The local subculture of people without fixed addresses is on the rise - including a surprising number of families & working people.

These are their stories.

When it comes to finding a place to live in the Hudson Valley, Barbara McClinton has seen it all.  For the past two years, she has been working for the Kingston-based People, Inc., a nonprofit human services agency dedicated to helping people with disabilities lead productive lives.  When the 41-year-old McClinton isn't helping people track down affordable housing, she is tracking down the homeless themselves, scouting for people beneath bridges and overpasses, among rural campgrounds and along country roads, and even under the stairs of large buildings on Broadway.  Although McClinton's job is to talk directly to the homeless and act as a liaison with social services agencies, she frequently finds people who prefer to "live outside the system."  When she finds evidence of squatters, she generally leaves notes informing them of available social services and "letting them know that we're not the police, so we're not mandated to report on them."  But frequently, McClinton also drops off care packages containing "sandwiches, meat, diapers, soap, my baby's old blankets, whatever they need" - often at her own expense, despite her own financial problems.  Barbara McClinton has experienced firsthand many of the problems her clients face.  "I advocate on the part of people who fall through the cracks," she says.  "I've met a lot of people like myself that I advocate for."

For 16 years McClinton held a career as a licensed practical nurse until she "bottomed out" with alcoholism.  Now sober for seven years and still undergoing psychotherapy at Ulster County Mental Health Association, McClinton spent about five years doing unskilled work while in recovery before finding a full-time job at People, Inc.  Although she occasionally qualifies for food stamps, McClinton mainly relies on child support, day care subsidy, and her own earnings to support her family.  She is the divorced single parent of two sons, aged 21 and 18, and two daughters, now 19 and two, as well as grandmother to two children.  One of her sons is disabled and receives SSI (Social Security Income); the other has a criminal record.  McClinton has also been helping her oldest daughter raise her own two children, ages three and eight months, but supports her daughter's wish to find her own apartment and establish her own family.

While she was married McClinton owned her own home; since then the security of having a permanent residence has mostly eluded her, partly because she insists on keeping her family intact despite the fact that three-bedroom apartments and landlords willing to take on large families are difficult to find.  While bouncing around between apartments, she and her family once spent three months living in the "homeless hotel," Family of Woodstock's Family Inn (formerly the King's Inn, on Broadway in Kingston), but three years ago, things began to look up when McClinton received Section 8 rental subsidy after five years on the waiting list.  Then, last June, McClinton's family was evicted from their apartment on Cedar Street after the rental subsidy decreased suddenly when her oldest daughter found her first job.  When the landlord demanded the difference immediately McClinton won a temporary stay, but the landlord managed to get the judge to sign an eviction warrant even before the stay was over.  With an eviction notice now part of her background check, along with a judgment against her for $3,000 from 17 years ago, only two of the landlords for the 24 apartments McClinton visited would agree to rent to her.

Barbara McClinton surveys evidence of homelessness beneath a Kingston overpass.

Rather than resort to returning to the Family Inn, McClinton now pays $1,200 a month for her family to live in what she says is a flea-ridden, roach-infested three-bedroom apartment on Hudson Street.  "It happens to be in a drug-infested neighborhood," she says, "but it's a home."  A member of Rural Ulster Preservation Company's (RUPCO) First Homebuyers' Club, McClinton says she has completed the program's eight-month course, but is unable to complete the program's second requirement of becoming credit worthy.  In fact, she says she is in such dire straits financially that she is preparing to file bankruptcy, which will mean renting for an additional two to three years before she can qualify again to buy a house.

It seems impossible for one person to have experienced so much difficulty trying to find a home for her family, especially in a region renowned for its high quality of life.  However, Barbara McClinton's story illustrates the crisis of homelessness - and increased vulnerability to homelessness - that is prevalent throughout the Hudson Valley.  Unlike urban homelessness, which tends to occur, literally, on the street, in full view of the general population and often accompanied by aggressive panhandling, occurrences of homelessness and near homelessness are fairly well hidden in the largely rural Hudson Valley.  But if you know where to look, people who are homeless or in danger of becoming homeless can be found in some surprising locations and population sectors throughout the region.

