Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 3, 1995 TAG: 9506050039
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RICK LINDQUIST STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
At first, Walters, who asked that her real name not be used because she feared stigmatizing her children, didn't worry. After all, she had skills and she was a high school honor graduate with a good employment track record. She never anticipated being out of work for long.
But when a new job failed to materialize, her world began to unravel.
Within a few months, she'd fallen behind in her mortgage payments. Her house was auctioned.
Frayed but undeterred, the buoyant, chatty 34-year-old loaded everything she owned into a rental truck and headed for the New River Valley, where she'd heard from friends and relatives that the job market was better.
It wasn't.
Then her car "dropped dead." Somehow, she scraped up $300 to buy a 13-year-old clunker with 130,000 odometer miles.
Her meager savings dwindled. She'd moved in with a cousin in Giles County, but the landlord found out and said the family couldn't stay there any longer.
"That was the final shove out the door," she said.
Like most Americans, Walters never imagined being broke and homeless.
"I wasn't prepared," she admits today.
Fortunately, the New River Valley Community Shelter was prepared, but it's been touch-and-go in recent months as the valley's only safety net for the temporarily homeless tries to make a smooth transition from mostly public funding back to its roots as a community-supported resource.
"Every day, we're sort of teetering on the brink of nonexistence," said Rose Teixeira, the shelter director, who believes many New River families are just a couple of paychecks away from being out on the street.
Most families the shelter works with are "working poor," Teixeira said.
One family she worked with found a trailer at $350 a month to rent. But the single mother, with four kids, only makes $600 a month, leaving little left for a rainy day.
"She can barely get by, and if she should have any kind of disaster ... it could cost her her home," she said.
While homelessness is not an in-your-face problem in this part of Virginia, it's there nonetheless, and it's taken its toll on the shelter. The past few weeks, the small house on Roanoke Street was vacant for a change, as volunteers spruced it up for another onslaught, painting, cleaning, fixing the plumbing.
An open house today 1-3 p.m., marks the shelter's formal reopening and provides "a way to reconnect with the community" on which the shelter expects to become more dependent as state and federal money dries up. State funds run out at month's end.
"The safety net is real flimsy at this point," said Teixeira, who faces trying to stretch three units and a $30,000 operating budget to meet a huge demand. "If you're homeless, you need housing now."
Last year, the shelter got 233 requests for housing. It was able to provide transitional accommodations for 13 families for an average stay of three to four months.
"There's nothing fancy in that budget at all. It's all just very basic," she said.
The shelter also has received Federal Emergency Management Agency money for emergency shelter at local motels, but that's dropping off.
"This year, we got about $8,000 in FEMA money, as opposed to about $10,000 we got last year," she said.
But Teixeira says the fact the community even has a homeless center is a positive sign. Now, a new Homeless Coalition, with representatives from each of the valley's jurisdictions, wants to grub out the roots of homelessness and open better communications within the valley about the homelessness issues, like day care for preschoolers and mass transit.
"Every homeless family is very different," Teixeira said, a fact that further complicates the matter of dealing with their problems.
The Homeless Coalition includes community members, New River Community Action, the Giles County Development and Housing Corp., the Women's Resource Center, Radford Community Hospital and other organizations.
"It does seem to be working," Teixeira said.
Support services, including financial, family and employment counseling, also are available through the shelter.
Through the shelter's "host church" program, a church adopts a family and helps out with transportation and inspiration. "It also reinforces that whole sense of community," Teixeira said.
About a half dozen churches make themselves available in rotation.
Montgomery County also has been a long-time supporter, Teixeira said. The county kicked in $2,400 for 1995-96, the same as this year. County residents get first call on shelter space as often as possible.
The shelter also got $9,000 from United Way.
Teixeira hopes the coalition will be able to help address the area's homelessness by drawing attention to the need for more substantial employment opportunities and more affordable housing, "something someone making $10,000 to $15,000 a year could afford," she said. "There is not enough affordable housing in this area."
However, for Donna Walters, there was no housing. "No one would rent to me, because I didn't have a job," she said.
"You hate to admit you have to ask someone else for help."
But she's glad she did.
Walters and her younger son ended up spending four months - and lots of sleepless nights - at the shelter. Her teen-age son remained with a family in Giles County, where he already was in school.
While looking for work, Walters upgraded her job skills.
Today, it's a brighter picture. Walters was hired by a company out of Richmond and hopes to move there. For now, she and her two boys are together in Giles County, grateful the New River Valley Community Shelter was there when they needed it.
by CNB