They were homeless, but turned their lives around. Here’s how they did it

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About two years ago, Michael Mata boarded a bus at 5 a.m. near the shelter where he was living, on the northern edge of South Los Angeles. He was determined to bring an end to years of sporadic homelessness and a string of dead-end jobs.

A shelter mate had advised him to arrive early at Chrysalis, a nonprofit that helps people figure out how to find work and rebuild their lives. A line forms early, Mata had been told, and they can only take in so many people each day.

“I got here at 5:30,” said Mata, who was first in line.

That day, Mata took two of the four required orientation classes. Two days later, he took the other two. When I met him Wednesday, Mata was driving a van into the parking lot at Chrysalis headquarters. He’s a road crew supervisor, with six people under him. They were hot and sweaty from a day of picking up litter on roads and highways, working with Caltrans in the Glendale area.

For the last several months, Mata has been living in his own apartment.

The mayoral election will be held in three weeks, with Mayor Karen Bass and challenger Councilmember Nithya Raman touting their records on homelessness and each insisting she can do better than her opponent.

I had reached out to Chrysalis Chief Executive Mark Loranger with a pitch:

Gabriel Gonzalez of the Chrysalis Roads program walks back to the van to go to another location after helping with clean up near the 5 and 134 freeways in Los Angeles on Friday. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times) Although one person’s recovery is not necessarily a road map for others, let’s hear from some formerly homeless people willing to share stories about how they managed to break the cycle.

Loranger and his staff suggested I meet with Mata, 43; Marshall May, 58; Elyse Moya, 41; and Nicole Bastiany, 52.

People end up homeless for any number of reasons. A lost job. Domestic abuse. A mental illness. An addiction. A financial setback. A criminal record. The cost of housing. All of the above.

“People come into the program voluntarily,” Loranger said. “They’ve been in and out of systems and a lot of people have offered them help and it hasn’t worked out. Something in them … says, ‘I gotta get my act together. I gotta get a job.’”

Mata had spent time in prison, he’d lived in an RV, he’d worked a number of jobs that didn’t pay enough to dig him out.

“You know how hard it is to get a job in Los Angeles?” Mata said. “Everybody has some issues in their life, right? But it’s about getting that interview or even getting noticed, you know?”

Michael Mata, Chrysalis Roads program supervisor, poses for a portrait at the Chrysalis offices on Wednesday. The Skid Row nonprofit helps people find jobs. (Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times) He has a daughter he couldn’t provide for. That’s part of what motivated him.

“I’d applied for even McDonald’s,” Mata said. “I didn’t care where I had to work. I just wanted a job.”

Chrysalis hooks its clients up with social services and teaches them how to write a resume, navigate online job listings and handle an interview. The nonprofit, with six locations, is on track to have 2,200 clients find jobs this year in security, hospitality and other fields.

About 600 clients work for Chrysalis in one of four divisions, including street cleanups, which has always made sense to me. You put homeless people to work, with a chance of getting housing, and you address a big city problem at the same time.

Mata opted for work in the roads division “because I kind of thought I was overweight,” said Mata, and he wanted the exercise. He connected right away with his supervisor and was promoted to team leader and later to supervisor.

Mata said it seems to him that homeless people are being offered housing without the means to hold onto their keys.

“I don’t understand why you would house somebody that can’t provide income,” he said.

He moved into a small studio apartment in Skid Row several months ago and pays $520 a month. It’s not much. No kitchen. Just a bed and a bathroom. But it works for him.

“You have your own four walls,” Mata said. “It’s about having your own peace.”

Marshall May had a father in the military and a mother who was a psychiatrist. Smart and well-spoken, he might have found his own success, but he found drugs instead.

Marshall May is a supervisor with the Safekeeping program. (Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times) “I smoked crack from Ronald Reagan … to Obama leaving office,” said May, who stole to support his habit and spent time in prison. When he was out, he lived “in motels, programs, and on the street, and in cars, abandoned houses.”

In 2016, after another stint behind bars, he said, “I cannot go back.” He joined a 12-step program with a spiritual component that “restored … hope and faith in the idea that you can change, but you have to want to do it.”

While living in Skid Row, May saw cleanup crews working the streets.

“I walked up to one of them and said, ‘I can do this,’” and he did. “It’s not pleasant at all. Cleaning up feces, dead rats, vomit, needles.”

