10. The Macy's Home Department
The Macy's at Landmark Mall in Alexandria, Virginia closed its doors for good a year ago. Then, the whole mall shut down. The empty department store become a homeless shelter. And a woman who once worked there, found herself sleeping there.
Produced by Dan Bobkoff, Anna Mazarakis, and Clare Rawlinson, with Amy Pedulla and Sarah Wyman.
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Transcript
Note: This transcript may contain errors.
DAN BOBKOFF: I found this quote in a New York Times article a few months ago that really stood out to me. It was this woman named Karleen who was moving into a new homeless shelter back in June. And she said in the paper: "It's weird to be moving into this building. I used to work here."
KARLEEN: I said that I can't believe that I'm in Macy's... And you know they took the shelter and just stuck it inside of Macy's. Macy's is not tore down, they just built within it.
DB: When we found her, she was sharing a room. The walls are temporary sheet rock. There's a little piece missing and she said she can look through the hole and see what used to be the Macy's in the mall.
KARLEEN: You know, on the other side. And my reaction is that I'm here? You know that's all I thought, I'm here. My past repeating myself in a different way.
DB: From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is Household Name. Brands you know. Stories you don't. I'm Dan Bobkoff.
Today, the Macy's home department.
For Karleen, Christmastime was always the best time at Macy's and her local mall. As a kid, she admired the big lights and holiday decorations. She couldn't always afford to shop there, but she loved to look.
Years later, Macy's hired her as one of thousands of seasonal workers it needs every fall into the holidays.
Now, Karleen lives in the Macy's where she worked eight Christmases ago. It's a homeless shelter, and she's doing all she can to move out.
The story of Karleen and this Virginia Macy's is also the story of what's happening to the middle class, and how Americans have started to sour on the traditional department store.
Stay with us.
ACT I
DB: I'm not sure exactly when I stopped going to malls. I think it was in the last decade or so.
As a kid, my family would pile into the station wagon and head to the mall in December to buy last minute presents for each other.
And we always entered the mall through the Macy's and this place was always decked out. There were trees, ornaments, oversized fake presents.
And I didn't really think about it until we met Karleen, but Macy's and the holidays have gone together in America for like most of the country's history.
MACY'S AD: That's the magic of Macy's.
DB: The first time Macy's stayed open until midnight on Christmas Eve? 1867!
Here's a story from the New York Times on November 28, 1924. First sentence: "Santa Claus chose Thanksgiving Day this year to come to town. He traveled from 145th street all the way down to 34th, riding on a float as 10,000 kids and their parents looked on." It was its first Christmas Parade… now known as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
MIRACLE: "What do you think of my parade?" "It's much better than last year's." "Well I hope Mr. Macy agrees with you."
DB: In 1947, there was Miracle on 34th Street.
MIRACLE: "Mr Macy, if you recognize the gentleman seated there, will you tell us who he is?" "Kris Kringle."
DB: Turns out Macy's had been employing the real Santa!
MIRACLE: "Do you really believe this man is Santa Claus?" "Well I…"
DB: And every decade, Macy's found some way to make itself a big part of the holidays.
MACY'S AD: "Can you tell me who's in charge here?" "I am."
DB: Sometimes reprising the characters from Miracle…
MACY'S AD: "I made an appointment with Mr. Macy." "Is there a Mr Macy?" "Not since before I was born."
DB: In this ad talking to Donald Trump
MACY'S AD: "What's with the get up Kringle?" "I'm Santa Claus" "Let me see for myself." "Oh go ahead, pull it."
DB: I don't know why he keeps showing up in our episodes. Karleen and Christmas have always gone together too.
KARLEEN: I'm born a week from Christmas so, I like it.
DB: It was the early '60s, and not long after she was born, a new mall opened in Alexandria, Virginia. It was called Landmark.
High school bands played for an opening ceremony, and tap dancers performed in a central stage. The crowd was packed.
After it opened, Karleen would go there all the time as a kid, but the only time she really liked it there was around the holidays.
