US shelters swell - with families

At the end of the 1990s, the economic boom prompted serious talk about the possibility of ending homelessness in America. Last year, a national coalition produced a 10-year plan that even some skeptics admitted sounded viable.

Now, the economic downturn, exacerbated by the events of Sept. 11, has those same national leaders predicting a dramatic rise in homelessness reminiscent of the crisis at the end of the 1980s.

The signs are emerging throughout the country:

• A record number of people are crowding into shelters in New York. The fastest-rising group among them: families.

• In Georgia, almost 90 percent of shelters and service providers for the homeless are reporting an increase in requests for help with everything from a bed for the night to emergency assistance in paying utility bills and rent.

• In Chicago, all the city's shelter beds for families are full, forcing the city to regularly look for emergency alternatives, such as hotels.

Families of the working poor appear to be hit the hardest by the combination of high housing prices - a legacy of the '90s - and shrinking job opportunities. In New York, for instance, of the 80,000 people who lost their jobs in October, almost half were low-wage service workers.

"Our biggest worry is that the worst impact in terms of rising homelessness as a result of those job losses hasn't been seen yet and won't be seen for a couple of months," says Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless in New York. "Things are already worse than they were in the late '80s, because we're now dealing with more families with children."

At the same time that demand for shelter and homeless-prevention services are on the rise, providers report a funding squeeze as a result of tight state budgets and contributors who are tapped out by the terrorist tragedies.

Even groups that diversified their funding sources by requiring contributions from some shelter inhabitants are finding themselves in a bind. For instance, in Georgia, several shelter programs are designed to help people reenter the housing market by providing an array of services such as education, job training, and child care. Once someone in the family is working, he or she is required to pay 30 percent of their income to help pay for those services. But with tens of thousands of low-wage jobs now drying up, so has that source of income for the shelters.

"It's like a triple-edged sword. We're suffering from funding cuts, contributors' cuts, and now the program money is down," says Katheryn Preston, executive director of the Georgia Coalition to End Homelessness in Atlanta.

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