By JIM BARON

WOONSOCKET — During the year she was homeless, Pat Walsh frequently slept in World War II Memorial Park, waking up one morning to find that her shoes had been taken off her feet sometime during the night.
“It was horrible,” she said of the homeless experience. “I am nothing like I was a year ago.”

That is a result, she says, of being a part of Rhode Island Housing’s supportive housing program for the past year.
The first day she moved into her apartment on Sayles Street, she remembers, “I just felt safe. Nobody was going to hurt me; nobody was going to bother me.”
The supportive housing program provided her with therapy, grief counseling — she said she became homeless after the break-up of “an 11-year really bad marriage” and the death of her adult son — “and I had a lot of help doing it.”
After a year, Walsh said Monday, “I’m finding myself very well grounded. I’m not depressed anymore. I’m looking for a job, which is something I didn’t think I’d ever do. I’m getting the help that I need.
“You can’t try to pick up your life if you don’t have a roof over your head,” Walsh said, adding that she now thinks she’s “ready to spread my wings, to go out there and do it. To give someone else the chance that I had because I do not know if I would be here if the house had not taken me in.”
Walsh was one of several beneficiaries of a variety of housing programs that are now in jeopardy because of state budget cuts.
They were at the Blackstone River Valley NeighborWorks office Monday to urge that the projects be maintained.
Elizabeth Santana, a single mother with two children, got her Constitution Hill apartment through the Neighborhood Opportunities Program (NOP), which budgeters are threatening to de-fund.
A part-time student with a part-time job, Santana said NOP is her “steppingstone to affordable housing until I finish school.”
But NOP is more than just apartments and houses, Santana said. “The NOP program stabilized the neighborhood and helped create a safe and healthy culture where I live. Losing this fund would cause a lot of people to lose their homes, including myself.”
A high school senior, Diogenes Martinez, grew up in Constitution Hill when it was still a distressed and deteriorating community.
Youth RAP, another program under the budget gun, taught him “pride, commitment, establishing connections with the community, hard work and determination.” Martinez said. He credits Youth RAP with giving him the tools to apply to and be accepted at both the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College.
Without Youth RAP, he said, “I wouldn’t be here now.”
Woonsocket Sen. Marc Cote, admitted that when he first ran for office 14 years ago, he didn’t feel comfortable campaigning in the rough Constitution Hill neighborhood and has “followed the progress our community has made” since that time.
“We are in a difficult budget year,” Cote cautioned, “it is going to be difficult to maintain the level of support the government has been providing. I’m sure that many of you realize the benefits you have had by virtue of what the volunteers have been donating to the community during this time and I think it is going to be all the more incumbent on the citizens here today to continue that volunteerism to fill some of that gap that government is not going to be able to fill in the coming years.”
Cote said, “The thing that I have found very frustrating over the last few months is that it seems when suggestions are brought forward it seems to be singling out individual constituencies whereas if the sacrifice was spread over a large population and the broad base of constituencies, we could all accept that and recognize that we all have to do something.
Brenda Clement of the Statewide Housing Action Coalition responded that, “Housing is an economic engine and at a time when your economy is going into a recession, now is not the time to take gas out of the tank. Affordable housing puts people to work, it creates construction jobs, it creates property management jobs, all kinds of industry related jobs.
Back in the days when cities like Woonsocket were built, Clement said, “Factory owners understood the connection between jobs and housing. We need to reconnect those two things and make sure our workers have places to raise their families.”
“We’re zeroing out a program that has been our only investment in years,” said Barbara Fields of LISC (Local Initiatives Support Company). We know we’re going to have to tighten our belts, but you can’t zero out a program when we have nothing to fall back on. To take the whole program away is too hard for us to do.
Carol Brotman, who described herself as a volunteer housing advocate, said she and her husband “comfortably” pay capital gains taxes. “And I know there are other people who are in that level of income and who feel as I do,” she said, advocating that the state raise the rate on that tax, which is currently being phased out.
“Raise it a little,” she urged. “Let some people scream about the taxes going up. So what? Look what we are doing to programs and people. We’re putting people out of housing, we’re putting people out of jobs, we are taking people out of supportive programs, we are taking children off of RIte Care and that’s supposed to be okay, just because the legislature feels that we should not raise taxes? I’m sorry, people who live on comfortable six-figure salaries, let them pay a little more.”