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Monday, December 15, 2003
Safe housing tough to find
Copyright © 2003 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||||||||||||
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Also on this page: Hidden Faces of Poverty | |||||||||||||
SOUTH PARIS — Melissa Andrews knows what it's like to live in a home so cold your baby is bundled in three layers. A home so cold your baby is sick with colds, croup and asthma, one illness after another. Andrews knows what it's like to live in a home infested with spiders and mice, a home that smells like sewage because she cannot afford anything better. Andrews has been waiting more than two years for a Section 8 voucher to help her pay rent in this small western Maine town. She called the local public housing authority last spring to ask when she might get help. "They told me there were 1,000 people ahead of me," Andrews says. "I called back in September and they wouldn't even tell me where I was on the list." As housing prices rise, families like Andrews' settle for unfit homes because they cannot find anything better. More than half the renters in Maine exceed the recommended threshold of 30 percent for the amount of their income that goes to housing each month, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition survey. The proportion skews higher in some northern counties with higher poverty rates. Because housing takes so much of their money, some find it challenging to pay the rest of their bills - bills for such basics as food, heating, health insurance and clothing. Unable to find affordable housing, a rising number of families are knocking on shelter doors, requesting government assistance or, like Andrews, raising children in homes that pose safety and health risks. But federal housing assistance - in the form of Section 8 vouchers and low-interest loans for rural home repairs and construction - has declined sharply in a decade. The effects are most visible by the scores of homes in disrepair in poorer counties. Last year, Andrews lived in a trailer in Paris, a small town in Oxford County. It was infested with spiders and mice. It was drafty and cold. The linoleum was cracked and torn. "It was perpetually filthy from years of mistreatment," Andrews says. "It smelled like sewage." She stayed for two years. She paid $350 a month. When her son, Malaki, was born, Andrews didn't want to bring him home to the trailer. "I hated it there and I hated that I had to bring my son home from the hospital to live in that place," Andrews says. "But I couldn't find anything else." During the winter, wind tore through the trailer. Andrews taped plastic over inside windows, trying to keep out the cold. "Sometimes there was ice on the inside of the trailer," she says. "It was always so cold." She wrapped her son in three layers for warmth. He began getting sick just after his first birthday. "He got asthma and the croup," Andrews says. Andrews is 26. Malaki is 21 months old and has difficulty crawling. He uses leg braces to walk. He receives therapy seven times a week to help him overcome poor muscle tone and gross motor skill delays. Andrews herself is disabled by a severe case of psoriasis that covers most of her body, causing her skin to crack and bleed. After searching two years for a better place to live, Andrews moved into another trailer in South Paris. She pays $95 a week for the two-bedroom mobile home. It is clean and warm, but Andrews still is paying more rent than she can afford. Andrews and her son receive $1,140 in monthly disability and $40 a month in food stamps. Though Andrews worked as a bank teller before her son was born, she knows she wouldn't be able to get a job now. "Who would take my son to seven therapies a week?" she asks. "How would I pay for child care?" Her bills top $1,000 a month and food stamps barely pay for a week's worth of groceries. She is overwhelmed by need. How will she pay for electricity? Oil? What about diapers, gas and warm clothes for her son? "You tend to feel like a failure," she says. "Every day you've got some bills to worry about. It's tiring. You wonder how you're going to keep going. I try not to cry about it. Because I know I'd never stop." Homeless turned away Mainers such as Andrews are turning to state and county agencies in greater numbers. More than 3,700 families, children and single residents were turned away from overcrowded homeless shelters in 2002, more than double the people turned away in 1998, according to the Maine State Housing Authority. "It's overwhelming," says Koriene Low, who connects families with services at Community Concepts, the Oxford County agency where Andrews sought her Section 8 voucher. "We've got families who are sleeping in their cars, families who are living in shelters for a year and a half. We've got nearly 900 families waiting for Section 8 housing and it could be three years before their names come up." The biggest increase in homelessness was in