On a gorgeous, sun-filled morning, Lance Cosper sat cross-legged on a tiny patio made of pavers in front of his tent and shared his good news: He’d been approved for short-term rental assistance.

He and his neighbors were sitting in folding chairs contained within a circle of tents, which formed an outdoor living room with a firepit at the center. Overhead, two concrete ribbons on the edge of downtown carried drivers turning off Interstate 10 onto U.S. 59 South.

The Houston area has received national attention for dramatically reducing its number of people living without homes by more than half since 2011 through a seemingly simple solution: offering them housing.

Samuel Hurt catches up with Albert Castillo on Dec. 2, 2021. They both lived under the U.S. 59 Freeway.

All Cosper had to do to leave the camp — dozens of tents that stretch along both sides of the interchange — was find an available unit from a list of four complexes that worked with Houston, Harris County and their partners, which pay to house the formerly homeless and provide them with social workers.

But he was afraid that someone — with good intentions or bad — might walk up to his home while he was gone, and he’d regret having stepped away.

As Cosper watched to see who might turn up, a small figure appeared on the sidewalk. He was wearing a bowling shirt, rectangular sunglasses and square-toed leather shoes; in his hand was a plastic bag. He plopped it near Cosper’s feet and gestured at it, then at the group, smiling and tilting his head.

“Family,” mouthed the man, Albert Castillo, motioning at Cosper and the five others who sat in a circle. He wore a leather collar with a lock hanging over a hole in his throat, from which air whispered.

“I do know that,” Cosper said, reading the man’s lips and nodding. He peered inside the bag and pulled out a gallon of cold milk for breakfast. “That’s why we love you, Albert. When I get my housing, I’ll also come back.”

Castillo had lived in the camp until receiving housing through the city, county and their partners. But despite having an apartment of his own off of Westpark Drive — an hour and a half away by bus — he visited regularly. Sometimes he visited just to get away from his empty room, or because he felt his mental state start to darken. Sometimes he visited because he needed food or clothing, which good Samaritans regularly brought by the camp. Even though he had his housing, he believed he wouldn’t be alive without the support of his friends.

He sat down next to Cosper, who had settled into his chair and set his eyes upon the horizon. The milk had begun to sweat with condensation.

If everything goes according to plan, the camp and all of its inhabitants soon will be gone.

The Houston area started systematically closing camps by offering those living there permanent housing — then clearing the site, usually with fencing to prevent the camp from reforming — in early 2021, as the city and county bookmarked tens of thousands of COVID-related funding sent down from Congress to address homelessness.

But when the rental market began to boom as social distancing mandates thawed, fewer landlords opted to participate in the program, choosing instead to rent to the market. The pace at which the city, county and their partners could move people out of camps slowed.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Houston, Harris County and their partners quickly ramped up the number of units available to house the formerly homeless by renting vacant apartments. But as the rental market picked up steam, the number of units added to the program plummeted from 1,100 in the first four months of 2021 to 500 in the same period in 2022, according to the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County.

So for Cosper and his neighbors — as for people living in many other camps — life remained stuck in the day-to-day shuffle of survival, trying to protect what they had while also navigating the bureaucratic web of organizations meant to help them get back on their feet. Without other places to go, the camps provided the protection of other people.

“It’s the safest place to be homeless that I know,” Cosper said. Everyone in the circle of tents had made an unspoken pact to look out for one another.

That didn’t mean the camp was free from tragedy. Within months of losing his home, Cosper said the police dispatcher knew his voice. “She says, ‘Hi, Lance, I know where you are — what’s going on?’” He’d seen a friend have a stroke and another suffer a life-threatening infection; others in the greater camp had died from illness, exposure, overdose or violence.

But there was also plenty of generosity. Just take his leather boots. One of them had the words “Follow Jesus” written across the top in permanent market, the other, “Do not sell these,” a message that makes him chuckle. Cosper said a selfless man who traveled across the country helping the homeless had pulled up, asked what he needed, and drove back with boots in his size.

Lance keeps this pair of boots dropped off by a good samaritan outside his tent.

The Monday after Cosper announced he had qualified for short-term rental assistance, he borrowed his neighbor Alex Dehn’s phone to call a Yale Street property that was the most promising of the four participating apartment complexes his case manager had given him.

But the line was busy, and Cosper never found out if there were vacancies at the complex.

