Scenes from America’s housing crisis

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by Donnell Alexander | August 10, 2015

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The lady’s name is Stephanie, and on the second morning of July I met her in the parking lot of a chain motel in downtown Vancouver, Washington, or “The Couve,” the state’s fourth-largest municipality.

Around lots like that one you’ll find everything you need to know — maybe not anything you want to know — about those who are reduced to living in rooms with doors that open to car exhaust. Bedbug bites are far from the worst outcome in this, one of the lowest rungs of housing insecurity, just steps away from homelessness.

Watch the parking lots and you will see, first, that the numbers infrequently add up. A front desk worker might tell you that room 219 — top floor, dead center — sleeps two. But as many as eight members of an evicted family or eight homeless friends who’ve pooled funds could pop out, uncorked as though sprung from a broke-down clown car.

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On the morning I met Stephanie, she was hauling three coffees through the motel office door, highlights of a pitiable continental breakfast. Three months earlier, she said, she lost the Vancouver home left to her by her mother, who passed away in 2009. She tells me that the toe truncation — jagged and just this side of gooey — happened when she was living on the street, after an infection went unattended.

Two days a month Stephanie and her husband treat themselves to nights here, a respite from 28 or so days vulnerable to the elements. After a few minutes collecting woes similar to so many motel regulars — bad breaks and worse decision making — I did that thing I’ve picked up from public radio gigs, the one where you ask the subject to say their name and how they’d best be described.

“My name is Stephanie,” she said into my recorder, her voice breaking, “and I’m a lost soul right now.

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Some regulars have vouchers from local governments. Most simply fell behind on rent or, as in Stephanie’s case, a mortgage.

About 10 days before I met Stephanie, I sat down at a coffeehouse in the upscale section of Portland with Bobby Weinstock, a three-decade veteran of housing advocacy, to discuss the structural problems that force so many to turn to motel living. (Nothing animates him more than the disempowerment of Housing and Urban Development that reaches back to the Reagan era.)

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Having fallen behind on rent while working an $11-per-hour health-care job and studying to become a medical assistant, Gaye lost her apartment at the start of April. Gaye loaded up her uniforms and a few street ensembles, Tiarry’s skateboard, “astronaut food” that would heat up conveniently, and threw the few belongings that she could not sell into storage.

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The evidence is in plain sight, from the feds who aren’t even close to compelled to send monies to local housing authorities to city developers who opt not to build for those desperate for shelter to the moteliers that charge exorbitant rates for pinnacles of shabbiness. It’s not just the fine fuzz of Washington that despise the homeless — just about none of us are really feeling them. It takes Herculean effort to ensure that their ugliness remains out of our sight lines.