| Yesterday,
I received a troubling phone call from a person
who was desperate to find housing, but it wasn’t
for himself. A plumber he had recently hired confided
that he was homeless and living in his car with his wife
and infant child. The new employee — we’ll
call him Bob — was a good guy, and my man on the
phone wanted to help.
“He already has a job,” he thought. “How
hard can it be to find housing?”
As it turns out, plenty hard. Bob has no real credit history,
and a 12-year-old felony on his record. Until recently,
his family had lived with relatives. When that became
untenable, they moved into their car.
In a tight rental market, no one wants to touch someone
like Bob. He makes too much money to qualify for assistance
programs and not enough to buy his way out of the problem.
So Bob earns about $2,500 a month
as a plumber’s apprentice and spends about $1,700
of it on a weekly motel rental for his family.
I wish I could say that I have a solution, but I don’t.
No one else seems to either. Bob’s boss had been
calling around for a week and hitting nothing but brick
walls.
So I said I’d put the word out and see if anything
came back. If you have any ideas, email me at rchange@speakeasy.org.
See Tim Harris’ daily blog at apesmaslament.blogspot.com.
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