He moved on to other jobs at Chrysalis, and now is supervisor of the Chrysalis Safekeeping division — a storage facility where homeless people keep their things.

Sober and working, May moved in with and took care of his ailing mother for a while, and now lives with and cares for an elderly aunt.

“I don’t believe in excuses, justifications, rationalizations. Every opportunity that you’re given, take advantage,” May said.

Without a purpose, he said, “you don’t have anything to focus on. And I desperately needed that.”

Elyse Moya said she was abused by family members, ran away at 14 and kept running for years. She was homeless off and on, got taken in by gang members, sold drugs, used drugs, had four children. The birth of a daughter, while she was homeless, was an awakening.

Elyse Moya is a case manager for Bridge to Home. (Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times) “I think the worst place I’ve ever had to sleep with her is, I broke into a laundromat at an apartment building and I made a bed for her on top of the washers, and she slept there,” Moya said.

When the county took her child, Moya knew she had to go to drug rehab to have a chance of getting her back. She was in a program for seven months and thinks it worked because therapists treated both her addiction and the bipolar disorder she’d been diagnosed with as a teen.

“There was a nurse onsite 24 hours a day, so she made sure we took our medications on time,” Moya said.

After rehab, she was referred to Chrysalis, where her first job was evacuating people from homeless encampments during the pandemic and placing them in temporary housing. A supervisor thought she’d do well at a Venice nonprofit that works to prevent and end homelessness for teenagers and young adults.

Moya thinks she was good at that job because she could relate.

“It basically made all that bad stuff that I went through useful. It wasn’t for nothing,” she said.

Homelessness has much to do with low wages and high rent, but Moya thinks it’s also a symptom of failed systems. In her Venice job, the majority of people had been in foster care, juvenile hall or prison.

Moya went from doubting her ability to handle full-time work to thriving on it. After a number of promotions, she moved on to a job in the Santa Clarita area, where she’s now a case manager for newly housed clients.

“It’s hard to come inside,” Moya said, explaining that it’s difficult to leave a community of fellow survivalists behind as you face doubts about whether you can handle the responsibility of a normal life.

“It’s really hard to care about yourself to want to do all the hard work that there is. Thankfully, I had something that I was working for,” she said.

Moya now has her own apartment and just bought a car to commute to work. She said two of her children live with her.

An epiphany. A push. A purpose. An opportunity. It can take all of those things to help break the cycle of homelessness, and for those who make it to Chrysalis, Nicole Bastiany, an employment specialist, is there to help.

Always industrious, she worked in tech, sold cars, got her own apartment near MacArthur Park. She fell back into drugs and for a time was hospitalized for major depressive disorder with psychotic episodes. But early in 2024, she was job hunting again and saw a listing for a client services coordinator at Chrysalis. She started in April that year and later moved up to her current job.

In her office, Bastiany glanced at a wall plastered with resources for housing, rehab, job training. A lot of her clients don’t know what’s available, she said. For those who are ready to make a change, she helps them find the right path, and she thinks back on a woman she met at a mental health agency.

“She was an employment specialist, like myself, who would not quit on me,” Bastiany said. “When [I was] climbing out of it, I was just like, no, I’m getting too old. Nobody wants to hire, you know, Black trans, and with mental health and substance abuse. She would just not give up. … Let’s try this kind of thing. Let’s do this kind of thing. And so that’s what I try to channel when I do my stuff.”

Some will find that they aren’t ready. Some will give it a try and stumble. Some will make it.

And each year, thousands more will walk through the front door and take their shot at a better life.

Bass’ Inside Safe teams went to these places again and again. But so did the homeless Aug. 9, 2026 Voices Lopez: On Skid Row, it’s been decades of frustration. Will the next mayor have a plan? July 8, 2026 Voices Contributor: Los Angeles’ homelessness strategy needs a next act June 30, 2026 Show Comments CaliforniaHousing & Homelessness The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.

Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist. Lopez is the author most recently of “Independence Day: What I Learned About Retirement, From Some Who’ve Done It and Some Who Never Will.” His book “The Soloist,” inspired by his columns on his relationship with a Juilliard-trained homeless person, was a Los Angeles Times and New York Times best-seller, winner of the PEN USA Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and the subject of a Dream Works movie by the same name. He has also written three novels and two column collections.

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