Charities, Shelters See Wave of Homeless Families

By Alexi Mostrous
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 15, 2009

PONTIAC, Mich. -- The lowest point in Lawanda Madden's life came in February, when she woke up on the floor of her friend's run-down house in this city battered by recession. She was shivering with cold. She remembers turning to her 8-year-old son, Jovon, and thinking: "How did this happen to us? How did we become homeless?"

Only 15 months before, Madden, 39, had a $35,000-a-year job, a two-bedroom apartment and a car. She was far from rich, but she could treat Jovon to the movies. She occasionally visited her sister in Chicago and bowled in a local league. She dreamed of going to law school. Then she was laid off and lost everything.

"I've had a job since I was 19," she recalled. "I never imagined I would be without a home. You think it's going to get better -- that it's just temporary -- and then six months goes by, and you wonder, 'Wait a minute -- this might be it.' "

With neat hair and clean clothes, a college education and stable job history, Madden represents the new face of American homelessness.

Across the country, community housing networks, charities and emergency shelters are seeing a flood of people like her -- mothers driven out of their homes by the economic collapse. Even as the economy shows signs of improving, the number of homeless families keeps going up. In more and more cases, these people have never been homeless before.

More than half a million family members used an emergency shelter or transitional housing between Oct. 1, 2007, and Oct. 1, 2008, the latest figures available from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The number of homeless families rose 9 percent, and in rural and suburban areas by 56 percent. Women make up 81 percent of adults in homeless families, and tend to be younger than 30 with children younger than 5.

In some areas of the country, family homelessness has almost tripled since 2007, new figures obtained by The Washington Post show. Formerly prosperous areas such as Bergen County, N.J., and Hillsboro, Ore., have been particularly affected, with increases of 161 percent and 194 percent, respectively. Oakland County, where Madden lives, has experienced a 111 percent jump in the number of families seeking shelter or emergency housing since 2007.

"And it's going to get worse," said Marc Craig, president of the Community Housing Network in Oakland County. "Thousands of people here will lose their unemployment benefit in the next few months. Many of them will become homeless."

The Obama administration announced last month a $1.5 billion package focused on tackling first-time and family homelessness. The funding, which lasts for three years, represents a change from President George W. Bush's approach, which limited most HUD funding to the chronically homeless with substance-abuse or mental-health problems.

"There's been a funding gap for a long time," Craig said. "It's good there's been a change in approach, but the new money is just a Band-Aid. It's got to continue."

The shift is also evidenced in the District, where the number of homeless families is listed as 703, a 20 percent increase over last year. But these figures -- like the HUD statistics -- heavily underestimate the number of homeless families, experts say, as they do not count those who cram themselves and their children into friends' houses, "couch surf," or sleep four to a bed in cheap motel rooms built for single occupancy.

"Families, especially, are likely to explore every option before they stay in a shelter," said Jill Shoemaker, who collects homelessness data for the Community Housing Network in Oakland County. "We just have no way of counting them at the moment."

Madden stays day-to-day at the half-finished home of friend Frankie Johnson in a dilapidated suburb of Pontiac. Layers of drywall are stacked on the floor next to giant bales of insulation. There are holes in the wall, and the one bathroom that works leaks. More pressingly, the three-bedroom house is also occupied by Johnson and seven children.

"It's tight," Madden said stoically, sitting on the bare bed she shares with her son. "But at least it's not winter anymore. When we moved in, in February, we didn't have a bed. For a week, there was no heating. The gas people hadn't turned up. Even with jackets, coats and two pairs of socks on, the cold was indescribable."

In a city with unemployment at almost 20 percent, it is perhaps unsurprising that Madden is still without work, 20 months after being laid off from a laboratory testing firm where she worked as a biller. From earning a middle-class wage, she now survives on $118 a week in child support.

"Whenever I see a job come up I apply, but I don't get replies," she said. "I go to the job center three or four times a week." Madden also enrolled in a No Worker Left Behind program, under which she hopes to complete her bachelor's degree in criminal justice. "But a degree is no good if you can't get a job," she said.

And with no job, "there's no mortgage, no savings -- definitely no house."