KARLEEN: It was beautiful, it was lit up, the outside was the main attraction. It was pretty.
The decorations was the trees and lights to go around the side of Landmark that would blink the names out, and in the mall they had lights and stuff. Those was pretty.
We bought whatever we could afford, like socks, underwear, jeans that was not popular, or whatever we could afford for 6 kids or 6 girls.
DB: Back then, there wasn't a Macy's at Landmark. It was called Hecht's. Macy's bought that chain years later. When Karleen was a kid, most of the time, her dad would take her to the Sears on the other end of Landmark Mall. She was not into it.
KARLEEN: My father, you know what I can't stand, he had a credit card from Sears, and I do not go shopping in Sears. Every time we need something we go in Sears in the basement. Sears was boring and we went to the mall every other week.
DB: Karleen grew up just a few miles from the mall.
KARLEEN: My neighborhood was called John Roberts Homes.
DB: The John Roberts Homes were an early kind of public housing. Not big towers, but rows of buildings with backyards and clothes lines.
KARLEEN: It was a pretty dwelling. We had our own sprinklers, big fields, we had like little racquet den. And on the Memorial Day, we had a long round circle that had roses and we used to take it off and go to our family and put it on their grave, so we didn't buy them. We couldn't afford to buy roses anyway.
DB: Her parents divorced when she was seven. While her dad would take her to the Sears at the Landmark from time to time, her mom was doing most of the parenting.
KARLEEN: I have six other siblings and one brother. We did the best we could. We was on welfare, of course. Eating oatmeal for breakfast everyday, sometimes eating breakfast for dinner. Running out of food before the end of the month, but we all loved one another. She did the best she could.
She died two years ago on November the 21st, from kidney failure. So she was a strong lady. I miss her, I really do. I wouldn't be here, but you know. She was a strong lady.
DB. Did you learn a lot from her?
KARLEEN: Yes I did. I learned how to cook, respect elders, just be patient and no matter what just keep going forward. Also she used to say, no pun intended, 'Don't let no man pay your rent,' and I carried that with me.
DB: Yeah, so you don't let any men pay your rent?
KARLEEN: No, I sure don't. (laughs) No, because when I say go you go.
DB: Two things happened when Karleen turned 16. She started hanging out at the Landmark Mall food court to meet boys. And she got her first real job at the local recreation department, helping with kids' activities. She said the kids had no respect.
DB: What did they do?
KARLEEN: They throw stuff at you, spit at you, call you names or pinch you, so you know there's nothing you can do. You have to deal with it.
DB: Oh man!
KARLEEN: They're rugrats.
DB: That does not sound fun.
KARLEEN: No but that's how they were. They couldn't take it out on their mother so the mother let them take it out on us that brought them here.
DB: And you were only 16?
KARLEEN: Yeah, 16. And that was my money for my summer clothes to go back to school.
DB: There wasn't much money left after she bought those clothes, but the Landmark Mall was still where she spent most of her time. Often at those food court eateries.
KARLEEN: Yes, the eateries was where you would meet a guy when you were window shopping and couldn't afford to pay for stuff, but your friends was going to buy something and all you had was money to buy food so you would go up to the eatery and just meet people and chat. That was the hang out for us.
DB: She liked going to the Chinese and chicken stands.
KARLEEN: I would go with the people that I knew and just meet up with people.
DB: How would you strike up conversations?
KARLEEN: 'Hi, how you doing?' That's how we always just sit down and the seat taken. You know kids, you just talk. We just get to talkin, then we exchange numbers. And when they had a game at their school we used to go, and when they had a game at our school they used to come.
DB: Did you get any boyfriends out of that?
KARLEEN: Not in my mother's house! Not in my mother's house!
DB: As I listen to Karleen talk, I realize that this mall has been the focal point of so many important moments in her life. Like, take her second job. It was at the US patent office. Even at 17, she figured out that working for the government could be a good gig. So she'd sit there filing designs...
