This is an article from the Charlotte Observer, in Charlotte and Mecklenburg, NC.
It explains far better the plight of the working poor than anything I could ever write.
http://www.charlotte.com/112/story/128740.html
Posted on Sun, May. 20, 2007
$2 MILLION TARGETED FOR WORK FORCE INITIATIVE
A WISH to make rent more affordable
Subsidies, support services would help the working poor
by: JENNY SONG
jsong@charlotteobserver.com
GAYLE SHOMER - gshomer@charlotteobserver.com
Joyce Turner holds a recent photograph of her 13-year-old son in her room at the YWCA where she lives. Turner’s wish is to get a place of her own and bring her son back to live with her.For many of Charlotte’s working poor, $8 an hour comes down to this: a narrow room in a transitional home, an envelope of money to a faraway child and thousands of dollars in long-unpaid debt.
Compared with the shelter floors where Joyce Turner has had to lie in the past, her YMCA room is “heaven,” she said. But it isn’t a permanent home.
Social service agency workers have long tried to help residents like Turner, who works full time for a cleaning service but can’t afford an apartment to live with her 13-year-old son. For $355 a month, Turner rents a small but clean space at the YWCA on Park Road, about 170 miles away from her child. The Y offers case management to help her get back onto her feet.
But there is a gap, agencies say, between this and permanent housing. A growing number don’t make it to the other side. Some agencies are trying to start a new program: Workforce Initiative for Supportive Housing, or WISH, a program established at the Foundation For The Carolinas to offer a rent subsidy and services to the working poor.
Generally, WISH would subsidize rent by about $250 a month — the difference between the $550 average rent for an older apartment and the $300 that a worker making $8 an hour can afford. Darren Ash, a leader of the effort, stresses that WISH is not like Section 8 housing, the federal housing subsidy for low-income families. Each client would receive personalized support for as long as they need it.
Because of Charlotte’s shortage of affordable housing — estimated at a deficit of more than 12,000 units — even those who move on from transitional homes are devoting a dangerously large portion of their paychecks to rent, workers say. WISH would offer some stability. Otherwise, any small financial emergency could leave them homeless again.
“We just serve the same people over and over and over again,” said Susan Burgess, mayor pro tem, who chairs the City Council’s housing and neighborhood development committee
For years, the agencies — Crisis Assistance Ministry, Lutheran Family Services, Charlotte Emergency Housing, Uptown Shelter and various shelters in Charlotte — had pondered a way to start WISH. Recently, momentum has built. In two months of fundraising, religious groups and corporations have committed about $2 million, largely due to Ash’s efforts.
Ash has been educating congregations on how thousands of families such as Turner’s increasingly can’t afford housing. They become “stuck” in shelters or transitional homes, he said, unable to leave because of low wages, bad credit and debt.
Besides the $2 million committed, organizers have asked the city for $200,000 a year for five years, beginning in the 2008 fiscal year.
Burgess, who supports the measure, said passage could be difficult because of a tight budget. But she will work to get WISH in the budget, she said. “To me, it’s just cost-effective,” she said.
Within the next two months, WISH organizers hope to enter their first clients into a pilot program. WISH will work with landlords to find vacant units, bridging financial gaps for the client’s rent and pairing families with case managers who help them become self-sufficient. Ash said they are looking at about 4,000 vacant apartments.
The initiative would target only those who have a stable job. So it would be unlikely to alleviate overcrowding in homeless shelters like the Salvation Army, said Deronda Metz, director of social services there. Most who enter that shelter are unemployed, she said.
At the YWCA, Turner spread photos of her five children onto her bed. Four are adults; her son lives in a children’s home in Oxford, about 170 miles northeast of Charlotte, If only she could afford an apartment in a safe neighborhood, she said, she could bring him home.
“If I’m coming home from work and my son gets home before me,” she said, “I want to know that he’s gonna be all right.”
The Poverty Line
About 82,000 residents in Mecklenburg County live below the federal poverty line, measured as earning an income of about $19,000 for a family of four. In Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, there are 1,900 homeless children.
To Learn More
For more information or to donate, please contact Darren Ash at dash@crisisassistance.org
