Out of Balance
Barbara Harvey lives in her car, driving to a parking lot each evening to spend the night and then leaving shortly after the sun rises.
A 66-year-old mother of three grown children, she has been homeless since March, not long after she lost her job and then the three-bedroom condominium that she rented.
“I expected to live there for the rest of my days,” Harvey says, recalling afternoons spent tending her garden. “I thought that was where I would be happy to live for the rest of my life.”
A notary, Harvey was a contract employee for several companies, but when the work dried up, she could no longer pay her rent. “I’ve never earned enough to save a lot of money,” she says.
She was forced to move into the back of her Honda CR-V with her two golden retrievers. Four months later, Harvey still hasn’t been able to find a place to live in Santa Barbara, Calif., a coastal community that has been her home for 26 years. How hard has the search been? “There isn’t any affordable housing,” she says. “That’s the answer right there.”
On some nights, she will stay with a friend, but most of the time she sleeps in the back of her car. Many cities ban camping in vehicles, but several churches, nonprofit organizations, and the local government in Santa Barbara have made parking lots available at night for people living in their vehicles.
The program, which began a few years ago with a dozen people staying in three lots, has grown to serve 55 people in 12 lots, with a waiting list, says Gary Linker, executive director of the nonprofit New Beginnings Counseling Center. Although counseling and education is the group’s focus, it helped place 40 people in housing last year. The parking program is one of the group’s outreach efforts.
The participants drive to one of the parking lots around 7 p.m. and leave at 7 a.m. Many have physical or psychological disabilities, and about half hold jobs, debunking a stereotype that the homeless choose not to work. “Many of them do work but just can’t afford a place,” Linker says.
With the economy tanking and foreclosures rising, expect more Barbara Harveys across the country. That prospect is alarming considering the already wide gap between the number of needy families and the supply of low-cost housing.
The impact of the affordable housing shortage is vast because affordable housing is like an iceberg. Below the surface, its expansive reach touches upon health, education, and the other foundations of a community.
If the demand continues to dwarf supply, more people will live in overcrowded and poor housing conditions, warns Nicolas Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) at Harvard University. “That will have a contagion effect on education and public health,” he says. “And we’ll see housing being built further and further out, with sprawl being a consequence.”
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