KARLEEN: And then I would file them. Half the time I used to look at the designs, they was beautiful.
DB: There's this one design she really liked. You might recognize it:
KARLEEN: They just put a little mark on it and then the flower designs.
DB: So when you went back to the mall, did you ever see that tennis shoe—
KARLEEN: Yeah, cause it was Adidas and that's what I liked to wear and I still wear Adidas today.
DB: Karleen described what Landmark Mall looked like back then and it's just such a quintessential middle class American mall.
KARLEEN: What would I see? Okay, I would see the tennis shoe store, which is Payless. I would go past the part where they have the pretzels and they would dunk them and we would say, 'wow, we want a pretzel.' Or we would play up and down the elevator, or we would take the change we had and put it in the bubble gum machine. The big bubble balls was coming out. Then we just walked around til we got to the eatery and that was a wrap.
DB: How many were you? Was it a big group?
KARLEEN: No, three or four of us. Half of the time people didn't have money to pay for them other kids to go so through the week we would save our money, sometimes we didn't eat lunch at school just to go to the mall.
DB: As Karleen got older, the city of Alexandria started changing. Affordable housing became even more scarce. Then, the land around the John Roberts Homes where she lived with her mom and siblings got a lot more valuable when a new DC metro stop opened next door.
So, in 1982, the city of Alexandria sold the housing project. The housing authority said at the time that rent hadn't kept up with expenses. That they needed the money from the sale to avoid bankruptcy. Only one city council member voted against the plan.
Nelson Greene said at the hearing: "We probably should consider the people living there." The Washington Post noted Greene was the only Black councilman.
Karleen's family was forced to move. But she still kept going to the mall to hang out.
KARLEEN: The bad moments when I didn't have any money to go, or I didn't have any money to get nothing to eat so we just went and just sat around. But somehow or another, there would always be somebody there who gave us food.
DB: Did something happen in your life that led you not to have money at that moment?
KARLEEN: I had one parent.
DB: Yeah.
KARLEEN: Being on welfare, not having a job. You know my mother, I know she was struggling, I'm not gonna go asking her for money unless I really needed it or something, that's what happened.
DB: If you haven't heard of Alexandria, let me tell you about it. Today, it's a city of 155,000… and because it's commute-able to DC, it's home to a lot of government workers. But originally, it was a slave trading port, and there is a very historic centre to Alexandria called the 'old town', along the Potomac river. Over the years, it's changed a lot.
KARLEEN: First of all, it's not affordable to live. And this is like, we in a little circle and we got all these big homes around us and the hood is in a circle. It have changed, and then we can't afford to live so it's a lot of homeless people then they got rid of the shelters. It's just, it's terrible to me. It's depressing.
DB: The first time Karleen experienced homelessness was about twenty years ago. In her mid 30s.
KARLEEN: Me and my mother, you know, me and my mother were more alike than different. We just could not live together. And so I left.
DB: Why?
KARLEEN: Cause she got her ways and I have my ways. And I, if I couldn't deal with her ways or respect her house, you had to go.
DB: So she went. And sometimes she slept outside, standing up. Or she'd lie down in fields. Or in people's cars.
KARLEEN: It was terrifying. It was cold. You sleep but you're not sleeping cause every word, every sound you're just popping up.
DB: It's like one eye open-
KARLEEN: You gotta worry about getting raped, killed, or whatever.
DB: She says it was easier to bounce back from being homeless when she was younger. She would find new jobs and new places to live, even if there wasn't a permanent solution.
And along the way, she had four kids.
KARLEEN: Ericka's 30, Chyna's 25, Rashaad is 21, and Malik is 14. And I don't know what I was thinking, I had a baby at 42.
DB: In 2010, the holidays were approaching. The decorations were starting to go up at Landmark mall. And Karleen needed a new job.
KARLEEN: It was Christmastime and I needed more money for my kids so we had this place it's called Job Link. I would go to Job Link and get on the computer and see who was hiring. I said 'wow, I'm qualified for this.' So I'm doing the Patent Office, so I actually went to Macy's, they hired me on the spot, and that's how I ended up at Macy's.
