Homeless in the countryside

“I
had a fire, and I had an accident,” says the man on the phone. He’s not telling
the half of it. He and his wife and two pre-school boys are newly homeless —
and holed up in a room-by-the-week motel in the northern Finger Lakes.

            The family’s story is a classic “one
thing after another.” First a fire took their home; insurance didn’t cover it.
Then a serious ankle injury cost the man a $20-plus-an-hour job. “I was trying
to put the house back together as fast as I could,” says the man, a painter by
trade. “Then a table [fell and] put me out of commission.” He says he couldn’t
get workers’ comp.

            “It don’t take long,” he says.
“You’re out for a year, and you’re done.” The leg still causes him pain, but he
has to find odd jobs. “I still have to work,” he says, even at $7.50 an hour.
“What are you going to do?”

            The motel room, he says, goes for
$192 a week, tax included. That’s enough for a decent apartment. “But we can’t
come up with the security,” he says. “I’ve always been productive, but this
last year’s been hell.” He plans to head south on a job search as soon as he’s
on his feet: “The Upstate area, we’re going to have some tough times ahead.”

            This story is repeated endlessly in
the “richest country in the history of the universe,” of course. But it’s still
significant — not just on its merits, but because it’s happening away from
the inner cities.

            There’s an “invisible” rural
homeless crisis in the US, in fact.

            This crisis recently made headlines
in the Christian Science Monitor. “A
sobering new reality for small-town America” is upon us, said the paper.
“Homelessness… is creeping into rural areas, but without the services available
in cities. Small towns typically have no shelters and few social workers. That
leaves churches, community groups, and volunteers to fill the void.”

            The Monitor looked at communities not so different from Upstate cities
and towns. Take Crystal Lake, Illinois, population 25,000. On a recent Sunday,
said the Monitor, one Crystal Lake
church served dinner to 45 homeless and poor people, of whom 39 “spent the
night.”

The vignette
points back to the Finger Lakes — specifically, the Geneva Center of
Concern, a mostly volunteer group that distributes food and sells second-hand
clothing to low-income people in this small city and nearby areas.

            Cheryl Toor, the Center’s manager,
is helping the homeless family of four that’s stuck in the motel. Her work
starts with the mundane. “We’re looking to find them a slow cooker, or anything
like that,” she says. The motel room has no kitchen, she says, so the family’s
been using a George Foreman Grill and a coffee percolator for heating up meals.

            Toor adds she often brings up such
problems at weekly meetings attended by representatives of the Red Cross, the
Geneva Food Pantry, Ontario County social services department, and other
agencies. The inter-agency meetings allow hands-on workers to share information
and help each other tackle the problems.

            A slow cooker is one thing, but
there are bigger fish to fry. “As far as providing the rentals, hotel rooms,
the funds aren’t there,” says Toor. She says Geneva-based agencies like the
Salvation Army and Red Cross can help for one or two nights. But sometimes
people, though their incomes are low in absolute terms, make comparatively too
much to qualify for transitional assistance. She says she regularly runs into
“someone who’s completely outside the [income] guidelines — it may be only by
$10.”

            Is there a saving grace? “They’re
bringing back the federal food,” says Toor, referring to the USDA surplus
program for commodities like cheese and canned goods. Indeed, the Center of
Concern’s shelves and freezers hold USDA canned meat, butter and margarine, and
other staples.

The city of
Hornell (population 9,000) looks more stressed than Geneva.

            And where Geneva gets an economic
and cultural boost downtown from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and upscale
lakeside properties, Hornell has been tracking up and down with industries like
ALSTOM Transportation Inc., which produces railroad vehicles.

            Moreover, Hornell lies in the
Southern Tier, whose counties — Steuben, Allegany, Cattaraugus, and others
— are among New York’s poorest.

            So how are the homeless doing there?

            “I have five cases [so far] this
week,” says Roger Miller, envoy (officer in charge) of the Hornell Salvation
Army office. “The average now is eight a week, up from five last year, and
three the year before.” He echoes providers elsewhere in the region: “Services
are nearly non-existent. In rural areas, you don’t have the advantage of
shelters.”

            Miller says he tries to get people
into very temporary lodging, and he helps with utility bills. But without
actual shelters available, where are people going? Are they disappearing,
physically and statistically?

            Briefly, they’re moving in with
friends, or maybe with anybody. “We’ve had cases in recent weeks like a
two-bedroom house with 16 people, full-time residents, two to three or six
unrelated families,” says Miller. Technically, the unit is rented in the name
of only one family, he says. So if landlords get wind of the situation,
somebody’s going to get evicted. In any case, these ad hoc arrangements are unstable.
“The Smiths don’t get along with the Joneses,” says Miller — and thus, even
without a landlord’s intervention, a tenant can be thrown out and rendered
homeless all over again.

            Miller describes another,
all-too-common “vicious cycle.” The typical homeless family, in Hornell as
elsewhere, is a single woman with two or three children, he notes. Frequently,
a woman snared in this web, he says, will move in with a man who’s offering
space for her and her kids. Miller believes this amounts to “prostitution for
shelter.” However one characterizes it, it’s not a great option for the woman
— and it sets her up to be the victim of abuse or violence.