Lance Cosper looks through a list of apartment complexes available for housing, on March 1, 2022.

The last day of what Cosper, now 54, calls his “old life” was May 1, 2020. Weeks after the novel coronavirus’ spread led to stay-at-home orders across the nation, two old drinking buddies called. They had driven over to his neighborhood in the leafy, master-planned suburb of Kingwood and were sitting at the end of the dock on a nearby lake.

He was sober after financial troubles, divorce and the deaths of his parents had threatened his prosperous life as a construction manager and cost him the two homes he had owned — 5 acres in the ranch-dotted town of Splendora north of Houston (“We did the whole horse thing: two horses and a Shetland pony”) and a brick home with a pool in Kingwood.

His friends had brought something for him: a Four Loko. He looked at the tall can. Just one would be fine, he thought. As they talked and laughed and tossed scraps of chicken to a gator in the lake, he had three more.

When a police officer found him asleep at a traffic light, his blood-alcohol content was more than double the legal threshold for intoxication. He went to jail, got fired and — unwilling to ask his uncles or children for help — determined he’d stay in Star of Hope shelter to sort things out.

But the shelter had reduced its capacity because of COVID-19 and wasn’t accepting new clients. From its doorstep, he turned and saw a collection of tents across the street, underneath U.S. 59. There, he recognized faces of people he had done the addiction program with before.

The men at camp keep an organized ad hoc pantry inside of a tent.

The pandemic pushed back Cosper’s court date again and again and again. In what his neighbors referred to as Tent City, Cosper fell into a rhythm, learning where generous individuals or food kitchens provided meals or how to sell food stamps for cash. He learned the schedule of the shower truck that came by Wednesday and Saturday.

Soon, the camp was home, and the small group living in the ring of tents was family.

Patricia Stevenson, right, a good Samaritan who regularly checks in on the men at the camp, joins in a toast of sparkling apple juice in honor of a friend under the U.S. 59 Freeway on March 12, 2022, in Houston. Pictured, from left to right, Alex Dehn, Gary Leeds and Lance Cosper sit closest to Stevenson.

There was Castillo, who’d had a tracheotomy during his treatment for throat cancer while living in the camp and wore a collar covering the spot where the tube had been surgically inserted. After Castillo got housing, others moved in — Gary Leeds was one, a tall man in his 60s with intensely blue eyes and a fondness for classic rock and roll. Dehn, at 25, became one of the youngest in the group, a jack-of-all-trades known for his upbeat, joking banter.

Leeds would take their makeshift family out to dinners at Outback Steakhouse when his disability and Social Security payments came. On nights they ate in, Dehn sometimes cooked meals over a firepit he had constructed out of pavers. One day, Dehn found a discarded love seat outside a nearby public housing complex; he brought it back and set it up inside his tent, where the crew took turns taking naps. While the menacing sense that things could go south never disappeared, Cosper sometimes caught himself using the word “comfortable” to describe their way of life.

Alex Dehn monitors a fire he started to be able to cook dinner under the U.S. 59 Highway on Nov. 30, 2021.

With one glance, Leeds was sure: His life was about to take a turn for the better.

A week and a half into the new year, a man had walked into the camp cradling a kitten. Each of his hands was the size of the gray tabby’s body. It mewed, opening its mouth wide like a hungry bird and squeezing shut its eyes. The man explained he was looking to find the kitten a home.

Leeds charged out of his tent. “That’s my cat,” he declared.

The man, looking a little confused, handed Leeds his cat.

Leeds sat in a folding chair, nestling the kitten in his lap. “Don’t ask me why I did this,” he said. “I can’t even take care of myself. But I’ll take care of that cat.” He tickled her belly. He had already decided on a name: Claws, for the needle-sharp nails she used to try to climb up his shirt.

Cosper thought he knew why. “Pets are therapy,” he told Leeds.

Gary relaxes inside his tent with his cat on Jan. 20, 2022. He says having a cat has been helpful with dealing with his mental health struggles. 

He had his theories about the ways people tried to deal with the unbearable. Take his bottle of beer. “There’s three ways to describe it: numbing, self medication and coping,” he explained. But really, he felt, what it all came down to was avoiding — and the need for an escape was intensified by living outside where you could never let your guard down. Sometimes he and the others in the camp muttered darkly that the worst place to be, if someone had it out for you, was inside a tent.