Oxford County, where the number of homeless bed-nights used increased from 2,101 in 1998 to 11,531 in 2000. Local agencies say the county's job losses over the past 10 years have contributed to families' inability to pay rents. Other counties are experiencing enormous demand from people needing housing. The number of homeless bed-nights used in Knox County - where 40 percent of the children live in low-income families - nearly quadrupled between 1998 to 2002. The situation has not improved. For most of 2003, the Maine State Housing Authority could not give out any new Section 8 housing vouchers because demand crippled the system. It was the first time the majority of the state's vouchers had been frozen in more than a decade, according to the housing authority. "The bottom line is there are way too many families in Maine that need assistance and we don't have the resources," says Dan Brennan, director of Maine State Housing Authority's Section 8 voucher program. "We've maximized our federal money and there are still thousands of people who need help." There are 12,000 federally subsidized vouchers in Maine. But the state housing authority estimates that the number falls short by 17,000. "You get to the point you don't want to put people's names on a waiting list because it's providing them false hope," Brennan says. Several factors contribute to the crisis: Maine's income lags rising rents and home costs. According to the Maine State Housing Authority, the state's median income rose from $34,150 in 1997 to $42,029 in 2002, a 21 percent increase. At the same time rents jumped 37 percent; home prices 38 percent. As need for help grows, federal dollars for rural rental assistance dropped from $23 million in 1993 to $18 million in 2002. For repair and construction of multifamily units in rural areas, federal dollars dropped from $30 million in 1988 to $3 million in 2003, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Development Office in Maine. Cumberland and York counties, strained by low apartment vacancy rates and population growth from northern Maine counties and Massachusetts, face dire housing shortages. The number of people waiting for Section 8 housing vouchers from the Maine State Housing Authority increased by more than 250 percent in the past three years. There are 4,369 people on the waiting lists. There also are waits at the state's 22 local housing authorities, which are so swamped with people needing help that there is a two- to four-year wait for vouchers. Crunch on vouchers Part of the problem, local housing directors say, is that federal money set aside for the rent subsidy program has not met rising need. From March through September 2003, families needing government assistance to pay rent were told there were no Section 8 vouchers available by the Maine State Housing Authority. "In the last three years, we've not been able to apply for any new voucher funding," says Brennan, head of the state housing authority's Section 8 program. "There's very little at the federal level. The resources have been stagnant." In Caribou, one of Aroostook County's largest cities, David Ricker is frustrated and concerned about the future of families and their ability to pay for housing. Ricker is the Caribou Housing Authority director. His waiting list has jumped 60 percent in the past two years. "I have vouchers to help 230 families," Ricker says. "Just 24 months ago, I had a waiting list of 55 families. Today, I have 141 families. These families just can't find affordable, safe housing. So they're paying more than they should on rents, and they can't pay for the necessities." Even homeless families, which are given priority status and usually have little difficulty obtaining a housing voucher, faced hardship finding assistance in 2003. Most shelters, which are designed as temporary living quarters, limit the number of days families can stay, typically 45 days or less. Families unable to find apartments bounce from shelter to shelter until they receive a voucher. Some stay in their cars, motels or at campgrounds. In rural Maine there are fewer homeless shelters to accommodate them. Some of the state's most isolated counties do not have shelters that cater to families and kids. Bruce Goodman sees the faces of desperation firsthand. He runs the Brunswick Tedford Shelter. Since July 2002, the shelter has turned away 337 families - a total of 1,046 parents with kids. Goodman tracks the problem month by month: "So far in October, I've had to turn away 19 families with a total of 67 parents and children and we still have 10 days left in the month." "It's frustrating. I see those families coming in and there is nothing I can do for them." More than a third of the families that come to the shelter include working parents, Goodman says. Most of them are parents who have never been homeless before. "We're seeing a lot of new faces," Goodman says. "They're working jobs that don't pay enough and there aren't a lot of options out there for them."
