The moving story of one family who never expected to find themselves without a home, and how Hamilton Family Emergency Center and First Avenues helped them move out of homelessness. Reposted from DailyFinance.com, please read this story about an aspiring web-developer who became homeless.
Earlier this year, the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimated that 1.5 million people would be made homeless over the next two years as a result of the recession. In this series of profiles, DailyFinance speaks with some of the people who have fallen victim to layoffs, foreclosure, unforgiving creditors and plain old bad financial luck. Here are their stories.
The descent into homelessness can occur with terrifying speed. For a 33-year-old aspiring Web developer, it happened after an emergency loan from a relative suddenly fell through, driving his family out of a motel and onto the streets of San Francisco in September.
His wife and two kids were lucky to get a bed at a shelter, but there was no room for him. So he ended up spending four nights in Golden Gate Park.
“I couldn’t believe it, I wasn’t technically well off, but I could keep a job, and I was thinking, ‘How the hell did I get here?’”
Just one year ago, everything seemed possible. he was living with his family and was in the middle of an exciting career change. After a decade of working as a chef, he was looking forward to finding a job as a Web developer. To make ends meet while he was finishing up a bachelor of science degree in software engineering at a state university, he was working for a company that did catering for private jets.
In February, the catering company he worked for dramatically cut his hours. People just weren’t flying in private jets much anymore. He was no longer able to pay the bills and started collecting unemployment, which he viewed as a stopgap measure until he could graduate in June and get a job working for a technology firm.
By the time graduation came, however, he was confronted with a sobering reality: “I was looking for tech jobs all over the place, but no one would hire a guy fresh out of college,” he says. “I was even looking for restaurant jobs, but restaurants had all cut back as no one was going out to eat.”
The family decided to make a bold, if risky, move. In the beginning of September, they scraped together what little money they had left and relocated to the San Francisco Bay area, the nation’s tech mecca, where they were certain he would find a job. For weeks, the family stayed in cheap hotel rooms while looking for work, cold-calling recruiters and sending out resumes.
Toward the end of September, the unemployment money that was supposed to last them through the entire month ran out. Their only option was to try to get beds in one of San Francisco’s shelters, already maxed-out with all of the other newly homeless looking for places to sleep.
The family ended up at Hamilton Family Center in San Francisco. The city has the highest per capita rate of homelessness — nearly 1 for every 100 residents — of any major U.S. city. Even more disturbing is that homelessness is increasingly a family affair here. As many as 40% of homeless people in San Francisco are part of a homeless family.
“It’s organizations like ours that are the last safety nets for this community,” says Hamilton Family Center’s Executive Director Beth Stokes, adding that funding cuts are leaving this net increasingly frayed. “We’re all worried about what’s going to happen next year.”
But there was only enough space in the shelter for his wife and their children, ages 6 and 4. That’s when he headed to Golden Gate Park. “I found a little private bush and made sure nobody saw me.”
After four nights sleeping outside, another unemployment check came through. The money allowed the family to move back into a cheap motel in early November. A few weeks later, they finally caught a break. Thanks to money made available through the federal economic stimulus program, Hamilton Family Center was able to enroll the family in its First Avenues program, which helps families keep or find homes, depending on their situation. Since it started in 2006, First Avenues has prevented 375 families from getting evicted and helped another 500 homeless families get permanent housing.
Through the program, which will last 18 months, the family has received money for a deposit on an apartment in Oakland, as well as assistance paying rent.
“It’s a really nice unit,” he says. “The kids are less stressed out.”
Loading ...