Story by Rachel Abbey
Photos by David Foster and Jake Kellogg

Because of the sensitive nature of homelessness, some of the residents at the shelters in this article are mentioned by their first names only. In many cases, they do not want people in their pasts to know they are now homeless.

In the kitchen, Bettie is peeling potatoes for homemade french fries, passing them to Mari Sue to rinse and slice. Todd is in charge of dinner tonight — they’re having hot dogs and pasta stroganoff with the fries. “I came to help him because he looked so lonely in the dark kitchen,” Mari Sue says, laughing. Kids are running around, chatting to the adults and to each other, eating popsicles and drawing pictures with neon-colored markers.

Tonight is Todd’s turn to make dinner. Everyone signed up for a chore, such as cooking a meal or cleaning the bathroom, at this week’s residence meeting.

At a homeless shelter, everyone must pitch in.

“We see more of the working poor lately, where they’re working but can’t afford to find housing,” says Heather Daniel, program manager at the Miller Community House in Kent. The Miller House is the only family shelter for the homeless in Portage County. According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 44 percent of people who are homeless are employed. The Washington, D.C.,-based center, composed of lawyers, activists, researchers, homeless and formerly homeless people, works to eliminate homelessness through legal means.

Some of the clients at the shelter can afford cars and cell phones with customized ring tones, but housing is another story. An individual would need to work full time, earning about $9.60 an hour, to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment and living expenses in Portage County, Daniel says. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the minimum wage in Ohio is $4.25 an hour. “In Kent, it’s so hard to find anything that’s not minimum wage,” says Craig, a client at the Miller House.

According to the 2000 Census, 3.9 percent of people in Kent were unemployed. About 18 percent of families, the largest percentage, had an annual income of less than $10,000, and 15.4 percent were below the poverty level. More than 25 percent of individuals, ages 18 to 65, live below the poverty level.

On any given night, about 400 people in Portage County are homeless, Daniel says. According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2.3 to 3.5 million people in the United States experience homelessness each year, about 0.9 percent to 1.3 percent of the population. A lot of people who are homeless in Portage County will “couch surf” at friends’ places or sleep in their cars, she says. If they are outside, they’re probably sleeping in building entryways or at a campsite. This makes it hard to calculate how many people are homeless in Portage County, says Carole Beatty, director of shelter services at Family and Community Services Inc.

The Miller House had 1,201 requests for shelter last year, Beatty says. This number represents any family or individual who asked for shelter, but not all requests could be met. Each family or individual is only counted once, no matter how many times they called during the year. The shelter was only able to house 114 adults and 51 children out of these requests.

“You don’t see them sleeping on the sidewalks like you do in the big city,” Craig says. “It’s different in Portage County.” He says he believes he would have had to go to Akron if he wasn’t at the Miller House because, “I would have lost my job.”

Craig currently works at a local telemarketing service while he studies to finish his advanced EMT license. He wants to find another job but is having trouble without his car. “I’m a single male in Portage County, and there’s no help,” he says. “Unless you have nine kids and have been on welfare, you can’t get help. I know I’m able-bodied but still.”

His car has been in the shop, leaving him at the mercy of the bus system. He’s been thinking about writing to churches and asking for small donations to raise the $400 he needs to fix it, with the hopes of paying them back in money or in volunteer work. “It sounds like such a scam when I talk about it,” Craig says. “I’m just grasping at straws to get back on my feet. I can’t get a job until I get my car back, and I’m not going to my family. I can’t.”

Even though Craig says he talks to his family regularly, especially his two young daughters, most of them don’t know he’s lived in two shelters and three apartments in the past two years. He has only told his aunt, who was supportive, but he feels as if he is letting his family down by living in a shelter.

Craig, who is divorced, says he didn’t want to take everything away from his kids, so he left the house he and his then wife built a few years earlier in Trumbull County and moved to the Kent area.

“I built a house,” he says. “Now I live in a shelter.”

Up to 22 people can stay at the Miller House, Daniel says. Five women can stay in one room and five men in another. Families can stay in one of two additional rooms, each with four single beds and one double. Twenty-one people are staying at the house now, but the rooms are full because individuals can’t stay with the families.

The shelter provides bus vouchers, cleaning products and linens. It also provides hygiene items and food, depending on donations. Milk and eggs are always available, Daniel says, but meat has to be rationed.

Before they can enter, residents must go through a background check — sex, arson or drug-related crimes could keep individuals out to ensure families’ safety, Daniel says. Once there, residents are expected to work toward goals, such as getting housing and employment, as well as do their weekly chores.

Daniel says the group meals and shared living space at the Miller House foster community. Bettie has heart trouble and can’t eat a lot of cholesterol, so she buys fruits, such as strawberries, and gets enough to share with the children at the house. “I bought my own container of coffee, but it’s almost gone,” Bettie says. “I don’t mind sharing with anybody.” But Bettie says the close living quarters can sometimes cause conflict, such as figuring out what time people can start to make noise in the rooms. Different sleeping schedules can lead to disagreements.

Residents give up a certain amount of freedom when they enter the shelter, Daniel says. They must be in the house by 10:30 p.m. and in their rooms from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.

In the kitchen, Todd and Mari Sue realize they lived in the same mobile home park in Ravenna before coming to the Miller House. Todd moved into a motel about a year ago, when he and his wife divorced. He didn’t want to take the mobile home from her. He landscapes, but it wasn’t enough to keep up the motel payments, so he came to the shelter.