WHO IS HOMELESS?
According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), on any given night, 600,000 people are without homes in the US.  Each year, approximately one percent of the US population - two to three million people - experiences a night of homelessness that puts them into contact with a homeless assistance provider; however, among those whose incomes fall below the poverty line, between four and six percent experience short-term homelessness.  Chronic - long-term or repeated - homelessness is experienced by approximately 200,000 people each year.

In order to receive federal homeless assistance funding, each county must conduct a survey of its homeless population during a single day each year, counting those who are using its emergency and temporary shelters as well as those who are seen to be living on the street.  The survey, says Cathy Germaine of Shingebiss Associates, the grant-writing firm that spearheaded Ulster County's survey this year, "provides a snapshot of visible homeless people on a single day in time," including those who present themselves at shelters as well as those who are discovered to be unsheltered by law enforcement officials and outreach workers.

King's Inn

In Orange County, the number of homeless individuals rose from approximately 800 in 2002 to 1,070 in 2003, says Judy Stanger, vice president of the Orange County Housing Consortium.  In addition last year, 350 families, consisting of at least one adult head of household with two to three children on average, presented themselves to social services agencies there.  "We're in a housing crisis, and it's a huge dilemma," says Stanger.

For this year's survey, says Ann Saylor of the Dutchess County Department of Planning, Dutchess County's emergency and transitional sheltered homeless population included 185 single people, including 50 youth, and 86 families comprised of 186 people.  The unsheltered count included 91 individuals and 108 family members.

"We've seen huge increases in people who are homeless over the past five years," says Tina Sharpe, executive director of Columbia Opportunities, Inc., a social services agency in Columbia County.  During the 2002-2003 fiscal year, says Sharpe, her agency served 305 homeless households, representing 466 people over a 12-month period.  But within the first six months of 2003-2004, Columbia Opportunities had already seen 120 homeless households, representing 162 individuals.

Ulster County's most recent survey, conducted last June 16, includes its first unsheltered homeless count ever.  "Ulster County is the size of Rhode Island, and being as rural as it is, it's very difficult," says Cathy Germaine, who worked with several Ulster County social service agencies on the survey.  "Homeless numbers change dramatically depending on what time of year you're counting.  This time of year, [Ulster County tends] to have a lot more homeless coming in - it's called herding - because of the weather conditions and the growing and picking season."  This year's emergency sheltered count included 22 individuals and 22 families made up of 56 people, while there were 117 individuals and two families encompassing six people in transitional housing.  Among the unsheltered were one homeless family and five single people.

MORE PEOPLE, LESS HOUSING
"The next story you should write is the relationship between gentrification and homelessness," says one Columbia-Greene official who asked not to be named.  "Hudson is a good example.  All the antiques, New York City restaurants and stores came up and confiscated all the businesses on Warren Street.  Well, guess who lived on the second and third and fourth floors of those buildings - poor people.  The amount of money that the local [Department of Social Services] has spent on what they call emergency housing - if you show up at a DSS and say I'm homeless and you qualify, they'll put you up; here it costs $65 a night - went from a little under $100,000 in 2002 to $300,000 plus in 2003" in Columbia-Greene.

A squatter's camp

The fact that Ulster County's Kingston and Ellenville are "recovery towns" - each boasting several centers for dealing with substance abuse and mental illness - further stresses an already tight housing market, says Barbara McClinton.  "Everybody comes here to recover from alcohol, drug addiction, or whatever, so there's another influx of people coming here, sent up here from [New York City] court systems or wherever, and then we're all competing with them, too, for apartments."

Another potential segment of homelessness and possible factor in the competition for affordable housing is the steady migration of Hispanics to the Hudson Valley.  According to Barbara McClinton, the fact that Mexican-Americans, in particular, often put up silently with poor housing conditions, and can share the rent between several working people makes them more desirable tenants in some landlords' eyes.

