being unsheltered after six months of receiving the money and friend. They reported using the money to buy food, for housing, transport, all of which had brought them closer to meeting their basic needs.
On a crisp spring morning, I meet Todd and Armstrong outside the apartment where Todd moved in December 2021. We walk down to San Francisco’s Union Square and chat in the sun.
Most days, Todd wakes up before dawn and works at the vast plaza outside city hall where he once sold drugs, only now he’s unloading trucks of fruit through the night for the farmers’ market. On other days, he unloads furniture for nearby offices. Armstrong says that having the house and income has filled Todd with the energy to reimagine his life.
“Now he has dreams,” Armstrong tells me later on a phone call. “He wants more out of life. He wants to travel. He wants a wife.”
A few days later, Todd invites me over to his new studio. When I arrive, he is wearing an oversized khaki jacket given to him by Armstrong. He gives me a tour of the apartment, which is filled with pots, pans, a television and other furnishings bought with the Miracle Messages income.
As we make breakfast, I look up at the counter shelf and see a mug with a picture of Armstrong and Todd, their arms wrapped around each other. It was taken after walking across the Golden Gate Bridge in May 2022. It shows how far the two have come together.
Most of all, Todd enjoys sitting on the bed at the far end of the house and watching life on the street below. What would he like to do now that his long-held dream of being housed has come true, I ask?
“I am thinking of writing a book.” When I ask what it would be about, he replies: “Myself. Bruce and myself.”
One was a tech VC, the other was unhoused. They forged an unlikely friendship in a deeply unequal city - The Guardian US
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