Between treating medical conditions, addressing mental health and finding a roof to live under, it can be a challenge for the estimated one in every 500 Americans experiencing homelessness to find stability in life, especially when they have unique needs. 

An agency based in Norfolk, Va., is trying to change that. 

Johnson Homes, a placement agency founded in 2022 by investor and house flipper Janice Miles, is working to place seniors and other vulnerable individuals with certain health needs in homes that double as affordable care facilities. 

The agency is named after Miles’ own mother, who was diagnosed with early onset dementia at 55, as a “representation of her life and her spirit.”

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Janice Miles (right), founder of Johnson Homes, named after her mother Janice Johnson (left). (Courtesy of Johnson Homes) (Courtesy of Johnson Homes)

Working the housing system to find safe and stable housing for her mother proved to be a challenge, and she aims to alleviate that challenge for others who find themselves in her position.

“Many people don’t have the support, the family, to find these things out for them,” she told Fox News Digital.

While the Fair Housing Act provides for regulations on shelter accessibility, there is still a world of resources homeless individuals need to navigate to obtain health benefits and other basic needs. 

Through partnerships with local organizations, Johnson Homes provides wraparound services and case management to the homeless community, to people with mental health disabilities, and to others who need help finding stability in life. 

Insurance, she said, only covers so much when it comes to people’s ability to live. 

In some cases, Johnson Homes assists individuals transition back into their own home or a family member’s home with support from case management and resources to get back on their feet. 

“Sometimes our strength is not within ourselves, but the partnerships we make around us,” Miles said.

Miles estimates the agency has helped close to 60 people since its inception, with about 25 currently placed in housing. 

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An example of a Johnson Home in the Hampton-Portsmouth area of Virginia. (Courtesy of Johnson Homes)

Johnson Homes, she said, is not a group home, but rather a placement agency that works as a liaison between homeless individuals and homeowners and investors as well as case management. She also works with home care agencies, telecommunication companies and attorneys to help with disability claims. 

“We’re pulling resources together for those who need it the most,” she said, adding that Johnson Homes is digging into “minimal pots” to find adequate funding for necessities like food and clothing.

Miles said Johnson Homes does not receive state funding, and charges residents rent. In exchange, it provides room, board and utilities as well as case management and an on-site coordinator. 

As a qualified mental health professional, Miles said she’s used to gathering resources to help people become stable. But with policies around COVID-19, she noticed vulnerable populations, including elderly individuals who had been hospitalized for various conditions, were suddenly facing a housing crisis. 

Example of a Johnson Home in the Hampton-Portsmouth area of Virginia. (Courtesy of Johnson Homes) (Courtesy of Johnson Homes)

What happened, she explained, was that hospitals had been retaining individuals who might not have needed an inpatient level of care any longer while COVID-19 policies were still in place. So when those policies were lifted, they only had a limited amount of time — roughly a month — to find housing. 

“That really opened our eyes to a bigger problem,” she said of the elderly homeless. “They really need some help — they really need some support.”

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Miles teamed up with Lana Pressley from the Four Rivers Project, a nonprofit that aims to help recidivism in the Norfolk, Va., area, including those with mental health and substance abuse issues, as well as “people who have been disenfranchised through no fault of their own.” 

The group is one example of Johnson Homes joining forces with a nonprofit to best meet the community’s needs. They created a memorandum of agreement so they’re able to share resources. 

“We have to recognize that homelessness is a condition just like any other condition we have in our society,” Pressley told Fox News Digital. “Who goes over and talks to these people? Who starts a conversation with them?”

When it comes to maintaining a productive life once off the streets, Pressley said, “case management is critical,” including the emotional aspects of helping an individual work the system for medical and financial resources. 

For one woman in particular, the system Johnson Homes implemented is working.

Ms. Kathy — a homeless, retired CNA in need of housing suitable for a 71-year-old with health needs — recently settled into a Johnson Home after a years-long battle with homelessness reported by Fox News Digital in 2022.

After a 20-year career in nursing, assisting patients after cardiac surgery, she fell on hard times and found herself sitting behind a Burger King dumpster in winter weather. With health conditions and a mobility device, it was challenging to find a shelter that would take her in right away. 

Good Samaritan Lisa Suhay was witness to the process it took to find placement for her. She told Fox News Digital that the system in place for homeless individuals to stabilize is not ideal for those who have a hard time processing official forms that require other types of documentation. 

Elderly individuals in particular, Suhay said, carry a lot of shame around being homeless and are less inclined to reach out for help — and when it comes to using technology to find shelter, it’s an even bigger burden. 

She likened the Johnson Homes system of partnerships to “Stone Soup” — the folk tale in which the end result is built piecemeal. 

“Many hands make light work, and this could be light work for America,” she said, adding that this system could be getting homeless off the streets at a “stunning” rate. 

Suhay is helping the Four Rivers Project through a GoFundMe page, “Elderly Homeless: Help fund a real solution,” which in turn helps fund Johnson Homes. 

Norfolk, Va., Mayor Kenny Alexander told Fox News Digital, in part, that while poverty in his city has “decreased by 4.1%, homelessness presents persistent challenges, often exacerbating chronic health issues due to unstable housing.”

He added that he’s urged the city manager to create a multi-agency task force in addition to enhancing Norfolk’s emergency shelter, and providing households with rental and utility assistance to prevent evictions. 

Could Johnson Homes be a model for a longer-term solution to homelessness?

“We’d love to spread and show our system and what we have,” Miles said. “The homeless situation is not going anywhere, and the population is getting older.” 