DB: What did you do there?
KARLEEN: I did pricing, which means you go around and scan the price tags if it's clearance, markup, or sales, I would change the prices of the clothes, which consist of like 2500 pieces a day. And I stayed in the kid's department cause I had children but I could not afford their clothes. I always looked at it, I always priced it. And I always admired it. It was just too outrageously too high.
Like Kenneth Coles, what was out back then? I don't know. All I know they were designers I can't even remember the designers back then. All I know is for a shirt for $19 for a baby shirt was not in my budget. When I could go to like Kmart and get it. The shoes was too expensive. There was Baby Phat jeans then, which was $30 for some jeans I probably would put in the washer and mess them up. So no, I wasn't doing that.
DB: So you ended up buying stuff at Kmart instead?
KARLEEN: Yes, I sure did and put a long shirt on and thought they was the same jeans.
DB: So you found the secret to a good deal?
KARLEEN: Yes I did.
DB: But what's happening while she's working at the Macy's is that retail in this country is changing really dramatically. This is right after the recession officially ended but the economy is rough. About a million retail jobs are lost around 2010.
And then after that, retail jobs start to bounce back to the same levels as before the recession, but not in department stores. Hundreds of thousands of department store jobs are lost and never come back. Macy's has closed 200 stores — a quarter of its total — in the last four years, which actually isn't as bad as some other chains.
Karleen ended up getting a new job away from Landmark — at a Target store.
KARLEEN: We called it "Target". Yes we did. I sure did.
DB: "Target." So there was more stuff to find there than at Macy's for you?
KARLEEN: Yes. Affordable. Yes. I wouldn't say more, it was more affordable in my price range.
DB: Even after all this time she kept going back to Landmark just like she had since she was a little kid.
KARLEEN: I shopped there until it closed.
DB: The Macy's went out in 2017. Then the rest of the mall closed for good a few weeks later. There was just one exception: Sears. It's still open somehow. It's the only shop left there.
KARLEEN: I stopped going when it was no longer a mall, and I'm not going to Sears.
DB: She never liked that Sears, even when her dad took her there as a kid.
Obviously, it wasn't just Karleen who's been affected in one way or another by the mall closing. This place was the lifeblood of the city's retail economy for so many decades. So what happens when a mall goes bust, and how does a Macy's become a shelter?
That's in a minute.
ACT II
DB: We're back.
So, if you're like me and you were thinking retail is tanking because of online shopping, well let me start this segment by saying — you're wrong. Walmart is doing great. So are luxury malls. But I still wanted to know why department stores like Macy's are struggling and why middle class malls like Landmark are disappearing.
And the person with the answers is Business Insider senior correspondent, Hayley Peterson.
DB: Hi Hayley.
HAYLEY PETERSON: Hi, thanks for having me. There are a number of factors that are contributing to the decline of these mid-tier retailers. You had the recession where a lot of consumers started shopping at discount retailers like TJ Maxx and Dollar Stores and a growing number of people that would have shopped at these mid tier retailers like Macy's and Sears are now moving to dollar stores and a lot of them as the economy improved never went back to shopping full price, so these mid tier retailers did a lot of promotions. Macy's and Sears and JC Penney, they did tons of promotions —
DB: 40% off, 70% off.
HP: And people got used to that and they just didn't go back to shopping full price. And so you continue to see these discounters doing really well and as the economy has improved and the income brackets have sort of bifurcated, these lower tier discount stores are doing much better than the mid tier retailers. At the same time, at the other end of the income spectrum, you've got these high end luxury malls doing pretty well.
DB: So you said that income is bifurcated, what happened exactly?
HP: The middle class in America is shrinking. More and more people, either by choice, by wanting to save money from what they learned during the recession, are also having to spend a larger share of their wallets on rising healthcare costs, schooling costs, and technology. They're spending less on apparel and that's all leading to a downturn, a decline in shopping malls.
