Christina Gentry: From experiencing homelessness and housing discrimination to advocating in Lawrence

Sometimes the No. 6 bus would run late, Christina Gentry remembers.

If that was the case, Gentry would walk. Her planning around the bus schedule the night before would become obsolete at that point. In the name of professionalism, she’d switch out her sneakers or flipflops for heels when she’d arrive to her job at Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health.

Gentry worried how she’d continue to provide as a single mother. She facilitated meetings among colleagues at work but remained afflicted with feelings of inadequacy.

During times when the next 24 hours were unpredictable, Gentry said she remembers believing “this world was never meant to be mine.”

In her present self, she recognizes survivorship. 

“I see ‘survivor’ because I have felt and been the opposite,” Gentry said. “In the face of all the discrimination and all the blame and covert shunning and othering, I still want to be a part of the community. I still love it. And I still want to see my children thrive in it.”

‘It’s all of our history’

As Gentry has been selected as chair of the City of Lawrence’s Affordable Housing Advisory Board this year, she strives to continue advocating for folks who are now in the same space she was in not too long ago.

Gentry, 48, previously experienced homelessness with her five children. 

The family moved to Lawrence in 2004 from Texas, where Gentry’s ex-husband was based in the military. He struggled to secure new employment when they arrived.

Instability set in for the family a few years into calling Lawrence home. Gentry was navigating a divorce, juggling motherhood and bills, and trying to stay afloat. Eventually, she couldn’t afford their two-bedroom loft anymore.

Hotel stays began to add up. Keeping up with vehicle fees became more difficult and resulted in accumulated municipal fines. Gentry could no longer afford housing and other basic necessities.

Years 2006-2011 were the peak of the crisis, Gentry worked to recall as she acknowledged trauma’s ability to suppress memories. Her children, Amaiya, 29; Asha, 27; James, 23; Analise, 22; and Anita, 19, were attending Lawrence elementary, middle and high schools. 

The six of them stayed in an RV at Clinton Lake for a bit of time when hotel rooms were no longer viable. Gentry reflected on the duality of living among nature.

“It was really beautiful, like at the time it was summertime, it was July, so it kind of felt like camping,” Gentry said. “In my mind, it was traumatic, because this is the only place that I can feed my kids right now until I can find the space. But in my kids’ eyes, they were outdoors and they were climbing in the forest and playing with the sticks.”

The Lawrence Community Shelter doesn’t serve children, so that wasn’t an option for Gentry and her family. She decided it would be best that her mother, who lived in Washington at the time, care for her kids for a while. Her time apart from them lasted a year but felt like a thousand, she said.

“That right there — that broke my heart in five different pieces,” Gentry said. “That was a veil of mine — that I couldn’t keep my family together, and that my children wouldn’t have their mother to help them do this.”

Meanwhile, she worked to secure housing in Lawrence, often getting from place to place by foot in a city not considered walkable. She remembers public transportation lacked accessibility but commends Lawrence Transit’s growth over recent years.

Today Gentry celebrates being a homeowner of four years. She said it’s a testament that someone with a housing choice voucher should be able to afford to live on the west side of town. Housing is security.

“It is a place to have your things and store your items,” Gentry said. “It is your pictures. It is your tooth when it comes out to the tooth fairy. It is the first haircut. … It’s all of our history, all of our collection.”

‘We need to see people on fire’

Finding that security was preceded by ‘nos’ riddled with racism.

“I’ve been called a ‘ghetto queen’ and a ‘Section 8 bitch,’” Gentry said. “And I’m really sorry to use these words, but I think those are expletives that are important, because that discourages your spirit.”

The application process for a housing voucher includes an extensive waiting period — one barrier. Eventually, with the help of Family Promise of Lawrence, a nonprofit organization that aims to assist local families seeking housing, she and her children were approved for a five-bedroom rental house. 

They had waited two years. And at the 11th hour, the landlord turned them away.

The cycle continued: fill out personal information, submit family Social Security numbers, wait, face rejection and start over. And Gentry didn’t have a large enough income to prove to landlords and apartment owners her ability to pay rent — another barrier.