"It's hard to discern how much doubling or tripling in housing is already occurring - HUD is not able to get that kind of census - but [Hispanics] are an important part of our fabric," says Gail Webster, executive director of Hudson River Housing in Poughkeepsie.  With the tremendous growth of the Hispanic community in Poughkeepsie, for example, Webster says there can be 20 to 25 people living in "whatever they can rent - even a one bedroom."  Hispanic homelessness remains virtually invisible, says Webster.  "But all it takes is an argument and some of them will be out on the street.  We don't see them unless they're hurt or having a baby because some are here illegally, and in the Hispanic community, they take care of their own."

WAGES DON'T KEEP PACE WITH HOUSING COSTS
The September 2003 AFL-CIO report, "The Crisis of Affordable Housing for Hudson Valley's Working People," states that in the last decade, 70,900 houses and apartments were built in the Hudson Valley, creating 144,946 local jobs and generating $6.75 billion in local wages and other income.  Despite this bright economic data, the real estate boom and the still ailing economy are creating a situation in which housing is "trickling away before trickling down."  The result is an estimated 44,345-unit shortage of affordable rental housing in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Sullivan, Ulster, Orange, and Dutchess counties.

And according to figures released by Michael Berg, director of Family of Woodstock, the earning power of tenants just isn't keeping up with the cost of accommodation.  In Ulster County, for instance, average house sale prices have increased by more than 50 percent since 2002, resulting in rent increases.  But between 1990 and 2000, the average weekly earnings for Ulster County residents compared to the New York State average dropped from 80.43 to 58.94 percent.  Meanwhile, the pool of New York State residents earning less than $7 an hour tripled between 1979 and 2000 from 3.6 to 11.7 percent, creating a large number of impoverished working families.

The situation is not much different in Orange County, the state's fastest growing county, which has been experiencing all the problems of Westchester - "burgeoning housing costs, transition to a bedroom community, and lack of workforce housing" - since 9/11, says Judy Stanger.  "People now need to make at least $15 an hour here to stay above the poverty line.  People who make the average wage can't afford to live here anymore, so we've got people living on credit cards who can't pay them off, people living one paycheck away from losing their job, and that's all it takes to become homeless."

IGNORANCE NOT ALWAYS BLISS
"You've got people teetering, who just don't know how close to homelessness they really are," says Tina Sharpe.  "You have people who are on the verge of homelessness and all you need is one major car repair and you don't have rent money - you have people who are really just managing.  And once you lose an apartment, you don't get back in."

According to Brad White, Dual Recovery Coordinator for Columbia County and supervisor of the 2004 Columbia-Greene HUD survey, rural people's tendency to tough it out means that some sectors of the population believe they are housed when they are actually homeless.  "If the  HUD definition of 'homeless' is not living in a place that is fit for human habitation, then people who live in shacks are homeless," he says.  "You have people out in the hills that are living in a broken down trailer with no water or sewage.  People in rural areas are a little bit more tolerant of that kind of poverty to some degree."

"Big Frank" and his dog, Midnight, at their northern Ulster County camp.

GOING IT ALONE
Rather than struggle with rent without assistance, or in some cases, adhere to social services requirements or treatment programs, some people opt out altogether.  Barbara McClinton says there are more outsiders than most people realize.  "There's a lot of them - I deal with a gentleman who's disabled, on SSI, who lives in his car, and takes showers at his sister's.  Another one lives under the steps at the Broadmoor, [an old hotel on Broadway in Kingston] and sits out there every day with his bags.  The kids like the campgrounds, like along the creek on River Road in Rosendale, or on Creek Locks Road, a lot of them camp out there and they fish to eat.  When you tell people they look at you like, 'Huh?  We have homeless people here?'"

