The Human Face of Hotel Homelessness

In a small room with two beds and a mini-fridge near the end of a chain of motels in San Jose, four-year-old Jasmine watches cartoons while her older sister is at school. Just outside the open door, standing in the parking lot, her mother Heather tells me about their trip here. She was in her late-20s and had a a good marriage and a good job at a veterinarian's office. This was up in Fresno, where her husband's family lived.

The couple was always social, she says, so the line where her husband's drinking crept from appropriate to problematic was, in retrospect, always tenuous. But past a certain point the trajectory down became intense and unmistakable. A year ago, Heather took the two girls and fled back towards familiar ground. San Jose is where she grew up, and she still has family in the county. They offer help where they can, but they can't offer much. Taking anything causes Heather feelings of failure and guilt.

Heather went to a family shelter for a short while, then to a shelter for women and children, but there are maximum allotted days — between 60 and 90, if you can qualify for an extension — and she has surpassed them. She is splitting the $62.01 cost of the motel room with two other women whose shelter stays expired at the same time  — one who is working full-time at Walmart and the other part-time, both looking for second jobs.

Earlier this year Senator John Kerry and others wrote to Majority Leader Harry Reid asking for an extension of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Fund. The fund was set up in 2009 to help with the stresses of the recession by creating jobs for low-income families and to assist those families in emergency situations. As it now stands, this TANF funding is set to expire on the 30th of this month.

Kerry began circulating a sign-on among his colleagues last week asking for help in extending the funds for one year. The National Alliance to End Homelessness is urging concerned citizens to contact their Senators and demand they join the letter. The deadline for joining is Wednesday, September 15 at noon. If you don't know who your representatives are, you can go to whosreppin.me to find out (full disclosure: I am a part of the whosreppin.me project).

So here Heather stands in the parking lot of the motel, looking out as a police siren roars by. "You get a lot of sketchy people. You get a lot of prostitutes, drug dealers," she says, "probably straight out of jail." Her husband has since lost his house and entered a residential treatment center for drug and alcohol abuse, meaning no one in the family has a home now.

Between trying to find out where she's going to sleep, what she's going to feed the kids and keeping her oldest stable in one school, Heather's struggling. "I haven't had that bonding with them that I need to have because we've had no stability," she says. She thinks she has enough money for a few more nights.

I met Heather while putting together some short documentaries for a San Jose-based homeless service organization called Destination: Home. See video of Heather and Jasmine on Destination: Home's Facebook page. Then tell the Senate to extend funding to help get low-income families back to work.

Photo credit: Danny Fenster