July 27, 1981, quickly went from a normal day for the Walsh family to one that seeped into tragedy.

Reve Walsh and her 6-year-old son, Adam, went to Sears in Hollywood, Florida, on that day. While at the store, the boy went into the video game aisle while his mother browsed just a few aisles over, History.com reported.

When his mother went to the aisle to retrieve her son, he was gone. Investigators discovered that Adam left the store with a group of older boys who were asked to leave for causing trouble, according to the source.

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Adam’s parents launched a massive hunt to find him, and they even put up a $100,000 reward to draw attention to the case.

“When Adam was kidnapped … the FBI did not help us,” Walsh previously told Fox News Digital. “… The FBI refused to enter Adam in the NCIC, or the National Crime Information Computer, which, at the time in 1981, stored millions of records of convicted felons, stolen boats, stolen cars, stolen planes. … There was no unidentified dead file, no missing children’s file, nothing.”

Less than two weeks after Adam went missing from the department store, his severed head was found by two fishermen in a drainage canal in Vero Beach, about 100 miles from where he was abducted, according to History.com. His body was never found.

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“I was dying of a broken heart,” Walsh told Fox News Digital when the tragic discovery was made.

It would take 27 years for Adam’s case to finally close.

Ottis Elwood Toole would eventually confess to Adam’s murder, but his story was given and recanted many times over the years after the discovery of Adam’s murder. 

John Walsh, Adam’s father, is a co-founder of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. (Alex Wong/Getty Images/File)

In October 1983, Toole, who was an inmate at a Florida prison, originally confessed to Adam’s abduction and murder, according to History.com. He alleged that serial killer Henry Lee Lucas was also involved in the crime, though it was later discovered that Lucas was in jail at the time of the kidnapping.

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Investigators were unable to locate Adam’s body in the location Toole claimed to have buried it, providing no physical evidence to the case. 

Several months after his confession, Toole recanted.

In the following years, Toole continued a cycle of confessing and taking back his story. Another possible suspect of Adam’s murder was serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who was living in Florida at the time, according to History.com.

Toole, who was convicted of six murders, died behind bars in 1996. It wasn’t until Dec. 16, 2008, when the police department announced that the case was closed with enough evidence to declare Toole responsible for Adam’s death, according to History.com.

Since then, Adam’s family, including younger brother Callahan, who was not yet born at the time of Adam’s disappearance, have dedicated themselves to a life of advocacy.

John Walsh and son Callahan Walsh are hosts of “America’s Most Wanted,” a program launched after Adam’s death that helps track down dangerous criminals. (Michael Becker/FOX ©2024 FOX Media LLC)

John is the creator and host of the show “America’s Most Wanted,” which has been hunting down criminals for more than 40 years. He launched the series in 1988 after his son’s murder. 

“I grew up in a nice, gated community [and] didn’t think crime would touch us,” Walsh previously told Fox News Digital. “… I’ve learned in all of these years that the bad guys will come right into your area. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are. They can do something to you and get you.”

The show has helped capture more than 1,190 criminals.

“What drove me was that no one helped us look for Adam,” Walsh previously told Fox News Digital. “We put a man on the moon, and we couldn’t put missing children into the big FBI computer. But we persevered. We loved that little boy so much, and we didn’t have a clue who murdered him. It took 27 years to find out. It was a wonderful retired detective and DA who looked at those files, discovered Adam’s murder and solved Adam’s case. But it’s that driving force, our love for him, that has pushed me.”

Walsh is also a co-founder of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a nonprofit organization for which Callahan serves as the executive director of its Florida branch.

On the 25th anniversary of Adam’s kidnapping, President George W. Bush signed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act into law in 2006. (TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images)

On July 27, 2006, 25 years after Adam’s disappearance, President George W. Bush signed the Adam Walsh Child Protection Safety Act into law, “which created a national database of convicted child sex offenders, strengthened federal penalties for crimes against children and provided funding and training for law enforcement to fight crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children via the internet,” per History.com.

Tennessee has agreed to remove sex workers with HIV from the sex offender registry following two lawsuits that argued the state’s law did not account for evolving science on the spread and prevention of the disease, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press. 

The state’s decades-lasting laws made prostitution a misdemeanor for the majority of sex workers, but a felony for those who were HIV-positive.  

Eighty-three residents of the state were on the registry for aggravated prostitution, according to the lawsuit. This classification posed limits on housing, work and relationships with minor relatives.  

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“Plaintiffs argue that the Aggravated Prostitution statute is rooted in fear and discrimination, targeting people living with HIV for harsh punishment and forcing them to register as “violent sex offenders” for the rest of their lives,” the ACLU said in an October press release when the court case was filed. “Criminalizing people with HIV defies evidence-based best practices and is patently unlawful as it singles out people living with HIV — a protected disability — for harsher punishment.” 

Gov. Bill Lee, R-Tenn., signed a settlement agreeing that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation would alert those now wrongly on the sex offender registry that they can make a written request for removal. Victims of human trafficking were able to get their aggravated prostitution records expunged earlier this year after the law was tweaked.

Fox News Digital reached out to the Attorney General’s Office to ask about the litigation.

“The General Assembly recently amended the sex offender registry statutes to remove aggravated prostitution from the list of offenses that require registration,” Director of Communications Amy Lannom Wilhite told Fox News. “The plaintiffs have agreed to drop their challenges to the registry statutes as the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation implements those amendments. The TBI has removed multiple registrants who were made eligible for removal by the amendments and who requested to be removed. The litigation is ongoing, though, as our Office continues to defend Tennessee’s prohibition of aggravated prostitution.”