In Royal Oak, Mich., Kevin Roach is a front-line witness to this paradigm shift. "We've seen a dramatic increase in women and children seeking help," said Roach, executive director of South Oakland Shelter, which provides 30 beds to homeless people in Oakland County. In October, he turned away 770 people, more than half of them from families. "We turned down 320 children. That's a number that's burned in my head."

Even a year ago, Roach said, he would have described a "prototypical" homeless person as middle-aged, male, with mental-health or drug issues. "But in the last months, we've had a teacher and a banker in our program," he said. "A third of our clients once had a steady income." Two months ago, he added, the number of clients with bachelor's degrees overtook those with mental-health problems.

Roach's clients are sheltered by a rotating list of churches and community groups that take them in for a week each. Last week it was the turn of First Baptist Church of Detroit. Over a plate of lasagna cooked by church volunteers, a mother of two, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told a familiar story. "I moved into my mother's after I was evicted," she said. "But we argued. I think she expected Molly the Maid service. Sometimes you want someone else to load the dishwasher, you know?"

That night, the church's volunteers give the sheltered women makeovers, using make-up scrounged from local stores. "It's amazing how much our guests have changed," said Myrtice Batty, a college professor who has been involved in the church's shelter program for 15 years. "When I first started, there were many more men. Now families are about 50 percent."

The new wave of HUD funding will benefit groups such as South Oakland Shelter, which has just secured a $300,000 grant to provide rental and utility assistance to struggling families. Roach hopes that a concerted outreach effort will reach women like Veronica, 47, a former Ford worker who lives with her 11-year-old son in a tiny motel room near Royal Oak. She declined to give her full name in an interview.

"I remember in June 2008, Ford called a meeting for me and 20 other employees," she explained. "They got us all up and said, 'This is your last day.' I was like 'Whoa.' I knew straight away I couldn't cover $650 a month. We left quietly as we didn't want to be evicted -- you're already embarrassed enough."

After moving between friends and family five times in less than a year, and applying unsuccessfully for 65 jobs, Veronica moved into a $110-a-week motel; her son sleeps on an air mattress at the foot of her bed. "There are so many moments where I don't feel like getting up and putting on clothes, but you do, for him," she said, nodding at John, who wants to be a chemist when he grows up. "And he supports me, too. Sometimes he tells me, 'Don't doubt, believe.' We support each other."

There are thousands of children like John in Oakland County. "This year, the number of students we served was up by a third," said Susan Benson, director of the Oakland Schools Homeless Student Education Program, which advocates for homeless children. Benson estimates the number of homeless students in the county at 4,000 to 10,000. "The average age of a homeless person in Oakland County is just under 9," she said. "Most are doubled up, living with friends, hours away from their schools."

Back on North Johnson Road in Pontiac, Madden finds it difficult to adjust. She used the last of her unemployment benefit to buy a $2,000 car in January -- allowing her to take Jovon to baseball practice and herself to the job center. The car uses up $60 a week in gas, but still providing activities for her son is a priority.

"Entertainment doesn't happen too often," she said. "In 2007, I couldn't buy Jovon Christmas presents. Sometimes I take him to his grandma's because I find it hard to feed him. I want to keep him here, but it's more stable there. Sometimes he screams, 'Don't leave!' "

Iraqi Immigrants Struggle to Adjust to Life in the U.S.

By KIRK SEMPLE

Not long after the Iraq war began in 2003, Uday Hattem al-Ghanimi was accosted by several men outside the American military base where he managed a convenience store. They accused him of abetting the Americans, and one fired a pistol at his head.

Now, after 24 operations, Mr. Ghanimi has a reconstructed face as well as political asylum in the United States. On July 4, his wife and three youngest children joined him in New York after a three-year separation.

But the euphoria of their reunion quickly dissipated as the family began to reckon with the colder realities of their new life. Mr. Ghanimi, 50, who has not been able to work because of lingering pain, is supporting his family on a monthly disability check of $761, food stamps and handouts from friends. They are crammed into one room they rent in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a city whose small Iraqi population is scattered. And Mr. Ghanimi’s wife and children do not speak English, deepening their sense of isolation.

“They say, ‘Let’s go back,’ ” Mr. Ghanimi said glumly. “It’s not what they were thinking. I told them, ‘Just be patient.’ ”

For years after the American invasion of Iraq, thousands of Iraqis clamored for admission to the United States and found the door all but closed — until the government reacted to widespread criticism in 2007 by making it easier for more to enter with special visas or as refugees.

