Sunny Nunan tapped open the NextDoor app to see if anyone had responded to her post. A few days before, she’d been eating an acai smoothie at a new spot in Casa Linda Plaza when she got the urge to tell people about it. “A great way to start a Sunday!” she’d written, adding a photo of a frosty purple swirl in a plastic cup.
At 53, Nunan isn’t big on social media, which she calls a “humongous time suck.” She only uses Instagram “to stalk my kids,” and Facebook can be a political stand-off, “too much hate.” She needs LinkedIn for work, where she runs an annual gala to celebrate administrative professionals, but the self-aggrandizing could be a drag when she was trying to make things work with so little. She did have a soft spot for small businesses, though, being a small-business owner herself, so when she wanted to spread the word about Rush Bowls in Casa Linda Plaza, she went to NextDoor.
Since its launch in 2011, NextDoor has become a virtual town square, a way for neighbors to connect at a time when speaking through screens can be easier than chatting across fences. Around 43 million people use the app, which links profiles according to home addresses so people in the same area can swap names of electricians, gripe about porch pirates and fret over lost dogs.
Nunan was scrolling through posts when she saw one that stopped her.
“I’m recently homeless after being evicted from the Melville apartments,” it began. “I am 77 years old and the heat is very hard on me.”
The post was from a man named Lee Petty. He had white hair and a beard, a bit like Santa Claus. Nunan didn’t know the man, but she understood the ordeal of trying to find affordable senior living, having moved her mother into the Juliette Fowler apartments years ago. She loved that place; a lot of people did. It had a waiting list of at least a year.
Part of what caught Nunan’s attention was the post’s specificity. “I receive $1,870.50 per month from Social Security retirement so I can pay a reasonable amount for rent monthly,” it read. Petty had included his email address and phone number. “Please contact me at your earliest convenience.” Twenty-four neighbors had responded with hearts and sad-faced emojis.
To pass a stranger in need is one of the small moral dilemmas of city life. Those placards and pleading eyes appear on the corner of busy intersections, and what do you do? Give money? Look away? The thorny social issues underneath these scenes of desperation — addiction, mental health problems, lack of affordable housing — cannot be unwound with a few bucks handed over at a stoplight.
It would have been easy for Nunan to keep scrolling. Poor guy. That’s a tough one. But she thought about the heat, and she thought about her mom — what if her mother had needed a stranger’s help? — and she heard a quote from Samuel Johnson in her mind: “Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.”
She picked up the phone.
Skidding toward eviction
Lee Petty was staying at a Motel 6 when a 469 area code flashed on the screen. The past few days had been rough: He’d hustled his furniture into a storage unit thanks to a neighbor at his former complex. Lee had been a competitive swimmer in his youth; these days, he walked with a cane.
The Motel 6 is not where he thought he’d end up. Raised in Fort Worth, he’d graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and worked at Smith Barney, a stock brokerage in Dallas, before taking a gig in the advertising department of Texas Monthly when the magazine was still a scrappy upstart. Austin was a quirky hamlet in the late ‘70s, and he became friendly with the magazine’s writers, like Al Reinert and Gary Cartwright, and partied with politicos at the Raw Deal bar back when a pre-sobriety Ann Richards was a regular. Eventually he moved back to Dallas and took a job in sales, but work went sideways during the 2008 financial crisis and never righted itself.
The past decade had been a flip book of bad luck, questionable decisions and a fair bit of magical thinking. It’s not usually one moment that sends a person reeling, but a series of micro-moments that nudge them ever closer to the cliff. For Petty, a crucial shove came when COVID hit, and his roommate bailed during lockdown, leaving him to cover half the rent on an Old Lake Highlands apartment at the very time finding another roommate was not merely difficult, but physically unsafe.
He sheltered in place, scraping by with help from a friend, but eventually he fell behind in rent, and kept falling. He looked for work, but your 70s are not an optimum age to find employment. Maybe he should have moved sooner, but your 70s are also not an optimum age to relocate. Petty has a 46-year-old son Christopher, an artist living in Seattle, but he didn’t want his son to know how dire things had gotten.
“I was skidding toward eviction,” he says, “and I was freaking out.”
On July 9, a bright green notice appeared on his door: “24 HOUR NOTICE TO VACATE.”
