A View of Homeless America

A homeless Iraq war veteran and single mother pauses for a photo in Brooklyn, May 19, 2006. On any given night in the United States, 750,000 people are homeless, sleeping in shelters or on the streets or in abandoned buildings, said Philip Mangano, named the nation's homelessness czar by President Bush in 2002. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

Temporary homeless in U.S. face tough choices

October 30, 2006

By Matthew Bigg

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Sanovia Stevenson's story is like a song from the blues: came to the big city in search of a job. Wound up homeless and sleeping in a shelter.

Her experience is typical of thousands across America, the wealthiest nation on earth, who are drawn to big cities for work but are unable to secure housing because of the cost.

Stevenson came from a small town in Florida and found a job in booming Atlanta, in the neighboring state of Georgia.

At first she slept in her car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. She left her window open a crack because of the heat but never felt threatened by her neighbors, the other homeless people who shared the parking lot north of Atlanta, she said.

She lost that job when her mother fell sick and she had to return to Florida to collect her two children, lost her second job when her employer told her to work weekends -- who would look after the kids? -- and has started a third.

The children spend weekdays at the Atlanta Children's Shelter, an institution that provides free child-care so homeless mothers can work, and the family stays in a dormitory at a shelter called My Sister's House.

Soon, she fears, their time at My Sister's House will be up. And unless she finds a permanent place to live, she will risk joining the ranks of the chronically homeless.

"I heard a lady standing in the dinner line (at the shelter) saying: 'This is my fourth shelter.' She sounded so proud, but I would never tell anybody that," Stevenson said.

"To me it's depressing. I have headaches every day. Sometimes I just tear up just thinking about it. I have never been in a situation like this," she said.

TEMPORARY HOMELESS

On any given night in the United States, 750,000 people are homeless, sleeping in shelters or on the streets or in abandoned buildings, said Philip Mangano, named the nation's homelessness czar by President Bush in 2002.

Over the course of a year more than 2 million experience homelessness, though only between 10 and 20 percent of those are chronically homeless, said Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, a federal agency.

"The majority of people who would constitute homelessness don't have significant substance abuse or mental health problems and it is beyond their dreams that they would ever find themselves in this situation," he said.

"People hear about an economic hotspot and they go to the place of opportunity but find out the boom has driven up housing dramatically so that even though they are working ... they don't have enough money to afford housing."

The agency aims to reduce or end homelessness by encouraging states, cities and county governments to devise and implement ten-year plans and Mangano said there was a "record level" of funding on the issue. Bush has requested $4.15 billion in federal funding for 2007 and hundreds of millions more are given through state and local funds and private donations, he said.

Critics argue broader economic policies have increased the base of poverty, driving up the number of homeless.

The top factors that can lead to temporary homelessness are illness, the loss of a job or domestic violence, all of which can upset the balance of those who live from paycheck to paycheck and lack strong family support.

"I have been here 17 years and the causative factors for homelessness have not changed. You can always see the same cluster of problems," said Jacqueline Brown, executive director of Atlanta Children's Shelter.

Around 81 percent of people using the shelter are single mothers and 91 percent are black, proportions that have barely changed over recent years, the Shelter said.

TOUGH CHOICES

Stevenson's route into homelessness was straightforward, but to find a way out involves choices of bewildering complexity.

Landlords tell her that to rent she needs to show she's been working for six months, which is impossible since she only arrived in July.

Options include transitional housing and subsidized housing but to explore them she needs time and a telephone, but because she works and has little disposable cash she has neither.

A chunk of the $7 an hour she earns goes on gas for her 1996 Oldsmobile Intrigue.

In the evening she lines up with other families for food at the shelter. One night it was pizza, which her children picked at, and ice cream, which they devoured. Then she bathes them in a bathroom she shares with others and describes as mildewed.

The hardships are small-scale but stressful. Not everyone in the dormitory holds to the same standards of cleanliness. Inevitably there are arguments between women who don't know or trust each other but find themselves sharing living space.

Worst of all her children, a girl of three and a one-year-old boy she calls 'Small Fry', know this is not their real home and that something has gone wrong.

"I told my daughter that we are staying in a big hotel with a lot of different people. The first week she was there she would wake through the night crying that she wanted her grandmother," she said.

In October, with the clock running down on the time her children could spend in the shelter, she sent her children back to their sick grandmother in Florida to maximize her chances of getting a job that would pay enough money to rent a home.

"I'm not getting my hopes up. I'm just trying to get things worked out so that if one thing doesn't work out there may be something else," she said.