Gentry and her family lived in a few places, and experienced homelessness again at times, before signing the mortgage to their current house in 2020.

The previous subsidized housing she and her family lived in was managed by a landlord who was unapologetic in his disapproval of them, she said.

“He looked at the fact that I was a Black woman and that I had five children,” Gentry said.

“And he said to the person who was advocating for me in that space, ‘I would not have accepted her, with all the things that she has going on, if it weren’t for that she was a Christian.’ And he thought I was a Christian because I was in the Family Promise program, which is associated with churches. So that’s a stigma in itself that I had to somehow still be thought of as a Christian or someone who was worthy to be allowed to pay rent to stay in the person’s space.”

Gentry looks at a sense of belonging as one of three pillars of social change in a community; connectivity and safety are the others.

Every person living outside in Lawrence has a multitude of reasons they are where they are. Some have expressed a desire to continue living at a campsite; others want to be housed, but the path to “go inside,” as many call it, is complex. Although the City of Lawrence has implemented measures to address chronic homelessness and many people want to help, the stigma and prejudice has also grown.

Grace is meeting people where they are, Gentry said. If Gentry is walking downtown and sees escalation from a person who is unhoused, for example, she really sees “a person on fire” — that’s why deescalation techniques and trauma-informed care are important, she said.

“What you’re seeing is a person who is in their most traumatic state, and still integrating, still being a part of community,” Gentry said. “And we need to see that … We need to see people on fire, people alerting, so that we know where we need to heal. Maybe there is an opportunity to learn by sitting and sitting with the discomfort.”

‘Healing comes through connectivity’

Once a guest of the Lawrence Community Shelter several years ago, Gentry now serves on the shelter’s board of directors.

“I knew that this place that I stayed in, although it was helpful and serving a purposeful need at a time of trauma, it also was very unsafe,” Gentry said. “There were things in that collective space that made me understand that the mental health of folks who are without housing is exacerbated by the community’s outlook on what the view of an unhoused individual was.”

Gentry remembers it was advocates — namely Dana Ortiz, former executive director of Family Promise of Lawrence — who helped Gentry keep her birth certificate, Social Security card and other required documents organized. Organizations that became resources were unknown to her before.

Source of income discrimination is a reality Gentry knows firsthand, so tackling related policies and procedures is a priority of hers. She helped boost an ordinance the Lawrence City Commission ultimately passed in February 2023. It disallows landlords from denying someone housing just because their rent money will come from a housing voucher, settlement, benefit, subsidy, Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing voucher or another social service. 

Mariel Ferreiro, community advocate, has also been a proponent of ending source of income discrimination.

She recalls working alongside Gentry in other advocacy spaces over the past few years, and the two are now serving together on the Affordable Housing Advisory Board, Ferreiro as vice chair.

“I think this is kind of the planets aligning a little bit,” Ferreiro said. “(Gentry) just has a really beautiful way of seeing every single angle of a situation, and being really thoughtful in how we approach people, and making sure that we’re doing it as a person-centered approach.”

Gentry and Ferreiro said they’re prepared to challenge the way Lawrence has done things in the past. 

Their work is not without personal sacrifice and struggle. That’s where regular checkups on one another come in, Ferreiro said.

“That kind of immediate solidarity, too, has always been the constant thread of, like, we can process that together, and we can talk about that together,” Ferreiro said.

Outside of AHAB, Gentry wears additional hats on the Friends of Lawrence Area Trails board and the Early Childhood Collective of Douglas County board. Her full-time job is at the Sexual Trauma and Abuse Care Center, where she’s the curriculum and education specialist.

Processing her traumatic experiences couldn’t happen alone, Gentry said she grew to learn. Her family took on their healing as a unit.

She had to seek out a larger support system, too. Black Brunch LFK events have brought her people who she said “represent healing.” One characteristic Gentry said she loves most about Lawrence is that advocacy spaces and the local arts scene are woven together.

She circles back to those three pillars.

“Healing comes through connectivity,” Gentry said. “It does not happen in isolation.”

Maya Hodison (she/her), equity reporter, can be reached at mhodison@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.

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