Leeds was trying to deal with a lot. In the weeks before, he had begun to worry about his health. His knee throbbed, there was blood in his stool, and he had lost weight. But when the kitten clumsily sat up in his lap, he broke into a smile and began to coo.

Leeds’ path to sleeping under U.S. 59 started in 2016. As an alcoholic, he had enrolled in a live-in program for recovering addicts, but he became suspicious of the people he lived with. That summer, convinced that the home was actually a crackhouse that society would be better without, he set the building on fire. In 2017, he pleaded guilty to arson and was sentenced to five years in prison.

The silver lining of his time in prison, Leeds said with a deprecating shake of his head, was that he got on medication that helped with his bipolar and generalized anxiety disorders. He sometimes drew line graphs to explain how his moods went up and down — a period of happiness, then a period of deep depression, until steady medication leveled it out.

When Leeds got out, he qualified for Social Security and disability payments but had no luck renting.

“Arson being my charge, it’s hard to get housing,” he explained. He went straight from prison to homelessness.

But he had money for Claws. Leeds called Dehn over and asked him to find cat food, kitty litter and a bottle of vodka.

Dehn returned with a bag of cat food, a bottle of Watermelon Seagrams and a stack of sticky notes. There had been no litter at the store, but Dehn — known within the camp as a MacGyver — figured he could make some by shredding the notes. “The cat food was expensive,” he warned as he handed Leeds the bill. Leeds seemed unbothered.

Gary Leeds places a kitten in the inside pocket of his jacket before going to an appointment at the Beacon on March 18, 2022, in Houston.

Cosper took comfort in knowing that he had been approved for housing. But each day he told himself he would visit apartments, he put it off. It was so far to travel by bus, especially not knowing whether there was a vacancy. Finally he heard troubling news — he had lost his spot because his application had been inactive. He was shocked. He hadn’t known there was a deadline.

Dehn found comfort in making improvements to the camp. He’d lost his most recent home — a towable recreational vehicle in Rockport — during Hurricane Harvey. Dehn remembered walking out into the eye of the storm from the hotel where he had sheltered. The world was cool and quiet. It was hard to tell that a disaster was unfolding around him, until he looked up and saw birds flying in a circle overhead, trapped by walls of wind.

After Hurricane Harvey, the number of people living on Houston-area sidewalks, in camps and in other places not meant for habitation jumped 42 percent, to 1,540 people from 1,084 the year before, according to the annual point-in-time count. It stayed stubbornly high for years, finally dipping to 1,473 during an annual count in 2022, after the pandemic and its influx of federal dollars.

When he went back to check on his RV, it had flooded. But while he had lost his home, he hadn’t lost his urge to make things homier. At the camp, he’d built a firepit out of pavers. He’d gotten hold of a small wooden table, which he had altered to make “coffee table height.” On top, he had spread a fleece blanket as a tablecloth and set a kettle, an ashtray and a copy of the Bible. He’d even installed a pole that he hung with the type of metal signs you’d find at a patio bar: “Lovely day for a Guinness” and “Beer! It’s what’s for breakfast.”

He’d also built infrastructure: trenches and berms to direct the flow of rainfall away from the tents.

But while he could freely shape aspects of his environment, other parts were out of his control. He worried that strangers coming through their courtyard of tents were not to be trusted, and he feared that Claws might get hit by a car.

So when a couple spotted Claws and asked if they could adopt her, Dehn considered. The couple lived on the other side of the underpass, in a cluster of tents by a hike-and-bike trail. It was quieter there. It seemed safer than their current setup.

“That’s a great idea,” he said.

Lance Cosper and Alex Dehn tidy up the camp on March 30, 2022.

When Leeds realized he had lost Claws, his despair surged.

He could feel the line charting his state of mind plummeting toward the bottom of the graph.

He picked up a can of propane, which they used to heat coffee and cook meals on a camp stove, and flung it into the firepit. Then another. And another. Dehn, who also felt something within him snap, threw a can into the fire as well.

At first nothing happened. Then the fire roared.

A can flew out of the fire like a rocket and hit the underside of the freeway. Another hit Leeds. Cosper ran out of his tent and called the fire department. He was livid. Any apartment, no matter the neighborhood, was better than this.

The nonprofit he had been working with agreed to make an exception and reactivated his case. This time, he promised, he’d find an apartment by the deadline. He had weekly check-ins with his case manager to make sure of it.

