Rural Homeless--Invisible Among Us, Everywhere Around Us

Amid the frozen farm fields of Iowa, Judy Shelly answered a cry for help from a small wooden garage. Huddled inside were a mother and three children. They’d lost almost everything--including their home.

They had blankets, beds, a few sticks of furniture and a hot plate, but no bathroom or refrigerator. No money either. Forced off their farm, abandoned by husband and father, the family was struggling to survive.

Their predicament is a sad but increasingly common sign of hard times in the heartland. As farmers lose their land, small-town factories shut their doors and housing costs rise, growing numbers of rural folks are joining the ranks of the nation’s homeless.

‘Sleeping in Caves’

“Rural homeless people are everywhere around us,” said Louisa Stark, president of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “They’re living in barns and chicken coops. They’re doubled and tripled up with families and friends. They’re living under trees or, in some cases, sleeping in caves.”

Garages, too. The Iowa family had rented a nearby house after losing their farm last winter, but when the pipes burst and the landlord couldn’t afford repairs, they moved into the garage because it was cheaper to warm with a kerosene heater.

Shelly, who works for a farmers-assistance group, helped find them a place to stay. They moved on shortly after.

People think rural America “has been able to stand on its own two feet ever since the Depression,” Shelly said. “(They think) somehow they’ll get by. They think you have the white picket fence, mom and dad sit down at the table and eat with the kids. That’s not the way it is.

“The reality is urban life and rural life are not much different anymore,” she added. “We have people going without food. We have people going without heat.”

Lacking Shelter

And people going without roofs over their heads.

Up to 3 million Americans are homeless, the national coalition says. Some experts estimate that 10% to 20% are in rural areas, but nobody knows for sure because they aren’t as conspicuous as people panhandling on city streets or sleeping on grates.

“Everybody calls the rural homeless invisible. In fact, they are,” said Melanie Roth of the Housing Assistance Council in Washington, D.C., which deals with rural low-income housing needs.

“They don’t wander the streets of small-town America,” said Keith Luebke, co-director of the Welcome Inn Transitional Living Center in Mankato, Minn. “They leave or they somehow hide themselves or hide their problems. They don’t want anyone to know.”

Most of the newest rural homeless are working poor and farm families, says a report by the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences. Compared to their urban counterparts, the report says, they are younger families dependent on two incomes; typically, one wage-earner loses a job and the remaining income isn’t enough to pay the rent. They most often live in counties where employment is dependent on a single troubled industry.

Poor ALternatives

These people face a choice of moving in with friends or relatives--or pulling up roots and leaving. The institute’s report said some rural areas have a five-year waiting list for public housing.

Though their numbers are just a fraction of those in the cities, the rural homeless get much less help--fewer shelters, fewer soup kitchens, less money from charities.

“In short, the faint voice that has recently been given to the homeless in urban America has been denied the homeless of rural America,” said a national coalition study on such problems in Appalachia and the South.

Several studies have examined rural homelessness. Among the findings:

- More than three-quarters of community agencies responding to a Housing Assistance Council survey last year reported increases in rural homeless from 1981-82 to 1986-87. Of those, 38% said the increase was significant.

- In Ohio, the proportion of women among the rural homeless was twice that of urban homeless populations, according to a 1985 study. That is partly because of the higher percentage of married people among the rural homeless, 18.5% against 6.7% married among urban homeless.

- In Minnesota, 36% of adults in shelters and transitional living centers had jobs, compared to 24% in urban Minneapolis, said a 1988 study by the Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless.

- In Iowa, a study found that one of the larger groups in danger of losing homes was farm widows, many of whom live on just a few hundred dollars a month.

21 in One House

The count of rural homeless should also include people who live in ramshackle houses or stay with friends and family, a common arrangement among down-and-out farmers, the experts say. It may be 21 people living in one house, nine children and three adults squeezed in a trailer or a family so crowded they sleep in shifts.

“You have people living on top of each other. Those are the hidden homeless,” said Luebke. “These people no longer have their own home or apartment. They have a roof over their head, but in real terms they should be considered homeless.”

Living conditions for others are so abysmal that social agencies say it’s tantamount to being homeless.

“When people have a home where the roof is constantly leaking and the cold air can come in . . . (and) there’s no money to fix those things, that’s not a home,” said Norma Dell, director of Bethany House, a Kentucky social service center.

Agencies around the country have files on people living in rat-infested shanties, rotting houses without walls or shacks without heat, water or toilets. Others describe a wheelchair-bound man living under a bridge after being evicted, an Indian family sleeping in an old school bus and drawing water from a horse trough, a man who lived in an abandoned refrigerator.

Stark said she has heard reports from California of farm workers living in groves of trees or taking shelter in caves.

Economics Key Link

Much of rural homelessness is tied to economics: the slump in the timber, agriculture, mining, meat and energy industries, the loss of manufacturing jobs, farm foreclosures and the ripple effect on Main Street.

“You’re dealing with people four or five years ago who would have been middle-class citizens,” said Keith Swenson, who works at a social service agency in Mora, Minn. “They’re chronically underemployed. They’re not much different than you and I.”

The decade’s farm crisis has fueled the decline. The government estimates that 274,000 farms disappeared from 1980 through this year, and the number of people living on farms dropped from 6 million in 1980 to 5 million last year.

Rural poverty increased by a third from 1978 to 1986, said a report by Public Voice for Food and Health Policy, a Washington-based consumer education and research group. In 1986, 9.7 million rural people lived in poverty, the group said.

One consequence: people can’t help themselves, much less each other.

“Although communities very often try to band together to help a person, it’s becoming more and more difficult because so many people are suffering,” Stark said.

Experts also say pride makes people reluctant to admit their troubles.

“There’s a real Midwest ethic: You don’t get it unless you work for it,” said Ane Fitzgerald, organizer for the Des Moines Coalition for the Homeless. And, she said: “If you’re homeless or destitute in a big city, you can be anonymous. In a small town, you can’t.”

Often, people hide their problems.

‘Pioneer Stock’

“You try not to let anyone else in the community know just how hard it is,” said Paula Neumann, who was homeless a decade ago in Wisconsin. “If you talk about it, it’s your personal failure. That’s what you believe. You’re of pioneer stock. . . . You’re left with the feeling you’ve failed to do something that’s worked before.”

Even if people acknowledge their problems, help may be many miles away.

“Your survival in the city is easier,” said Michelle Budzek, director of a Kentucky shelter. “If you’re hungry, you can walk to the soup kitchen. If you need medical attention, there are shelters in almost every city across the country. In rural communities, folks are isolated. Even getting to services is real difficult.”

Some places make an extra effort. A program covering 10 northwestern Minnesota counties tries to ensure that food stamps are available to the homeless and those in danger of losing their homes.

Small towns in Ohio and other states are setting up shelters and transitional centers.

But housing remains a major problem.

As far back as 1983, the Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that 1.8 million members of very low-income rural households were living in severely inadequate or inadequate housing.

Gaining Recognition

The problems of rural homelessness have been building for years but only recently are gaining recognition.

“People have already been working on solutions in urban areas the last eight years,” said Barbara Ferraro, director of a West Virginia center aiding the indigent. “They’ve only begun to voice the fact that (homelessness) may be in rural areas.

“What we see today as the problem of the urban homeless is probably the tip of the iceberg of what we’d see if we look critically at the rural areas,” she added. “The solutions are not as easy to come by. We cannot Band-Aid the rural problem at all. . . . We cannot just put people in shelters. That’s not a solution.

“As we begin to (uncover) more and more, you’re going to see a crisis has been there for many years,” she said. “It’ll only get worse if we do not do something about it.”