            Why is Hornell experiencing a rise
in homelessness and attendant ills?

            Part of it is geographical, says
Miller. The new east-west Interstate 86 (a.k.a. Route 17) runs through town,
and the north-south Interstate 390 is close by. “You get homeless transients”
added to “homeless from the town itself,” Miller says.

            Then there’s the economy, which has
hit Hornell and the rest of Upstate pretty hard — and which may get worse
under the pressure of endless war spending and tax cuts for the wealthy.

            Miller follows this descent step by
step: “The K-Mart went under, the Rite-Aid went under, business after business
went under… I’m just shy of 56, and I can remember five separate rail lines
here.”

            Today, he says, the city doesn’t
have much left. There are three medical equipment stores, he says, a sign that
the community is existing on the retirement income of former railway workers.
And there are some bars and clubs.

            A bit further west, within the
gravitational field of Buffalo as well as Rochester, Wyoming County is showing
signs of the homeless problem, too.

            County planner Tom Skoglund doesn’t
believe the area has a great number of homeless, though. He pulls out US Census
figures that seem to nail the facts down — at least as the facts were on
April 1, 2000, the day the slightly faded statistical snapshot was taken.

            How did Wyoming County look that
April day? According to Skoglund, there were 118 “non-institutionalized” people
(a catch-all census category that includes the homeless). Wyoming County’s
total population then was 43,424. So the homeless comprised less than one
percent of the county population — seemingly little, but significant in terms
of raw human need.

The
Washington-based National Coalition on the Homeless, cautioning that a
“definitive representation” is impossible, says “the best approximation” is
that 3.5 million Americans — 1.35 million of them children — are “likely to
experience homelessness in a given year.” In rural areas, says the group, “the
numbers of children experiencing homelessness are much higher” than in urban
areas. So there’s good reason to think any official number — like the 118 in
Wyoming County in 2000 — may be a shade low.

            Alan Bliss, director of the
Perry-based Community Action of Wyoming County, says that when 10 or 12 cases
of homeless cases are reported countywide, there are probably more like 20
actual cases. He adds that his agency has built nine stand-alone, three-to-four
bedroom units for homeless to stay in longer-term. “We have housed 24
families,” he says.

            Back in the Finger Lakes, Marie
Milligan, social ministry coordinator for the Roman Catholic Community of
Geneva, deals with a factor that might not define the problem of homelessness
but nonetheless can’t be ignored: personal actions and choices.

            Sometimes, she says, a group of
people “will come to Geneva to party or whatever” and leave someone behind on
the street. “Most of the time I give them a bus ticket back home,” she says.
She adds she might see only five people a year who are actually “sleeping
behind the plaza, or in a box, or in a car.”

            Yet Milligan also points to a
structural, even political difficulty that put families into real crisis mode:
delays in processing.

            It takes 45 days, she says, for a
family to get on “DSS” (now TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). But
if there’s been “a problem,” she says — say, a previous denial of public
assistance for cause — the delay might run from 90 to 175 days.

            So how do people survive in the
meantime?

            The question comes around again to
the lack of dependable drop-in facilities. “We don’t have a shelter in Geneva,”
says Milligan, “so we refer them either to Rochester or Syracuse.” She points
out an irony, too, one that says as much about existing facilities as about the
lack of them: “Most people don’t want to go to a shelter.”

“Generally, we
have seen an increase in needs,” says Tim McMahon, director of Catholic Charities of
Livingston County. (Numbers from the state social services agencies back this
up. Ontario County’s TANF caseload, for example, rose from 528 cases in 1999,
to 604 in 2000, to 662 in 2002. Wayne, Wyoming, and other nearby counties
showed a similar trend.)

            McMahon singles out one factor:
“Despite what has been touted about welfare reform, the shelter allowance has
remained the same since 1998… a ridiculously low amount, frozen in time.” The
homeless in Livingston County, he says, “aren’t living under a bridge or in a
subway tunnel.” Rather, as across the region, they’re existing in substandard
or overcrowded quarters.

            Here it comes again: “There is no
homeless shelter in Livingston County,” says McMahon.

            But McMahon passes along some good
news, too. His agency leases an apartment in Mt. Morris where a homeless family
can be placed for up to four weeks. Livingston County social services, he says,
has asked the agency to “duplicate” this project in Dansville. Why isn’t DSS
there or elsewhere doing this kind of thing itself, instead of pushing private
not-for-profits to do the heavy lifting? The not-for-profits, says McMahon, can
do “high-quality” work at a lower cost.

            The push to save money gets ever
stronger as the public sector pulls away from providing adequate support. Nan
Roman, head of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, says current federal
funding, at around $1.5 billion, is substantial. Yet, she says, it doesn’t meet
the needs out there — particularly the need for affordable housing.

            The Washington-based National
Coalition for the Homeless provides some data: Federal outlays must cover
almost 5 million households “experiencing ‘worst case’ housing needs”
nationwide. And around 90,000 affordable housing units are lost each year “due
to demolition or sale of public housing.”

            The net effect: Working families are
left out in the cold — “one thing after another” with no end in sight.

Human
services groups will distribute food for the needy behind St. Francis de Sales
Church, 130 Exchange Street, on Thursday, April 24.

This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2003.