After Craig left his home to his ex-wife and children, he lived in an apartment with friends. The Desert Storm Navy veteran then went to the Freedom House, Kent’s homeless shelter for veterans.

About 25 percent of all homeless people in the United States are veterans, says Matthew Slater, program manager at the Freedom House, and there are five to eight homeless veterans on any night in Portage County. The Freedom House, which opened this year, can serve up to nine male veterans at a time, and it served 38 this past year. The house received about 62 calls but was unable to serve them all.

Glen Gammon, 57, is one of those who was served at the Freedom House last year. A veteran of the ’60s, Gammon says he sees himself as a Robin Hood character — he might have stolen, rather than worked, his way through life, but he never hurt anyone or took from someone undeserving. He says he always gave his money away: to his two diabetic sisters who didn’t take good care of themselves; to his 13 children; to his five wives, who he says used drugs. He says he can’t stand to hear a woman cry.

“Maybe she’s telling the truth this time,” he recalls, remembering the women in his life. “Maybe she’s going to go to the store and get those groceries.”

Gammon ended up in the Freedom House for six months. After he gave most of his money to his sisters to buy a new trailer, he left Tennessee to live with his daughter in the area. She was about to move and told him she didn’t have room for him at her new place. He read about the Freedom House in the newspaper and called with the 75 cents in his pocket. After his stay, Gammon found an apartment in Kent, and pays rent with his pension check. The coffee table in the center of the living/dining room is covered with cigarettes smoked down to the butts and prescriptions bottles for the hip pain that he says keeps him from finding work.

Many of the veterans are from the Vietnam era, Slater says. From his experience and research, soldiers returning from that conflict had a lot of trouble rejoining society. They did not get a lot of support and didn’t learn how to adapt soldier skills to civilian life.

Some homeless people are not physically able to work, Daniel says. People could have had good jobs and nice homes, gotten injured on their job and lost their savings while they waited for their disability check to come in — a wait of about two years. Even when the money starts coming in, it might not be enough. Disability is $585 a month right now, and typical rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $500, which doesn’t leave much for food or extras.

Bettie at the Miller House has congestive heart failure, which has caused three heart attacks. She has abnormal bone growth in her feet and has lost all of her bottom teeth. She also suffered a nervous breakdown when she broke a bone in her spine working at a home for the elderly. “Sometimes I feel like my body’s breaking down,” she says. “I might be sick, but I sure ain’t dead.”

She came to Ohio in the middle of August after leaving Tennessee when one of her daughters committed suicide. She says she realized she couldn’t handle the stress of that and of supporting her boyfriend, who she says was only using her for her money. She left four sons, one daughter and her mother in the south and came to Ohio to live with a family friend and her husband, a living arrangement that soon grew dangerous with marital disputes and drug abuse. That’s when Bettie came to the Miller House.

“I just couldn’t take the stress down there,” she says. “This is where I want to stay. I don’t want to go back. I don’t.”

Bettie is trying to move into a house with other people who have disabilities. By the time this article runs, all of these residents will probably have gone from the Miller House to the next stage in their lives.

Clients can only stay at the Miller House for 30 days, unless there are special circumstances, Daniel says. As long as they’ve been working on their goals, but their house or apartment needs to pass inspection or open up from a waiting list, the house will let them stay a little longer. If unproductive, they’re asked to leave. “You have to be doing something,” Daniel says. “You can’t just sit around and watch TV all day.”

All the clients have set goals to work toward outside the house, such as finding a job, learning how to budget money or attending family counseling. Individuals meet with a resident advocate at least once a week to review their goals and to plan for the upcoming week.

The Freedom House follows a similar plan with goals and chores, but residents can stay for 90 days, Slater says. The average stay is about 42 days.

“We don’t want people to come back over and over and over again,” Daniel says. “We’re trying to eliminate homelessness here.”

Craig has found an apartment, and Todd has found a house. Todd says he hopes to move in soon, and his 15-year-old daughter, who has been living with family, will move with him. That’s one reason he decided to come to the Miller House. “I knew they could help me get a house faster than I could get one on my own,” he says.

Mari Sue has been homeless before, when her son was small enough to be in a stroller. She had just gotten out of her first marriage, and she lived on the streets for about a year with her young son. He is now staying with friends. “He’s almost homeless himself,” she says. “No job. No car.”

She’s been at the Miller House for about a week, homeless for a second time after a second divorce. In between periods of homelessness, Mari Sue raised her son and attended college, receiving a bachelor’s degree in social sciences from Hiram College. She’s worked part time and gone to school but hasn’t had a steady job since quitting to be a stay-at-home mom.

“Every time I go to get a job, they look at me like I’m nuts,” she says, because she has been out of the work force for so long. Mari Sue knows it’s hard to find work, which is why she went to college. She wants to get her master’s and study writing.

“My next chapter is coming,” she says.

Last year the Freedom House was able to get 25 of its 38 veterans housing, Slater says. Seventy of the 112 people leaving the Miller House found housing. People who don’t find housing may go live with family members or friends, Daniel says. No one really knows where they go.

Back in the kitchen, Todd and Mari Sue are still talking about their experiences as they finish dinner. The worst part of being homeless, Todd says, is “not knowing from one day to the next what’s going on.”

“Yeah, that’s my thing, too,” Mari Sue says, looking up from the dinner’s unfinished potatoes. “Not knowing where I am, feeling misplaced, like, what am I doing here?”

Rachel Abbey is a junior newspaper journalism major. This is her second story for The Burr.

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