DB: Are people also less interested in shopping?
HP: You could definitely make that argument. What you're seeing now in malls that are doing renovations, that are trying to survive, are that they are bringing grocery, retailers, and experiences. We've seen trampoline parks and movie theaters, all kinds of experiential retail, as opposed to simply buying things like apparel and accessories and shoes.
NEWS: Among the stores closing: the Macy's at Landmark Mall in Alexandria...
DB: I asked Hayley how important those anchor department stores, like JC Penney and Macy's — how important they are to the shelf life of a mall like Landmark.
HP: When an anchor tenant like Macy's closes, it can lead to a decades long decline for a shopping mall. It can take a really long time for these shopping malls to close. What happens is Macy's and Sears and JC Penney, these are huge traffic drivers for shopping malls. And so when one of them closes, that loses rent for the owner of the shopping mall and that also leads to a decline in traffic not just for those anchor tenants but also for those middle of the mall stores like J Crew and American Apparel, probably shouldn't use that example since American Apparel no longer exists. But so a decline in traffic, a decline in rent for the shopping mall owners, and shopping mall owners will try to find a replacement tenant. If that doesn't happen, another anchor tenant could close, and if you've got two anchor tenants closed at a shopping mall, that's almost like a death knell. It's a death spiral for these shopping malls.
NEWS: So a local shopping center is on its way out.
NEWS: Landmark Mall on Duke St in Alexandria is shutting its doors to make way…
DB: Many Macy's locations closed in early 2017, including the one at the Landmark Mall. Nearly 120 workers there were affected.
After talking to Hayley, I got the sense that after a mall closes, it can have this crazy ripple effect on the entire community. Once a mall closes it can set off a chain reaction. Small businesses nearby close too.
And what's left is just a giant empty building in the middle of a vast parking lot. No more discount furniture, no more dating in the food courts, no more Christmas spirit.
And for a lot of struggling malls, death comes slowly. I didn't realize how slowly until our producer Anna Mazarakis showed me something.
DB: Wait, wait, wait, so there's a deadmalls.com? Hold on, I need to Google this. Deadmall.com.
ANNA MAZARAKIS: Search for the Landmark Mall, there's an archive there.
DB: Here it is. Oh there's commentary. User submitted in March of 2005. So this is a long time ago. And it says here: like many other DC area malls, Landmark Mall is in a real pickle.
DB: So Anna, this is the beginning of the journey that leads to the Macy's becoming a homeless shelter.
AM: Yeah I found out it's been a long time in the making — for both the shelter and for the Macy's.
MARK BULMASH: When you show up on deadmalls.com, probably a decade before you close, it really is kind of the marketplace telling you you should get a different use there.
DB: Who is this?
AM: This is Mark Bulmash. He's a senior vice president at the Howard Hughes Corporation, which owns the Landmark Mall . And he told me Howard Hughes has big plans for the mall, but those plans are still a few years from happening. So at the beginning of 2017, he heard from someone who had a big new idea for what could happen in the Macy's in the meantime.
SHANNON STEENE: I don't know what Mark's initial reaction was.
AM: This is that someone. His name is Shannon Steene and he runs the Carpenter's Shelter in Alexandria. But back in 2017, they had a little bit of a problem. Because they had lived in an old DMV for about 20 years, and they realized that DMV was getting a little bit too old. So they decided that they had to redo it, but that would mean that they would be homeless for a little bit. So it was up to Shannon and the staff to find a new place to live while that construction was going on.
SS: We all huddled in a conference room and talked about: so where do we go temporarily? Carpenter's had a history of being in warehouses, and so we knew that might be in the realm of possibility. We thought about...
AM: OK, maybe a warehouse, maybe a church, maybe an old school.
SS: And then someone said 'you know, the ideal place would be the Landmark Mall.' And then there was sort of a pause in the conversation and many people chuckled. But the seed had been planted.
MB: It was a surprise and I needed to mull it over.
AM: This is Mark again.