For the first time in his life, he was homeless.
A neighbor from Ghana agreed to move his furniture into a storage unit for a couple hundred bucks. He took his bags to a Motel 6 at Northwest Highway and Interstate 635. The room had air-conditioning and free WiFi, but it was also $65 a night.
He spent the next day tracking leads on his laptop as he sat on a couch bolted into the wall. Craigslist had little in his price range. A promising apartment in South Dallas turned out to be a bait-and-switch. He figured: Might as well bare my soul on NextDoor.
When the phone rang, it was Sunny.
“I have a community of people who might be able to help,” she told him.
“What community?” he asked.
“Your neighbors,” she told him. “Your neighbors in East Dallas.”
Petty had spent the past several years despairing about the country. Between wars and politics and polarization, it was hard not to lose faith in humanity. Sunny’s call punctured his cynicism.
“It was like putting a bottle in the sea,” Petty told me later, “and someone picked it up.”
What a community can be
The private Facebook group for “Lakewood/East Dallas” has 6,700 members united by their ZIP codes in a part of the city that prides itself on a laid-back artsy vibe. The group’s rules include a request to avoid politics and a warning to “Be benevolent or get out.”
“Hello everyone!” began Nunan’s July 14 post. She laid out Petty’s situation and asked about studios for rent, or if anyone needed a roommate. No luck there, but 44 comments piled up with recommendations (the Senior Source, Sharedhousing.org), notes of support, and offers of food and money.
“Reading this post and the subsequent comments are examples of what a community can be,” wrote one commenter.
Within 48 hours, she’d collected $2,000 to keep Petty at the Motel 6 while they searched for solutions.
She began tracking housing leads, too, but a low-cost rental in Dallas, accessible to a man with a cane, who has the scarlet letter of eviction on his record — needle, meet haystack. Nunan scoured Facebook Marketplace and Zillow. She spoke to realtors and left voicemails for senior-centered nonprofits, most of whom never called her back.
Petty was born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boom, and he’s the tip of a spear when it comes to an aging population that may not have the resources and the support to care for themselves. There are 30,000 Dallas seniors 60 and older living on a monthly income of $1,000 or less, and with such high demand, Nunan found the system very difficult to navigate. If there was a centralized hub for senior resources in Dallas, she never found it.
One evening, she was sharing this plight with a friend named Pam Gerber, a longtime veteran of the nonprofit world.
“Have you tried the Resource Center?” Gerber asked. The nonprofit had recently finished construction on Oak Lawn Place, a $31 million affordable housing complex that its website called “the first LGBTQIA+ affirming senior housing in Dallas.”
Nunan had not, because Petty wasn’t gay. Gerber explained he didn’t have to be. “Affirming” was the key word; otherwise it would be discrimination. Nunan wasn’t sure how a 77-year-old straight Texas man would take to living in that kind of environment, but it turned out Petty’s son, Christopher, is gay.
“I can’t think of a safer place to live,” Petty said.
A home on the second floor
Oak Lawn Place sits on a quiet tree-lined creek just off a busy stretch of Inwood Road. The metal and glass exterior is punctuated by vibrant vertical panels: purple, blue, pink, red, black. It could pass as a tech company if you didn’t realize those panels were the colors of the progressive pride flag.
The building is a new venture for Resource Center, one of the largest LGBTQ nonprofits in the U.S.
“I’ve grown up as a queer person in this community,” Resource Center CEO Cece Cox said. “A lot of people who mentored me are old and struggling.”
Seniors of any age can feel swept to aside, but LGBTQ seniors — where traditional families often aren’t in the picture — face even more invisibility. Oak Lawn Place is designed with them in mind, although it’s open to anyone 55 and above who makes 30% to 60% of the median income. Petty qualified.
On Aug. 1, an afternoon that reached 102 degrees, Nunan and her husband helped a man who was once a stranger move his furniture and boxes into a home on the second floor. The one-bedroom/one-bath had new appliances and a full-sized washer and dryer and a far corner where he could set up his desk. It cost $981 a month.
On Facebook and NextDoor, Nunan posted a picture of Petty walking in for the first time, his cane steadying him on the hardwood floor, his face gape-mouthed as he marveled at a place that would finally be his.
