To stop being homeless, you have to get over that homeless mentality.

That’s the way Charles Brown sees it.

Brown, 47, has lived in Kenosha about 18 months. For nearly 20 years before that, he lived on the streets, wherever he could rest his head, primarily in Chicago.

He came here to start a new life.

With help from Transitional Housing Services, he has started to do that.

The service, which includes a Homeless Youth program and a companion program for adults at Kenosha Human Development Services Inc., offers subsidized housing to homeless adults.

Through a network of other city and county agencies, the group also offers job search help and job training, as well as medical and food assistance, among other services.

Life skills groups, like the one Brown attends every Wednesday, help those in the program learn to live their new lives.

Brown said it takes more than a job, an apartment or a kitchen sink to call your own to realize that you’re no longer on the streets, that you actually have a home.

“There is a mentality in homelessness,” Brown said. “It’s a state of mind.”

Gradual progression

Brown is one of 20 people in the adult Transitional Housing program.

Before the program put them in apartments it leases, all of them lived in emergency shelters.

The agency’s roughly $533,000 budget, funded through grants, includes five caseworkers. They supplement their services with referrals to city, county and private agencies.

Over 18 months, sometimes longer, program participants graduate from fully subsidized housing to paying more and more of their own rent, once they find a job.

Members also meet regularly, one-on-one and as a group, with their caseworkers.

As of November, there were 55 people on a waiting list for those services.

‘They’re here to help’

“I just thank God for this program,” said Ricky, 19, who has struggled with depression since his mother’s drug addiction left him and his siblings homeless.

Others agreed.

Jim, 49, was homeless for one year. His situation began in 2001 with a car accident, which led to a botched knee replacement in 2006 and eventually left him unable to work.

He has a home now, but still considers himself homeless.

“I don’t pay my rent. That makes me homeless, even though I have a roof over my head,” he said.

Another woman, 29, who didn’t want her name used, said she no longer feels homeless. But she worries about becoming homeless again if she can’t learn how to manage her money.

“If you do your work, they’re there to help you,” she said.

From ‘normal’ to homeless

For Terry, 53, getting past homelessness means letting go of what he has lost.

“I was living, what do they say, a normal life — working every day, the house, the car, the kids. I had a couple of years of college,” said Terry, a former construction worker who lost his home in 2002.

Low self-esteem led to drug abuse and what Terry thought was a life as a “functioning addict.”

“I was lying to myself,” he said.

He got divorced. A family member was murdered. Once the leader of his family, the oldest of eight children, Terry slowly loosened his grip on that normal life. When he let go, he thought he wasn’t even worthy to live.

From shelter to shelter, treatment center to treatment center, Terry admitted he wasn’t using any of those resources for the right reasons.

“I was using them for three hots and a cot,” he said.

That changed after a $5 Metra ticket brought him to Kenosha in September 2007. He meant to get off in Waukegan, Ill., but fell asleep. When he awoke, he was here.

Within days, he found the housing program and, with his caseworker’s help, a home.

“I had slept under bridges. I had battled rats for food. I was just grateful that this program was here for me,” Terry said. “The program stabilized my life.”

Now, he said, he’s working on his outlook.

“Homelessness can be a mental thing,” he said. “(You think) ‘I just can’t get out of it, so I might as well keep on.’ I was a nomad. ...The homelessness became part of me, like my right leg. It became part of my life.”