MB: It's an out of the box idea, right? We needed to think about it. I needed to convince our organization that we could do it, right? That we had the time between getting the - doing the planning and getting the entitlements that we could put them in and not delay our starting construction on our project. But in the end, it was an easy decision because it was the right thing to do.
DB: So, then what happened?
AM: Ok so Howard Hughes was on board, but then Shannon Steene had to go to the city of Alexandria to make sure that they would sign off on it.
NEWS: In the meantime, there's a controversial plan that would utilize the empty space as a temporary homeless shelter...
AM: So he went to their planning commission meeting and they waited the whole night through this very contentious schools issue until finally – at 11 o'clock — it was their turn. And so Shannon's sitting there worried, bracing himself for what he thinks these anxious Alexandrians might say about homeless people living in an old mall.
SS: And so imagine much to my surprise, that there was only one person who had registered to speak and testify at that hearing and so she stood up and she said, 'this is exactly the project we want to see in our community.' It puts a lump in your throat when you think about what I had expected.
AM: So that's how a Macy's turned into a homeless shelter.
AM: Ok I just pulled up to the Macy's, to the Carpenter's Shelter in Alexandria, Virginia, and let's go on inside.
AM: I pulled up into this huge parking lot that surrounds Landmark. There are hundreds of empty spaces. It's so empty I could do huge U-turns. It's so empty, there's sometimes an entire carnival in the parking lot. It's so empty, they shot part of the next Wonder Woman movie in the lot.
I saw the Sears that's still open — somehow — at the end of the mall, but I headed in the other direction…
AM: Walking up to the shelter, you can see the outline of where it used to say Macy's and it now has a little sign that says Carpenter Shelter on top of it.
AM: So I went inside. Karleen wasn't there when I visited because she was at work – most days, she is at work. So instead, I met Blair Copeland, she's the director of programming at the Carpenter Shelter.
BLAIR COPELAND: Ok, we're back.
AM: Hi! Anna.
BC: Nice to meet you.
AM: Nice to meet you.
BC: There are people who still come in and think this is a Macy's, that occasionally there'll be somebody that says, I want to return something, and I'm like how could you? There - stop. First of all, the mall has been closed for like 2 years. And secondly, it doesn't look like Macy's anymore.
AM: So Blair took me around and everything was very clean, very sanitized, very new. The walls were completely white. And you couldn't really tell that there had been much of a life beforehand, except for when you looked down at the ground.
BC: It's the floor. The carpet is clearly retail carpet.
AM: So you look at the carpet and you can tell you're in a Macy's. But then you look at the furniture and the chairs look like they could belong in a school cafeteria. The tables are square and small. And as you're walking around, there's a narrow hallway, and you pass a doctors office - a literal doctors office - on the right side. There's a conference room for meetings on the left, there's a little playroom on the left right next to that conference room. And then there are two long hallways off of that that go - one goes toward the women's rooms and the family rooms, and the other hallways goes towards the men's rooms. I saw two of the bigger rooms that had 6 beds. Most of them are bunked, and they have huge dressers, as well. But in the rooms where people are actually living, they really make it their own.
I was there in the afternoon and there aren't many people around. Most of the residents were at their jobs. They have to have jobs or look for work to live here. And as we're walking around, Blair and I come across some boys in the hallway.
BC: Hello gentlemen, where is your mother?
BOYS: In the laundromat.
AM: About a quarter of the residents are kids —
BC: Can you just hang out there and wait for her?
BOYS: Yeah.
AM: So this is a rule that is pretty tightly enforced: they have to stay with their parents. And these boys' mother said that it's been kind of hard for them.
SS: You know, they feel like they're 16, they shouldn't have to follow mommy everywhere they go. But are they dealing with it? Yeah, they're dealing with it because they know this is only temporary, it's not full time.
AM: The shelter is here temporarily, too. The Carpenter's Shelter's lease at the old Macy's is up at the end of 2019, and at that time, they're going to move into a brand new building that has a shelter on the first floor, and then on the above floors, they're going to have 97 new affordable housing units. Something that Alexandria could use a lot more of.
