On rural homelessness, a big feature out of Arizona

Alden Woods of the Arizona Republic reports this week out of Gila County, population 53,597, in the central part of the state.  The headline is "Into the Woods.  Rural housing shortages push some into forests, parking lots."  The story provides some hard data points, something not easily found on this topic:  According to the National Rural Housing Coalition, almost half of all rural Americans spend more than the recommended 30% of their income on rent, and seven percent of the nation's homeless population are in rural areas.  But that need is not matched by rural safety nets, which are often non-existent, or certainly pale in comparison to those in cities.  While rents are lower in rural areas, incomes are, too. 

While Gila County's poverty rate is 22%, local government is not eligible to apply for grants that would fund a homeless shelter because it doesn't have a Continuum of Care (CoC), "an organization that brings together housing, service providers and local officials,"--essentially the first step in fighting homelessness locally.  The state has only three CoC's, one each in Maricopa (Phoenix) and Pima (Tucson) counties, and one to serve the rest of the state, called the Balance of State Continuum of Care.  Though each county is supposed to be represented on the board of the latter, Gila County has no representative. 

Woods' story features Doug Stewart, a local volunteer liaison between the Payson police and the homeless. 

This place provided nothing, so Doug Stewart tried to prepare for everything. He filled his Jeep with blankets for the cold and tents for the rain, ham-and-cheese sandwiches for the hungry and a full tank of gas to take people out of Gila County. Then he drove to Walmart. 

He rolled into the parking lot, past the people who held cardboard signs at each entrance, past a dozen people who slept in their cars every night. Even more people camped in the woods behind the store, and into the trees walked Stewart, 46, to find Theresa. 

A week earlier he drove a man 89 miles to a shelter in Phoenix. The night before, he took another on the 74-mile drive to Cottonwood, bringing both to the homeless services Gila County didn’t yet have. Now there was room at a shelter in Flagstaff, 115 miles away, and Stewart knew who needed it most. 

“Theresa!” he yelled. His voice echoed in the trees. 

He traced a flashlight over small piles of trash and yoga mats that had become mattresses. He ran his hand along a graffiti-covered wall. Every few feet he passed a camp where somebody had been forced to sleep outside, trapped in a place unable to combat a national crisis. 

A shortage of affordable housing struck first in America’s cities, pushing poor renters into suburbs and sleepy outskirts. The shortage ate through those places, too, and it spread farther and farther out, into rural areas like Gila County, where there was nothing to catch people on their fall from housing to homelessness.

This story is the the sixth installment of a seven-part series on housing problems in Arizona.