Living at the shelter Donna Rasche is another frontline worker who understands how one bill or one lost paycheck can put families out of a home. Rasche runs the Sister Mary O'Donnell Homeless Shelter, the only shelter in Aroostook, the state's most northern county, a place with so little opportunity that it has been losing population steadily since the 1940s. "The rents are going up, the heat, oil, sewer is going up and a lot of families can't make it on two minimum wage jobs," Rasche says. But desperate times have not kept rents at a level that low-income families can afford. A two-bedroom apartment in Presque Isle costs $525. A three-bedroom is $720. The per capita income in Aroostook is $15,033. "You can't support a family on $15,000," Rasche says. "We've got more and more families coming to our shelter for help. They've been staying in our shelters 30, 45 days because there is nothing. No houses, no apartments they can afford." When the Aroostook shelter is full, families migrate to other counties. Like many shelters in the state, the O'Donnell shelter was unable to obtain any Section 8 vouchers from March through August 2003. In September, the shelter received five vouchers and they were gone in four days. By the end of summer, there were five families living at the Presque Isle homeless shelter that had been there for several weeks because there were no vouchers available. "It breaks your heart to see the kids homeless because they're the victims," Rasche says. Five-year-old Olivia Engstrom lived in the shelter for 32 days before her mother and she found a home. In October, when the shelter received five vouchers, Nichole Engstrom got one. She and her daughter moved into a three-bedroom apartment, owned by the shelter. When Rasche told Olivia she'd be moving to a new home, the kindergartner asked: "Who else is going to be living there?" Rasche explained the apartment was just for Olivia and her mom. "That little girl lit up like a Christmas tree," Rasche remembers. Nichole Engstrom knows she and Olivia are fortunate. They waited for a Section 8 voucher for more than a year. "A year ago I was 98 on the Caribou Housing Authority list," Engstrom says. "And I was still 98 this September." Engstrom will pay 30 percent of her $413 welfare check for her new apartment and hopes to move out once she completes her liberal arts degree at Northern Maine Community College. Engstrom believes she'd still be waiting for a voucher if she and her daughter hadn't become homeless and received priority status. But she knows her 5-year-old paid a price for living at the shelter for more than a month. Olivia and her mother slept at the O'Donnell shelter in Presque Isle for 32 days. They had nowhere to go after Nichole's boyfriend moved out of their apartment and they could no longer afford the rent. The shelter often was full of people and noise. Some of the people staying there were unhappy or, as Olivia remembers, "mean." Sometimes they yelled at her. Babies cried at night. "I didn't like staying there," Olivia says. "It made me sad." Children on the school bus also taunted the 5-year-old as the driver dropped her off at the shelter. "The school bus kids called her stinky and smelly for three days," Engstrom says. "That's a lot of torture for a 5-year-old." Every day, every night at the shelter, Olivia asked her mother: "When are we going to move into our own home?" Since they've moved into their apartment in early October, Olivia spends a lot of time in her new bedroom. The walls are painted blue. A Barbie comforter covers her bed. When visitors come to her home, she grabs them by the hand and asks: "You want to see my room? This is all my room," she says. "All mine." Rural isolation In northern and central Maine, rural families have additional disadvantages. Homeless shelters and housing authorities may be hours away. Sometimes rural families are unaware of programs that can help them or lack transportation to the nearest city. "A lot of families in rural Maine are so isolated they don't know who they can reach out to," says Sandy Thurston, who oversees case management and rural outreach at the Bangor Area Homeless shelter. "They certainly don't want to come to Bangor to find somebody." Unfit homes or trailers are also more likely to be found in rural areas because there are either part-time or no code enforcement officers to inspect the buildings. "Rural areas have many more housing-quality problems," says Leslie Strauss, spokeswoman for the National Housing Assistance Council. "Substandard housing, places that don't have plumbing or adequate heating or structures that are falling down are a lot more common in rural places. It's a matter of visibility." Eligibility for Section 8 vouchers varies by county. On average the most a family of four can earn is $23,850, according to the Maine State Housing Authority. As families migrate from northern to southern counties to find work, they put more pressure on the rental market. In Portland, where the Section 8 waiting list is 1,800 names long, it's nearly impossible to get a voucher to help pay the rent. "If you're not a priority and homeless, then your wait could easily be three to four years," says Peter Howe, Portland Housing Authority director. Once they get a voucher, families must find an apartment that falls within the federal fair market rent guidelines and a landlord willing to take a Section 8 voucher. In Portland a two-bedroom apartment with utilities costs roughly $859. The family must pay 30 percent of overall income toward the apartment and the housing authority covers the rest. Even if families are able to get a voucher, finding apartments in cities like South Portland and Portland is daunting. "We tell people it's a two- to three-year wait before we can help them," says John Gallagher, Westbrook Housing Authority director. "You talk about people's basic needs, having shelter and food. We're just not doing enough to see that those basic needs are met." Often families from northern Maine counties come to Westbrook seeking housing after they've found work locally. But their hourly wages of $8 and $9 aren't enough to pay the rent. "We see these families migrating here from other Maine counties, who have found a job but can't afford a place to live," Gallagher says. "It's frustrating when they call us for help. They learn they've got 1,000 people on the waiting list ahead of them." In York County, the city of Sanford hasn't handed out vouchers since December 2001, which Sanford Housing Authority director Bill Keefer says is unprecedented. The demand on the system comes from both sides of the Maine border, Keefer says. "We're seeing people moving here from northern Maine, Portland and Massachusetts," he says. Bethany Manuel, a housing coordinator at York County's Community Counseling Services, deals daily with the parents and children who are homeless. "I know a family whose home burned down last May," she says. "They were in a tent, a motel and we still couldn't get them a housing voucher. We tried everything but there was nothing to be found." Staff researcher Julia McCue contributed to this article.
Staff Writer Barbara Walsh can be contacted at 791-6355 or at: bwalsh@pressherald.com
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