DB: Is it really bad there?
AM: Yeah, the city lost 90% of its affordable housing stock since 2000. And at the same time, rent for a one bedroom has gone up more than 90%.
BC: So when people ask us, why are people homeless? It's because they have nowhere to live that they can afford. And you fix that by creating more affordable housing. I just tell residents, you know there are about 15 full time staff here - actually now that I think about it, there's only two people who can afford to live here in the city of Alexandria and we get paid, you know, pretty decent salaries.
DB: Wait, wait, wait. So let me get this straight: even the shelter staff, with full time jobs, they can't afford to live in Alexandria?
AM: Exactly, it's crazy. But as for the Landmark Mall, the Howard Hughes Corporation plans to tear it down and build one of those fancy shopping centers that you've probably seen that has a movie theater and retail stores and restaurants and some offices and residences, too.
DB: Alright, thanks, Anna. And, in a moment: what Karleen's life is like now in the Macy's... and what it will take for her to get back into a home of her own.
ACT III
KARLEEN: Good morning. Good morning.
DB: We're back.
KARLEEN: This is where everybody meets, out here for your leisure time, smoke cigarettes, kick the bubble.
DB: We met Karleen on a different day at Carpenter's.
KARLEEN: This is where we smoke and do whatever we do out here and get cancer.
DB: And I got the sense hearing her walk through these corridors, she can still picture what this building looked like as a Macy's around Christmastime. The clothes and Christmas lights she'd see as a kid or as a seasonal worker.
KARLEEN: And as I proceed through there, was the kid's department on the side, the boys department, then I keep going down through the aisle, it was the infants department, and then there was escalators that you would go up to the stuff and that was the whole world up there, the men's, the women's, all kinds of stuff upstairs.
DB: And now as you walk through, what does it look like? It must look very different.
KARLEEN: It looks like an old abandoned warehouse, but new. That's what it look like to me. With chairs and tables and people going through what they're going through.
DB: So where are you sitting right now?
KARLEEN: I'm sitting in the kids department.
DB: This won't come as a surprise, but it felt very different when she first walked through those same Macy's doors back in June… this time as her temporary home. She said she felt...
KARLEEN: Confused. Sorry for myself, or how did I get here. Depressed.
DB: Did you used to talk to people about how you used to work in the store?
KARLEEN: Yeah, I sure did. The people that I talk to was close, I sure did. And let them know, I said 'can you believe this was a Macy's blah blah blah.' And we would laugh it off, yes.
DB: She's been in shelters for seven months now. The last four here. Bouncing around ever since she left her daughter's home.
KARLEEN: I used to live with my daughter who's practicing, who's drugging now.
DB: They had a major falling out. Whenever her daughter couldn't get drugs, Karleen said she'd take it out on her.
KARLEEN: And it came to a time where she was disrespecting me and so much that I couldn't take it.
DB: Karleen can't go back to her daughter's. She said it'd be like suicide to go back there. Her other kids, she said, don't care enough to check what happened to her. So for now, she's here.
KARLEEN: This is where we go to the bathroom, take a shower here. Sometimes we take the chairs and put them up here and just talk. It's more comfortable in the bathroom than keeping someone up. So that's what we do.
DB: What's your room like?
KARLEEN: Oh boy. I mean it consists of six beds. It's like a cubicle, but I respect it. It took a minute to get used to, it's like bunk to bunk. You can't move all at one time past each other. It's been some rough times. You have to respect people's space. Some people don't want you to spray perfume. Some people don't want you turn the light on. Some people don't want you to turn the light off. I lay in the bunk bed at the bottom. I take a big towel and cover the bottom of my bed and I'm in my own world.
DB: What do you think about when you lie there?
KARLEEN: When I'm gonna leave. My day is off today, unbelievable. After 6 days, working from 3 to 10, 11 straight.