In the woods behind a store in northern Ulster County a camp has been set up by both kids and  adults.  "Big Frank," 40, lives there with Midnight, his Black Labrador-Rottweiller mix, and several skateboarding "gutter punks," as he calls them.  Big Frank grew up in Orange County and occasionally visits family there, but he prefers to be on his own.  He gets by on payments for odd jobs and landscaping work rather than get a regular job, receive Social Services, or "pay $600 or $700 or $800 for an apartment, or even $400 or $500 for some dintzy little room with a shared bathroom."  Although he has applied for emergency and temporary housing as well as Social Services benefits, Big Frank believes he isn't cut out to be helped.  "Shelters wouldn't help me, they kept on turning me down, and I didn't like it," he says.  "I had an attitude about it, which they couldn't understand, of course."  Nor is he capable of sticking to drug therapy.  "I don't want to attend, I don't want to have to do what someone else says," he explains.  "I'm better off in nature.  Nature helps me."

Big Frank's makeshift campsite isn't the only one in the woods, but it's the largest, and the neatest, complete with a campfire circle, Coleman stove, seating area made of logs, clothes hanging to dry on the branches of surrounding trees, and the beginnings of the hut he is building to house him through next winter and beyond.  He's done it before, and stayed warm, even before he got Midnight as a puppy last year to sleep on his chest at night.  "I can build all kinds of huts," he says proudly.  He's already begun collecting metal cans to weld together to make a woodstove and chimney.  "I buy what I need when I do the work to get it."

Big Frank has been in and out of jail all his life, mostly for burglary, has a history of substance abuse, and spent 13 years as a skinhead.  Between jail sentences, he's lived in cardboard boxes in New York City and in urban areas all over the Hudson Valley.  Last spring he hitchhiked to the Woodstock area from Poughkeepsie because he "got tired of the Bloods [gang members] shooting at me, and it was time to get out, be on my own, and keep my nose clean."

Big Frank says that being in nature helps him stay off drugs, and it allows him to form relationships with other people.  Although he arrived with nothing but a backpack, he says he's bought or been given everything he needs.  "I'm amazed at people's generosity," he says.  Although his neighbors know where he is, he says the police don't approach him unless he turns his music up too loud.  At night Big Frank often visits the local Cumberland Farms where, sometimes, he asks customers for money.

Section 8 recipient Maureen Reilly in her New Paltz apartment.

SECTION 8
"I can't tell you how many times landlords have shut doors in my face," says Maureen Reilly.  Reilly, 46, is disabled, and receives SSI.  Thanks to Section 8, she says, she is able to maintain a sense of dignity she would not have otherwise.  A resident of New Paltz since 1971, Reilly rented a single room, sharing a bathroom and cooking on a hot plate, for 17 years.  Although she never wanted to apply for Section 8, believing there were people more needy than herself, friends finally convinced her to get on the waiting list.  In 1996, her name came up, and Reilly finally found a one-bedroom apartment and a landlord who was willing to take her on as a tenant "because he wanted to do some good, to help somebody," she says.  "When I met him, I was so surprised I started to cry, I couldn't believe it.  Another landlord had told me, 'All you people who receive government checks are all the same - you're drunks and drug addicts, and you have too many babies.'"

But while landlords' prejudices against Section 8 tenants pose problems, homeless assistance providers agree that, given the program's successes with permanently housing people, its faults were, until recently, few.  "The only problems with Section 8 have been that there aren't enough certificates," says Berg.  That is, until the Bush administration devised the New Freedom Initiative, with its goal of ending chronic homelessness in 10 years, and tinkering with the Section 8 program began.

Traditionally, HUD has provided state and local housing agencies with enough funds to cover the cost of the vouchers they administer.  However, in a notice released on April 22, HUD announced a sweeping change in its policy for funding Section 8 vouchers.  The new system for funding vouchers, which takes effect in fiscal year 2004, "is compelling state and local housing agencies to institute cuts in assistance that will cause significant hardship among low-income families," according to a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a think-tank based in Washington, DC.

