Under the radar

https://country-survey-collabs.info/external_files/allimages/2007/jan22/graphics/070122-006.jpg%3C/figcaption%3E
Barbara Trivitt and her children, 13-year-old Eric and 15-year-old Jennifer, lived in their Jeep in Coos Bay, Oregon, when they lost their voucher for subsidized housing
Eric at an RV park where showers are $5 a person
Jennifer with her one real meal of the day, a hamburger at a seller’s warehouse after she and her family picked chanterelle mushrooms

COOS BAY, OREGON — The Mill Casino RV Park sits on the site of
the old Weyerhaeuser mill near this former timber town, population
15,000. The park is crowded with vacationing couples this
Thanksgiving weekend; in the early-morning half-light, they emerge
from Winnebagos to walk their dogs. Later, they’ll head to
the casino to try their luck at the slots.

Meanwhile, in
an adjacent asphalt lot where you can stay for free without a
hookup, Barbara Trivitt and her two kids are waking up in a Jeep
Grand Cherokee — Eric, 13, in the driver’s seat,
Barbara in shotgun, and Jennifer, 15, curled up in back.

The Trivitts have lived this way since moving to the coast a month
ago. They came here with little — $100 from the sale of a
beloved Australian shepherd and a $186 child support check. Now
they have nothing. The money ran out three days ago, the gas gauge
reads below empty and all that’s left to eat are potato
chips.

Access to the RV park’s showers and toilets
is $5 per person, so the three of them brush their teeth and change
their clothes inside the car; they pee between a pair of open car
doors. It’s been two days since the last bath, and there
aren’t many clean clothes left; inside the Jeep, the air is
sour.

“I feel bad for doing this to my kids,”
Trivitt says. “I feel like an awful parent because I
can’t provide for them. … They shouldn’t have to live
out of a car.”

With her long auburn hair, bright
blue eyes and erupting giggle, Trivitt seems younger than her 43
years. But sometimes in quiet moments, she stares off at the
horizon, and the lines on her forehead deepen under the weight of
so much worry.

Not just in cities

When we think of the homeless, we tend to imagine mentally ill or
alcoholic loners wandering city streets. But on the fringes of
small towns across the West, people live in cars, in makeshift
tents and under bridges. They’re no less in need than unkempt
men sleeping in Denver doorways, but they’re less visible.
Even as the Bush administration spends millions to ease
homelessness in cities, rural people without homes struggle to find
help.

“The unmet need is out of control,”
says Lance Cheslock, director of a shelter in rural Colorado.
“It’s a crisis that’s being ignored.”

In the lexicon of federal aid programs, only those
sleeping on the street or in shelters are defined as homeless. But
in small towns, displaced people often camp, stay in cheap hotels
or “double up”— move in with friends. That makes
them hard to see and count: Nobody knows exactly how many rural
families quietly live in poverty at the edge of the mainstream.

Trivitt has struggled with money since she left
Jennifer’s father 14 years ago, after he broke his knuckles
punching her. Six years ago she lost her job at a veneer mill, and
the family spent the summer homeless in Eugene. Since then,
she’s been taking classes toward an associate’s degree
and working a series of low-paying jobs that leave her juggling
unpaid bills at month’s end.

This time, Trivitt
lost her home when she left La Pine, Ore. — she was fleeing
another abusive relationship, and Eric had been in trouble with the
police. She chose Coos Bay for its school district, which offers a
well-regarded program for misbehaving teens. She found a job almost
immediately, answering telephones for minimum wage.

But
moving meant the family lost its Section 8 voucher, a federal
housing subsidy, and Trivitt can’t afford a home in Coos Bay
without it. Neither of the two homeless shelters in town can offer
the family a place to stay: One houses only adults, and the other
won’t take Eric without a male parent.

Federal
homeless aid is hard to come by all over the rural West; needy
people are dispersed, and it’s impractical to provide a full
range of services in every tiny town. Meanwhile, federal funding
structures favor cities and leave rural organizations wanting.

“Resources are consolidated in urban areas,”
says Cheslock. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, or
HUD, the federal agency that administers most homeless programs,
“isn’t doing anything to fund the rural
homeless.”

Rural service providers can’t
compete for federal grants against large, well-developed urban
organizations. And those grants, which often target subpopulations
— such as HIV/AIDS patients or drug addicts — may work
in cities but don’t fit the needs of small towns, where aid
agencies must help anyone who walks through the door.

Cheslock says rural areas need flexible grants to aid migrant
farmworkers, families and the mentally ill. His shelter in Alamosa,
Colo., has provided a wide range of services since 1981, thanks
mostly to fund-raising tenacity and a local spirit of volunteerism.
Only 11 percent of its budget comes from federal dollars.