DB: The day we spoke to Karleen, she was tired. She'd had had a long week working at a deli. It was right before Hurricane Florence.
KARLEEN: Oh, how was my week was going? It was terrible. It was like the people was panicking as if the day was ending. And every time I turn around the people was just going in and bought all the water, all the deli meat, because it's like, less perishable, and it was a busy work. I worked 38 hours straight. Today, I'm actually off, and I am exhausted.
DB: The deli is the best job she could find. It's hard when you're in your late 50s to find work. It pays $12 an hour. She's studying phlebotomy so she can get a job drawing blood at doctor's offices. There are a lot more healthcare jobs these days.
KARLEEN: Phlebotomy jobs, medical jobs, coding jobs, that's what I'm good at. I'm good at numbers, so.
DB: She said she needs a job that pays at least $40,000 a year. Rent prices average around $1400 for a one bedroom in Alexandria. So even on that salary, she'd be spending almost half her income on rent.
The city's affordable housing office even says you'd have to be working four full time jobs at minimum wage to be able to afford a one bedroom.
Until then, Karleen said she had nowhere to go. Won't go back to her daughter's, can't afford to live in Alexandria, and doesn't have a car so can't live outside the city. She dreams of buying a used Honda Accord.
But some things are happening. Karleen met someone! At the mall! In a sense…
KARLEEN: Here in the shelter. His name is M. Green, Mr. Green. He was in here for a minute, very educated. He had became an alcoholic for a minute and didn't let his family know. He was only here a couple of weeks, I don't know and I needed to get on the internet to do resume and he knew all about the computers. And from then on we just talked.
DB: And would you call him your boyfriend?
KARLEEN: I sure would. We call this here nowadays it's friends. Boyfriend is for kids. We call him my friend or my insignificant other. Yes.
DB: Sorry. So when you get out, you think you might live together?
KARLEEN: No, unless I get married I ain't living no man. Excuse me. Excuse me.
DB: He has to wait then.
KARLEEN: You never know, you never know. He's a nice guy.
DB: I was hoping this would be this story's happy ending, but the day Karleen and I talked was actually scheduled to be her last day at Carpenter's Shelter. She didn't want to leave.
KARLEEN: After I talk to you, I have to go to an appeal to see if I can stay.
DB: A few days later, we called her back. She said the shelter gave her a two week extension. She was depressed. Worried — maybe even resigned — that she'll end up on the streets again. Maybe using drugs, she said, to dull the pain. She said she can't live with Mr. Green she said because she doesn't want to be with a man just to have a place to live. They hadn't talked in four days.
But for now, she looks through the hole in the sheetrock in her bedroom, peering into the empty Macy's where she once worked, and dreams about a good job, a one bedroom apartment, and that used Honda Accord.
And maybe by next Christmas, after she's moved out of the old Macy's, she'll have a home of her own.
CREDITS
DB: Special thanks to Michael Corkery of the New York Times who introduced us to Karleen.
This episode was produced by Anna Mazarakis, Clare Rawlinson and me with Sarah Wyman and Amy Pedulla.
Our editor is Gianna Palmer.
Sound design and original music by Casey Holford and John DeLore.
Our executive producers are Chris Bannon, Jenny Radelet, Laura Mayer, and me.
Before you go - I want to tell you about a new show also from Stitcher that launched this week. It's called The Dream, and it's a 12-part investigation into the world of multilevel marketing and pyramid schemes. You can find it wherever you listen to podcast now.
And next week, we're actually going to bring you part of The Dream's investigation, in an episode about Amway.
Here's a sneak peek:
THE DREAM CLIP: It seemed as though the government had decided that multilevel marketing was a fraudulent business model. And they were doing great, for about 10 years, they were taking down some of the biggest companies, very high profile cases. And then it changed with that Amway case.
Tune in next week. And since we're nearly at the end of Season 1, why not rate and review us on Apple Podcasts - it'll help us keep making the show, and reach new people. Thanks for your support!
Household Name is a production of Insider Audio.