To make matters worse, the Bush administration has proposed harsh budget cuts for Section 8 vouchers for fiscal years 2005 and 2009, along with the conversion of the Section 8 program to a block grant, labeled the "Flexible Voucher Program," next year.  Despite the Bush administration's assurances that the new program will allow agencies greater flexibility, and that no one currently enrolled in the Section 8 program will be harmed, CBPP says "this would not be possible.  The proposed cut in voucher funding exceeds the entire amount of administrative funding agencies now receive."

The real problem with this system change is that since July 2003, voucher costs at individual housing agencies are out of sync with HUD's regional rent inflation fac-tor formula - whichis usually based on inflation rates in a region encompassing several states.  In the case of the Hudson Valley, local homeless assistance providers agree, rental prices are rising faster as housing becomes scarcer, which means that the gap between the Section 8 subsidy and rental rates is growing.

A mother and her two children at a Kingston homeless shelter.

CBPP low-income housing policy analyst Will Fischer says the Bush administration's cuts to the voucher program would overload local programs.  "State and local housing agencies around the country would have to implement the bulk of those cuts in three ways: cutting the number of families served, raising rent burdens on voucher holders, or shifting vouchers away from the poorest families to those with higher incomes."

In Ulster County, waiting lists for Section 8 were closed after last summer when the number hit 1,500 and it hasn't been open since.  "We purged the list twice, and then figured why give people false hope," says RUPCO director Kevin O'Connor.  "When we ran out of vouchers we had to call people back who had just been told they were finally getting vouchers after waiting months or years, and tell them no.  Those people, and the people trying to get on the waiting lists, will never see Section 8."

THE SAFETY NET SOMETIMES WORKS
If there is any single example of why Section 8 should be maintained, it is Chris Wilder, 40, who describes herself as "a poster girl for RUPCO," through which she applied for and receives Section 8 rental subsidy.  A single mother for 10 years with two children, now aged 14 and 11, Wilder says she is the last person she ever thought would be in her predicament.  "I get no welfare, no food stamps, nothing, ever - never, ever, nothing - and no child support," she says.  "I've always worked, since I was 12.  I've had a really hard life financially.  I've never been homeless.  I've been a single mother a long time, but I'm not one of those victim people who would be living in a hotel.  It would never happen.  But I'm making nothing right now.  I've been working at ShopRite and substitute teaching while I finished school and look for a teaching job.  When my name came up on the [Section 8] list, and it was like, oh my God, you know, Christmas."

Wilder owned a store in Wurtsboro while she was married, and was "rocking and rolling" financially until her husband left her and, she says, "pretty much took me for everything I had, and needless to say, I'm still paying that off."  Since then, she has worked at various full-time jobs, including most recently at Family of Woodstock, through which she became familiar with RUPCO and its services.

In the summer of 2003, almost three years after she applied for Section 8, Wilder's name came up on RUPCO's waiting list.  It could not have happened at a better time.  Having discovered earlier that year that, due to changes in teaching certification requirements, she had three months to finish her education degree at Marist College or lose some of her credits, Wilder had quit her job, given up her Kingston apartment, sold her sports car, and moved her family to a cabin in Kerhonkson.  In return for three months free rent, she agreed to make the cabin livable, and installed electricity and a water pump on her own, but then her landlord died suddenly.  Wilder initially panicked, but then the call from RUPCO came.  A representative came to inspect the house, and her subsidy began.

A room in a Kingston shelter

"I did all that myself, then I got RUPCO, and if it wasn't for them I'd be living in someone's basement, I'd be screwed, I wouldn't ever have finished school," she says.  "They saved my ass."

Having completed certification last February to teach kindergarten through sixth grade, Wilder is currently working at ShopRite and will return to substitute teaching this fall until she finds a full-time position.  "If it wasn't for Section 8, I couldn't have done it," she says of her teaching certification.  "I mean, I would have done it anyway, but it made my life a lot easier."  Now she says, she's got her resume "everywhere" and is waiting again, for a school to hire her.  "This year and last I was like, 'How will we survive this summer?'  I just want a job."