Philip Mangano, head of the Interagency Council on Homelessness,
coordinates the federal response to homelessness — and he
agrees that it’s harder for rural areas to get federal money.
But “rural folks need to get beyond the idea that
someone’s going to come from Washington to solve their
problem,” he says. “They have to be strategic and
creative in fashioning a solution.”

—-

Cheslock offers
one such solution: Transfer responsibility for rural programs from
HUD to the Department of Agriculture, whose employees already work
in small towns across the West. Cheslock and Colorado Rep. John
Salazar, D, are crafting legislative language to designate $50
million for USDA rural homeless programs. Communities would apply
for small grants, maxing out at $50,000.

“That
seems like nothing,” Cheslock says, “but a rural area
could do so much with that.”

A heavy
toll

At 7:30 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving, Trivitt
heads to work, her hair pulled into a ponytail to disguise the fact
she hasn’t showered.

The children, however, have a
holiday from school, and the day stretches before them. They
ping-pong around town, seeking entertainment and shelter from
Oregon’s rain. After visits to the pet store, the city dock
and two used-car lots, they land at the mall. Here they find
“lunch” for the day: a juice vendor’s tiny sample
of strawberry smoothie.

Eric and Jennifer try to keep
classmates from discovering that they live in a car, but their
situation is hardly unusual. This year, 175 of Coos Bay
schools’ 3,500 students were homeless. In Oregon, over 11,000
students have no place to live; nationwide, at least 200,000 kids
are homeless on any given day. These children fall behind in
school, suffer disproportionately from health problems, and are
more likely than their housed peers to become homeless as adults.

Jennifer wants to go live with her grandmother, but her
mother refuses. “If I lost Jennifer, I’d be
lost,” she says. Recently, after two straight rainy days, the
dank Jeep seemed to shrink around the family. The quiet
disagreement erupted into an argument that ended when Trivitt,
having reached some limit of patience and hope, threw a CD player
at the windshield. Now, a spiderweb of cracks fragments her view of
the road.

Help is hard to come by

Homeless programs help people survive crises, but a deeper problem
persists, rooted in a shifting economy. In much of the rural West,
housing costs are rising while service jobs replace relatively
high-paying, blue-collar work — and receding federal housing
programs haven’t filled the gap.

In order for
rental housing to be “affordable,” it must cost less
than 30 percent of the family’s total income. By that
measure, nothing in Coos Bay — not even a studio apartment
— is within reach of someone like Barbara, who earns
Oregon’s minimum wage of $7.50 per hour. To afford a
three-bedroom place, she’d have to work 84 hours each week.

“This is a dynamic you’ll find all over the
West Coast; it’s not just unique to Coos Bay,” says Bob
More, director of a nonprofit that provides a range of social
services along the Oregon coast, where fishing and timber have
given way to golf courses, restaurants and hotels. Each week, his
organization turns away between five and seven families seeking
rent or utility assistance.

Congress has been reluctant
to subsidize low-income housing over the last 25 years. HUD —
which administers most federal housing programs — is a shadow
of its former self, with a current budget less than half of what it
was in 1978.

Rural areas have been particularly hard-hit
— USDA’s rural affordable housing program now produces
just 5 percent of the housing units it did three decades ago. As
older units convert to market-rate rentals, there is a net loss of
affordable housing. Meanwhile, the Section 8 program continues to
shrink: There are 130,000 fewer Section 8 vouchers now than in
2004. Barbara will wait six months to two years before she gets
another voucher.

That leads to a high-stakes game of
musical chairs, says Beth Shinn, a professor of public policy at
New York University: The chairs are affordable housing units and
the players are families trying to secure them. “Because
there are fewer inexpensive housing units than households that need
them, some folks are left homeless when the music stops,”
Shinn says. “Individual problems influence which players are
left standing, but when there are so many more players than chairs,
it is not only people with problems who get left out.

“Homelessness is likely to remain widespread until we raise
wages or subsidize housing enough to bring the gap between incomes
and housing costs down,” adds Shinn.

Mangano says
more money for low-income housing won’t come without a shift
in political priorities. “When was the last time you heard a
presidential candidate — or even a senatorial candidate
— talk about housing as a major issue? Housing is not a
primary issue, a secondary issue or a tertiary issue. It’s
not even on the screen.”

Two weeks after
Thanksgiving, Trivitt has saved $200, but her Jeep has been
repossessed. “No way to get the kids to school, run errands,
look at houses, get to and from work,” she says. “I
have lost my independence.”

She and the children
are staying in a Coos Bay motel for one week, courtesy of a
generous local politician, but it’s just a stopgap measure.
At the end of the week, without an affordable home on the horizon,
they’ll be looking for another temporary place to stay.

The author writes from Berkeley,
California.

This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Under the radar.