LOUISANA: Homelessness reaching into rural
areas
The (Baton Rouge) Advocate
By J.D. Ventura
Advocate staff writer
Originally published March 20, 2005
Ponchatoula – Never mind the unfinished floors. Overlook the mold growing like wild moss on the ceiling of the bathroom. Ignore the chains and padlocks on the refrigerator doors. Forget about the noticeable lack of toys or playmates.
At least Nicole Henderson's three young children have a place to live.
That there is a homeless shelter in her small hometown may have once been reassuring news to the 22-year-old mother from Ponchatoula. She could remain close to her grandmother, the one who asked her to take the kids and make a go of it elsewhere. No need to move to New Orleans or Baton Rouge to find help. They'd go to House of Serenity. It sounded nice. It's just temporary, she told herself.
That was two years ago.
Now, staring blankly at her children -- Jack, 3; Kar'Darius, 1; and Reggie, 5 -- she says she feels trapped. Maybe she will leave in May. But that's a hope more than a plan.
There are 29 other people staying at the homeless shelter with her. Some of them stay for a brief period of time, or leave to take a job, or to stay with a relative, or just disappear. Some come back. Others, like Henderson, have been living there off and on since Francis Seymour, a retired school teacher from California, decided to open the place back in 2003.
If its mission is to help the homeless, then the House of Serenity is undoubtedly a success. Some who live there praise Jesus and "Ms. Francis" in the same sentence when they speak of salvation. But the success of a rural homeless shelter, advocates of the homeless
say, is an accurate barometer of a growing national problem.
Homelessness is no longer just an urban phenomenon.
"In rural areas homelessness is even more hidden," said Brad Paul, the executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit, National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness. "As we learn more about the effects of the housing crisis in this country, we are beginning to learn it's a growing problem…You see (families) doubling and tripling up, or living in houses that would be condemned in bigger cities."
Hardly any of Paul's contemporaries in the advocacy community shy away from using the word "crisis" when describing low-income housing and other programs intended to prevent homelessness from happening. Look at the Section 8 program. Call the housing authority. These programs are overwhelmed and underfunded, advocates charge. And when people cannot readily access the help these programs provide, many end up seeking shelter, not only in big cities, but in small towns like Ponchatoula.
Small town life is all Warren Crawford has ever known. The 60-year-old grew up with nine siblings in Haskell, Tenn. Gone are the days when, as a young farmhand, he bought a Coke for a nickel, or a pack of cigarettes for 25 cents. Most of his family is gone, too. His dad and his two closest brothers died of cancer years ago.
Home for Crawford has been wherever he makes his liver and onions, fried in bacon grease. Home, for now, is the House of Serenity. Before arriving there, he lived at the Super 8 in Covington. Then home was an apartment in Ponchatoula, where he made a shrimp dish the neighbors' kids loved. On a recent morning he watched Henderson's oldest boy, Jack, pour sugar on his cornflakes, "You wanna get this again?" he asked, showing Jack a knuckle sandwich and winking playfully at the giggling child. "I was just teaching him to take care of himself before."
How to take care of families like Henderson's, as opposed to single drifters like Crawford, who policy makers call "the chronically homeless," has created debates over how federal and state funding sources should be allocated, particularly with regard to President Bush's 2006 proposed budget. The major sticking points include a $174 million increase in funding aimed at only the chronically homeless (the "Samaritan Housing" program) and a $72 million decrease in a USDA-run program called Section 515, which encourages development of low-income rural housing through low-interest loans.
Paul and other homeless advocates say the Samaritan Housing program will effectively narrow the definition of homelessness by making those resources only available to "single adults with disabilities who have been homeless over a year, or at least four times in a three-year period." The worry?: that the homeless loner begging for money on the city sidewalk may be helped at the expense of families in rural areas who wind up homeless due to a severe lack of affordable housing.
"Section 8 (government vouchers that can be used to pay rent to some private sector landlords) is crashing, and we don't have anything to replace it," warned Ann O'Hara, the associate director of the Technical Assistance Collaborative Inc., a Boston-based nonprofit that examines the links between homelessness and affordable housing. "You are not going to get people out of homeless shelters without the affordable housing issue being solved."
Henderson has never applied for Section 8 or public housing (government-owned apartments) because she heard the waiting lists were too long. Officials in Tangipahoa Parish, where the House of Serenity is located, confirmed that it takes anywhere from a year and a half to two years to be approved for Section 8 housing there. There are 110 units of public housing in the parish, with a waiting list that currently has 50 people on it. Getting an apartment in public housing takes about a year once you are added to that list.
In East Baton Rouge Parish, the waiting list for Section 8 assistance has been frozen since 1999. There are 140 people waiting for public housing units currently in EBR.
According to Julie Stafford, lack of affordable housing is creating a "huge crisis." As the director of supportive housing for the Volunteers of America, she manages the Housing and Urban Development grant for five parishes: Ascension, East and West Feliciana, Point Coupee and Iberville. Stafford uses that money to augment the rents of people who are homeless and disabled, but who have some income to pay for day-to-day expenses (usually Social Security Income, or SSI). Here's the crisis part: Her federal grant was only $57,000 last year.
That only subsidizes 12 units --across five parishes.
"There is a very limited amount of resources in rural areas," said Stafford. "People just don't think there is a problem in rural areas because it's not about people in the streets with their families."
Even Seymour was surprised by the depth of the problem. "I've taken in people from out of the swamps," she said, standing in the back yard of her shelter, where there is a shed that's been converted into a chapel. "I would never have dreamt that there were this many people homeless in an itty bitty place like this."
Seymour said that while she's thankful to those who donate clothes to the shelter, what she really needs is a solid funding source. She funds the shelter's operation largely from her retirement savings, and said she receives no state or federal subsidies.
"Hats off to her good intentions in terms of creating such a place," said Philip Mangano, the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, upon hearing of Seymour's House of Serenity. Mangano, who has been described in the media as the President's "homelessness czar," said the federal government is acknowledging "the widespread nature of rural homelessness." "Ultimately we want the movement around the country to be aimed not at maintaining homelessness, but ending it."
Henderson wants that, too. But with the long waiting lists for affordable housing, and the minimum income requirements of some programs, she and Crawford have perhaps more in common than the various policies that attempt to help them. For now, they share a roof over their heads and a desire to leave the shelter. And although they don't have homes, they cling to country life and dream of independence.
"I'm missing," said Crawford, with Henderson's
children playing around him. "But I ain't gone."