Washington church gives homeless man a roof over his head

Published: 2006-06-12

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Danny Felix sleeps in a church basement. He has each night for more than six months. Felix is one of the thousands upon thousands of homeless people in the United States. Felix's home, such as it is, is in a corner of the basement of the McKenna Center, which is part of the complex of St. Aloysius Catholic Church, mere blocks from the U.S. Capitol. "I don't think of myself as a homeless person. I have a roof over my head. It's clean, it's comfortable," Felix said. "I know that I don't have my own home," said Felix, who spent 21 years in prison on a robbery charge. Following his release from jail and once his stay reached its end at a halfway house, he couldn't afford the rising rents in the nation's capital. "I couldn't believe they were rents," Felix said. "To me, they seemed more like mortgages. Essentially, what they did was to put me out on the street," he said. "I just struggled from day to day, from shelter to shelter."

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