Finally, Someplace to Call Home : Housing: The Longs are luckier than some homeless families: A church group got them an apartment in the nick of time.
As she cradled her 8-month-old daughter in her arms, Debbie Long worried. She was nearing the end of her stay at the Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter in Costa Mesa, and she and her husband still did not have an apartment lined up for themselves and their three young children.
“I have to be out of here by Monday and I don’t have a place to go again, and that terrifies me,” said Debbie Long, 32. Already it was Thursday.
Before coming to the shelter, she and her family had been sleeping on friends’ living room floors, in seedy motels and in the Fullerton Armory. Her husband, Mark, had lost his job eight months before and suffered an emotional breakdown.
Until she ran into trouble finding an apartment, Debbie Long said, she had felt fortunate that she and her family could stay at the shelter for two months. They received free room and board and were able to save $1,600 of the monthly $899 welfare checks to help them pay the rent and deposits necessary for an apartment.
The difficulties the Longs encountered are typical for the homeless, of which there are an estimated 10,000 in Orange County, according to figures from the Orange County Task Force on the Homeless. The county’s charitable organizations are increasingly seeing that providing emergency shelters is only a partial solution. Families who have taken refuge in short-term shelters are finding that the worsening shortage of lower-cost apartments in the county makes it nearly impossible for them to save enough money to move into an apartment.
Scott Mather, chairman of Orange County’s Task Force on the Homeless and founder and board president of the Orange Coast shelter, said that when the shelter opened in Costa Mesa nine years ago, it was relatively easy for a family to get an apartment after receiving 60 days’ assistance. “Then we started seeing our success rate drop,” Mather said. “We realized it wasn’t that we were doing anything different, but that there was no housing for people to go to.”
At the end of March, during her family’s last few days at the shelter, Debbie Long traveled by bus to Buena Park and Anaheim to look for an apartment. She applied at 10 apartments, to no avail. Landlords, she said, seemed put off by the family’s welfare status and checkered credit record.
On Sunday, the day before they had to leave the shelter, the Longs moved into a Fullerton apartment found for them by Love Inc., a nonprofit program supported by churches and based in Placentia. They moved in with almost no furniture, but they had a roof over their heads.
And still Debbie Long worried. She had difficulty sleeping, she said, because of fears that she might not be able to continue making the $750 monthly rent. As a safeguard, she paid the rent in twice-monthly installments when her welfare checks arrived.
June, however, brought more misfortune to the Longs. Mark Long was jailed for a week after being arrested for driving without a valid driver’s license and for failing to pay a traffic ticket. He called home, collect, every day, running up a $250 phone bill, Debbie said. When they could not pay it, the phone was disconnected.
About the same time, according to Debbie Long, a change in social workers and a paper work mix-up resulted in the Longs’ going three months without food stamps and three weeks without a welfare check. At one point, the family ran out of food. The family stood on the corner of Orangethorpe and Harbor boulevards in Fullerton holding a sign: “Will Work for Food or Rent.” The wife of a local welfare official saw them, and he got them their welfare money.
Then the Longs fell behind in the rent. As they faced eviction, another church assistance group came to the rescue with food and rent money.
Now things seem to be looking up for the Longs. They are still in the Fullerton apartment, and there is plenty of furniture, much of it pulled from an apartment complex dumpster that Debbie Long watches from her bedroom window. When she got her last welfare check, Debbie Long said, she paid the rent and splurged, spending $17 on pharmaceutical supplies and a small toy for each of her children--Kelley, 1, Nicholas, 4, and Christopher, 5.
And it appears that there is a good chance the family can eventually leave the welfare rolls. Mark Long said he has been getting training as a locksmith and is looking for a job.
Debbie Long attributes her family’s survival to God’s help. But it comes none too early. She smiled and said, “Some people call us ‘The Last-Minute Longs.’ ”
DOES ORANGE COUNTY CARE? * NOWHERE TO GO: That poor people have been displaced because of local government policies is no accident. A1