In late January, Patricia Stevenson, a good Samaritan who regularly checked in on the camp, received a call in the night. It was Castillo, and he was afraid for his life.

He told her that a gang was offering money to anyone who killed him. There was a convoluted story about sleeping with the wrong woman. Stevenson asked what she could do. Together, they decided to buy him a bus ticket to Amarillo, where his family lived. There, he got back in touch with his brother and sister-in-law, who had been unaware that he was homeless. He described his happiness at the reconnection, and she felt at peace.

Patricia Stephenson, right, leads a prayer with the men that live under the U.S. 59 Freeway on Thursday, Dec. 16, 2021, in Houston.

Stevenson received another call, this time from Castillo’s sister-in-law. Castillo had died from throat cancer.

She said that when she broke the news to Cosper, he cried.

Leeds was taking small steps toward housing — he had his birth certificate and was working on his Social Security card.

But in the meantime, his mental health was slipping. The last time he tried to pick up his medication, the community health center was closed.

On Dehn’s 26th birthday, they celebrated with dinner at Saltgrass Steakhouse, Leeds’ treat. Like irreverent high schoolers, Leeds, Dehn and Cosper pocketed silverware they figured they could use at camp.

Then, on the walk home, Leeds lost his grip. Some small grievance with Cosper resurged. He hit Cosper, and Dehn tackled him. Leeds took out a Saltgrass Steakhouse knife and stabbed Dehn in the back. Cosper called the paramedics.

But the men who called themselves family stood by one another. They’d all done things they wish they could take back. A few days later, Dehn was putting a chipper spin on his birthday stabbing, despite the black stitches holding together a red gash beneath his shoulder and the bottle of antibiotics he kept forgetting to take.

“It was my first time in the hospital for a while!” he said. “And they were nice. When you’re stabbed, they’re nice to you. When you OD, they’re like — let him die.”

Alex Dehn helps Gary Leeds figure out the balance on his benefits card on March 18, 2022.

As Dehn recovered, he also spent time trying to improve Leeds’ state of mind. He built Leeds paver-lined garden beds on either side of his tent and filled them with dirt and mulch that Stevenson had purchased. On the right side, they’d planted pansies and oleanders; on the left, a row of tomato plants.

“That’s his therapy,” Dehn said. Leeds loved tending the plants and the way they lit up the faces of passersby.

Alex Dehn built a garden outside of Gary's tent in an effort to help him with his mental health struggles.

The camp held a memorial service for Castillo on the 12th. They sat in a ring, with a cross that Dehn had built out of fleece-wrapped plywood. One by one, they shared stories of Castillo the boxer, the protector, the man who had made so many friends (whom he couldn’t pass without a hello) that a five-minute trip to Walmart could take hours.

“Lord God,” Stevenson said. “We’re all gathered around this campfire to honor Albert. Albert will never have to be homeless again. He’ll never not be able to speak again. He’ll never have his tent thrown away — any of the bad things that happened.”

Cosper wiped his eyes behind his sunglasses.

“I think he’s upstairs laughing,” he said. “And saying, ‘I can talk now.’”

Alex constructs a cross to honor his friend Albert Castillo before a memorial service under the U.S. 59 Freeway on March 12, 2022. Castillo died in Amarillo.

Spring arrived, breezy and hopeful. A friend found Leeds a new kitten, and the camp agreed to share the responsibilities of raising her.

Cosper looked into apartments. The phone number for the Yale Street property was still busy when he called, but he had another lead on a property management company. However, days came and went and Cosper still hadn’t reached out to the company. His first check-in with the nonprofit SEARCH Homeless Services came.

“Lance, don’t forget about SEARCH,” Dehn said, as Cosper’s appointment approached.

“I’m not in the mood,” Cosper said. “I have another three, three-and-a-half weeks. I’m not worried about it.”

But Cosper didn’t make it to the check-in. Nor the one after that nor the one after that. Finally, it was his deadline, and he hadn’t found an apartment.

“What’s the point of housing?” Cosper asked, sounding defeated. “If I don’t have my Social Security card, I can’t get my driver’s license. When I got arrested for a DWI, they took my whole wallet.”

He’d always said he wanted only temporary housing, something long enough for him to get another job in home construction that would allow him to rent something nicer. He wanted to regain a semblance of his previous life. But, he said hopelessly, he couldn’t get that kind of job without a driver’s license.