But now that Iraqis are arriving in larger numbers, many are discovering that life in the United States is much harder than they expected.

A report released in June by the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement organization in New York, said that many Iraqi immigrants have been unable to find jobs, are exhausting government and other benefits and are spiraling toward poverty and homelessness.

Advocates for immigrants in New York and elsewhere say that Iraqis have had more difficulty getting settled than most migrant populations. Many are well educated and arrive with unrealistically high expectations of the life that awaits them. Though most have received assistance from government or private agencies, large numbers have immigrated in the depths of the recession.

Many also need help dealing with the physical and emotional wounds of war.

“I’ve never seen a population where the trauma is so universal,” said Robert Carey, vice president for resettlement and migration policy at the International Rescue Committee.

More than 30,000 Iraqis have been resettled in the United States since the 2003 invasion as refugees, or with special visas for those who worked closely with the American government. At least 1,500 more have been granted asylum, federal officials say.

A vast majority have arrived in the past two years, settling thinly across the country, with larger concentrations in San Diego, Phoenix, Houston and Dearborn, Mich. More than 1,100 have been resettled in the New York region, with at least 100 in New York City.

In Iraq, many worked as doctors, teachers, scientists and interpreters — often for Americans, giving some the hope that they would be rewarded with a comfortable life here. But like accomplished immigrants from other countries, most have found that overseas credentials do not always apply in the American market, compelling them to compete for lower-skill jobs.

Nour al-Khal, 35, who arrived in New York as a refugee in 2007, has been mentoring several Iraqi families. Among the hardest adjustments, she said, is accepting the likelihood that they will not make a lateral professional move.

“We fight over that,” said Ms. Khal, who was shot in Basra, in southern Iraq, in 2005 while working as an interpreter for Steven Vincent, an American journalist who was killed in the attack. Ms. Khal was a senior manager for an American development contractor; in New York, the best job she could initially find was as a receptionist at a real estate firm.

“I just accepted it,” said Ms. Khal, who now works as a translator. “It was so hard.”

The New York region offers notable opportunities for newcomers. Public transportation is good, and social service agencies have a wealth of experience with recent immigrants. But living costs are high, and the Iraqi population — unlike other immigrant groups that have colonized neighborhoods and formed associations — is atomized, fostering an alienation that is aggravated by the city’s relentless pace.

“My life is miserable,” said Dunya al-Juboori, 29, a former hair salon owner in Baghdad who came as a refugee in 2007 and lives in Medford, N.J. She has been working for minimum wage at a salon in the mornings and attending cosmetology school the rest of the day, leaving no time or money to develop a social life. She has not seen her family since 2006, when she left Iraq to seek treatment in Jordan for advanced lymphoma.

“I cry every day,” she said, adding quickly, “Not in the morning, because I’m too busy.”

Ehab, 34, who worked for a development contractor in Baghdad but fled after receiving threats, said recent immigrants from Iraq are in need of profound guidance. (He spoke on the condition that his surname not be published, saying he feared that insurgents in Iraq would attack his family.)

“An Iraqi who is transitioning from a country in war needs a lot of care,” said Ehab, who arrived in New York as a refugee in 2007 and works as a project coordinator for Proskauer Rose, a Manhattan law firm that has helped hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers.

Mr. Ghanimi, the store manager who was shot, is deeply grateful for the free medical care, legal assistance and housing he received while his face was repaired and his family’s asylum applications were processed.

But the tasks still at hand are overwhelming, he said — like finding a new apartment, getting his wife treatment for a variety of physical and emotional ailments and enrolling his children, 21, 17 and 11, in classes.

His most important job, he said, is to convince them all that they are better off here than in Baghdad — at the very least, because their lives are not at risk.

“I told them everything here is beautiful,” he said. “Electricity 24 hours, not like in Iraq. The weather is very good, not like in Iraq. There are many things you can’t get in Iraq. And they come and say, ‘Yeah, but you can’t get it.’ ”

A few days later, he took the family to Times Square at sunset, to experience the full effect of the lights. They were wide-eyed, dazzled by the swirl of activity.

“Maybe it will take time to put everything in place,” Mr. Ghanimi said. “But I feel like everything will be good.”