Staff at First Place Family Center, a day shelter for
families with children located on Amazon Parkway, say
their monthly numbers are climbing each month. They
served 241 families in September, compared to 203
families in September of last year.
“We’ve had more people to serve every month than
the month before,” First Place Family Center’s director
William Wise says. “They just go up and up and up,”
The number one reason for homelessness in Eugene and
Lane County is its terrible housing market, Wise says.
“Our housing market is awful for rentals,” he says.
With about 80 percent of the UO undergraduate population
off-campus, according to U.S. News and World Report’s
educational rankings, families find themselves competing
for housing against students. Landlords, Wise says, are far
more willing to rent to a single person with no children or
criminal history than a five-person family, some of whom
may have a felony or two on their record.
“That drives the market up and makes it harder to get
in,” he says.
Indra’s mother, Robin Calhoon, signed up for the Lane
County housing list as soon as the family arrived last
June. She called the county office each week to check her
ranking on the housing list.
On Nov. 5, after showing up 5th on the list after five
months of waiting, the office informed Calhoon they had
changed their housing policy and her family was no longer
eligible because they hadn’t been homeless for 12 or more
months.
“I’m upset, because I did everything they say to do,”
Calhoon says.
Partially in response to the country’s housing crisis,
Lane County Human Services in early November erased
the eligibility of 319 out of 394 homeless people on the
county’s central housing waitlist. By changing the housing
criteria to apply only to the chronically homeless, Human
Services lifted some of the most urgent cases to the top of
the list, but left many hundreds of people out of options.
First Place Family Center had 47 families in its caseload
dropped off the list.
SINGLE MOTHERS
AND OREGON’S DERELICT
W E L FA R E S Y S T E M
Single mom Karol Green arrived two weeks ago at
First Place’s day shelter with her two boys, 6 and 8, from
Lakeview, Oregon. From August until the end of October,
the three were sleeping in Green’s truck around Eugene,
but transitioned to the shelter’s night program at the end
of October.
Six-year-old Dylan says he knows they are at a shelter.
Other children clamor around the lunch tables during the
interview. Siblings push their younger brother or sisters
around in overloaded strollers.
It’s noisy in here. Within the melée of children and
parents, almost everyone has caught the same cold from
being in close contact, sharing the communal kitchen,
three computers and the playroom.
“It’s definitely a shelter, because if you are homeless,
you go there,” Dylan says, shyly pushing his head into
his mother’s arms. “I don’t have a house and I can’t get
a puppy,” he says before scampering off to play with his
older brother. Moments later, he returns crying, because
Jack “won’t play with me.”
Green starts crying, too.
“We had to sell his puppy earlier this summer. It was
just too hot in the truck,” she says, scrolling through photos
of the little white dog on her cell phone. Green says all
three of them are experiencing behavioral reactions to the
stress and unpredictability of their situation; Dylan now
wets his bed and, a few nights prior, he started refusing to
go into the shelter bathroom without her.
Green became homeless several months ago after
trying to move to Eugene from Lakeview for a new job.
In Lakeview, the family was on Section 8 housing (a type
of subsidized government housing). Green transferred her
housing status to Eugene and moved here with the kids in
July, only intending to stay in the truck a few weeks. But
the boss at her new job kept holding her paychecks as she
worked and eventually stopped paying her altogether. He
continued to maintain, though, that he was paying her.
Without enough money to make the deposit on the new
Section 8 apartment in Eugene, and without knowing there
are programs in town that help pay for that, Green ran out
of the 90-day limit to pay the deposit.
She’s now at the mercy of the housing crisis that
the First Place staff is witnessing, as each month more
families pour into the day shelter. Green called the Oregon
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) office
to apply for welfare funds, but she says the same boss told
the caseworker that he was still paying her. That single
phone call has shut Green out of any TANF money.
The statistics connecting homeless parent/child
families, child support and TANF in Lane County are
spotty at best. EW obtained state records for homeless
students attending school in Lane County (2,148), the
number of single-parent families owed back payments on
child support in Lane County (10,502 out of 14,968 cases
in the past year) and the number of single-parent families
on TANF in Lane County for the past year (2,034, with
1,742 of those in Eugene/Springfield).
After that, though, the figures get murky. The Oregon
Department of Justice’s Child Support Program reports that
of the 14,968 child support cases in Lane County, 2,122
of those families — typically single mothers — received
TANF in the past fiscal year.
However, the TANF office, within the Department of
Human Services, told EW that just 360 families on TANF
in Lane County are receiving child support for the past
fiscal year. DHS staff says the two offices, DHS and DOJ,
may count child support payments differently, but couldn’t
specifically explain the major discrepancy in the figures.
The statistics on the overlap between TANF and
homelessness are equally unclear. Of the 2,034 single-
families on TANF in Lane County, the DHS office says 52
families self-reported themselves as homeless.
“One caveat is that this is based on self-reporting and
what the case manager actually puts in the system,” says
Xochitl Esparza, state program manager for TANF with
DHS. “If someone is living with relatives and they are
temporarily there and they haven’t indicated to us they are
homeless, it probably won’t be captured that way. It could
be under-reported, but we can’t tell for sure.”
Green says she doesn’t receive child support from the
father of her two boys. She says she fills out the paperwork
from the state, but “more paperwork” always comes back.
“I never get new paperwork on the father. It’s all the same
basic paperwork,” she says.
Dylan’s father left while Green was pregnant,
abandoning her and her two-year-old son.
Aside from the difficulty obtaining TANF funds in the
first place, the Oregon state Legislature hasn’t changed its
income rate for eligibility for TANF since 1991, meaning
families each year essentially have to earn less and less
money to qualify for TANF at all. The income limit is $616
per month for a single parent with two children in Oregon,
so any parent earning even a few dollars more can’t get
TANF.
A family on that salary today is earning just 37 percent
of the U.S. federal poverty level; in 1991, they would have
been earning 66 percent of that level, according to a report
by the Oregon Center for Public Policy (OCPP).
The outdated, 24-year-old income limit has forced more
and more families off TANF in Oregon. Lane County had
K A R O L G R E E N P L AY S W I T H
H E R C H I L D R E N AT F I R S T
P L A C E FA M I LY C E N T E R
eugeneweekly.com • December 3, 2015
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