“Lance,” Dehn said, in his usual cheery tone, but with more of an edge to it than usual. “At least you were honest today. You don’t want housing.”

Over the months, Cosper had grown thinner, more resigned.

“I’ve been out here 23 months,” he said tiredly.

Alexis Harris, an outreach worker, recovery coach and licensed chemical dependency counselor with SEARCH Homeless Services, talks with David about getting services on June 28, 2022, near Minute Maid Park. Harris gave another man a ride to a housing appointment after passing out blankets, water and other items to people living in the encampment. “I do this because it’s a calling from God,” she said. “This is my ministry.”

Ray Walker, a man with a white buzz cut and a soft-spoken, unflappable manner, thought Cosper seemed different. An outreach worker for the shelter Star of Hope, he’d been stopping by places where people live on the streets for years, offering to connect them to resources.

That day, Cosper sounded like he recognized that he needed more assistance to return to society than he’d previously thought.

Walker filed some paperwork and returned days later with word that Cosper had a spot on the permanent housing list and something else: a Social Security card that is the first step toward getting Cosper the driver’s license he needs.

When Cosper’s appointment came up to discuss his new application, Walker drove to the camp to chauffeur Cosper to his case manager.

“Ray basically had to kidnap him,” Dehn said happily. Walker also helped Dehn apply for housing.

Ray Walker, left, an outreach case manager with Star of Hope, distributes personal hygiene items to the men at the camp.

But when Dehn’s own housing appointment came around, he missed it. Cosper crowed at the opportunity to rag on Dehn — the tables had turned.

Dehn shrugged off the pointed questions.

“I thought I wanted to go but — I don’t know why.” He shook his head, then tilted it in thought and corrected himself: “I know why.”

Contrary to Alex Dehn’s perception, most people who receive housing stay housed, according to data from the Coalition for the Homeless in Houston and Harris County. Only 12 percent of people who receive short-term rental assistance — the option Cosper was first pursuing — return to homelessness within a year. For people who receive permanent supportive housing, that percentage is even lower.

After all, he’d been homeless for the five years since Hurricane Harvey. And if you counted a previous bout of homelessness and his four years in an orphanage, he had spent more than half his 26 years without a home.

“I don’t want to be thrown into the deep end of the pool,” he told Cosper. “Because I’ll drown.”

Once he got his housing appointment, he explained, thoughts of the future began crowding in. He wished he could ease his way into housing with a home not too far from the camp on which he relied.

“Lance, we have no good ‘I-got-housing’ stories. They’re all either dead or” — Dehn made a motion like he was swatting something away — “they’re back out here.”

A friend who’s stopped by said housing meant sitting alone in a room.

“You’ll get hungry in a house,” the friend continued. “You can’t expect people to bring food to your house.”

“You’re scared,” Cosper cut in, looking intently at Dehn.

“I’m not scared,” Dehn protested. “It’s the transition.”

Cosper had fears to face, too. Walker had told him that he had a warrant for failing to appear when his court date for the driving while intoxicated charge finally rolled around. In order to clear his path for housing, he would have to turn himself in. And he didn’t know if they’d just let him go and reschedule his court date or if they’d take him to jail.

“I’ll tell you what,” Cosper said. “I’m scared. Because I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Lance Cosper walks to a portable restroom as he waits for Houston Police to take him into custody on June 7, 2022, near Minute Maid Park. Cosper spent the morning waiting near his tent after he’d contacted police to turn himself in to deal with an outstanding arrest warrant. The warrant was delaying other steps he needed to take to get his housing.

In June, Cosper turned himself in, spent a night in jail and then went to court to plead guilty to the charge of driving while intoxicated. The night before going to court, he couldn’t sleep. Instead, he looked in on the tents of his friends, checking to make sure their chests were rising and falling the way he once did with his kids. Their tent doors were wide open in an effort to combat the summer heat, which hovered around 80 degrees at night. He, Dehn and Leeds — who injured his hip, landing him in medical facilities for weeks — are still awaiting housing. They occasionally ask the inspection crew whether their camp will be closed, with everyone living there offered housing, but have not heard that it will happen anytime soon.

R.A. Schuetz covers housing for the Houston Chronicle. Before joining the Chronicle, she wrote features for the Hearst Connecticut Media Group.