Reuters — Families are flooding homeless shelters across the United States in numbers not seen for years, camping out in motels or staying with friends and relatives, homeless advocates say. “There are lots of families hemorrhaging into homelessness and we need to figure out how to put a tourniquet on the hemorrhaging,” Philip Mangano, the homelessness czar appointed by President George W. Bush in 2002, told Reuters. San Francisco’s four shelters are “beyond full,” according to Paul Boden of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, whose organization has identified 450 families with 800 children living in single-room hotels in the city. In Virginia’s Fairfax County, one of the richest counties in the United States, there are about 100 families on a waiting list to enter shelters, local officials say.
Maria Stephens, 38, a mother of three young boys, lived in one of the Fairfax shelters for seven months after two landlords were foreclosed on and she lost her job as a mortgage underwriter earning $80,000 a year. “It was a hell of an experience for me. I went from having my own bathroom to having to share a bathroom with five families,” said Stephens, who now works in a restaurant making $9 an hour and was helped by a local group, Reston Interfaith, to move into temporary accommodation in July.
The public perception is that newly homeless families borrowed money they were unable to repay or were the victims of greedy banks that sold them mortgages they could not afford. But homeless advocates say most are actually renters whose landlords were foreclosed on, or who lost their jobs, and were then unable to find the first and last month’s rent and security deposit to secure new accommodation. Local and state homeless groups have seen a 61 percent rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007. More
Sphere: Related ContentTags: foreclosures, homeless shelters, landlords, Philip Mangano, Renters, US, Western Regional Advocacy Project
