Madison Marsh celebrated her first birthday with a splurge lunch at the Golden Corral — paid for by her mom's plasma donation — and, afterward, cake in the Council Bluffs shelter her family is calling home.
Dad's concrete-pouring job in North Dakota went bust and mom's entry-level wages weren't worth gas-guzzling commutes in a 19-year-old car they don't trust. So six weeks ago, the Marshes packed what they could fit in their oil-burning, rusted Chevy Blazer and headed south.
They joined a growing number of families in what some homeless advocates locally see as a twofold economy-driven trend: a rise in homeless families and an increase in homeless transplants from outside the Omaha metropolitan area.
What's happening at homeless shelters locally is mirrored in other measures of need that are growing, as might be expected, in this recession. Though Nebraska and Iowa were not hit as hard as other states, more residents of the two states are receiving assistance today than a year ago.
Food stamp use was up nearly 6 percent in Nebraska and 15 percent in Iowa. Energy assistance rose by double digits, hitting record figures in both states.
Wait lists for government-subsidized housing have grown. So has the number of public school students qualifying for government-subsidized meals.
Calls for help in rent and food assistance to a United Way hot line are up. The number of Nebraskans receiving unemployment benefits has doubled.
Compounding the increasing need are tight state and agency budgets, so case- loads are increasing.
In August, during one of the official counts it takes two times a year, the Metro Area Continuum of Care for the Homeless tallied 14 more families than the number a year ago in Omaha and Council Bluffs. The count of 110 families at emergency shelters, transitional living centers and outdoors doesn't include families doubling up with relatives or friends.
Of the total homeless population counted, 28 percent were listed as first-time homeless, up from 19 percent at the same time last year.
Anecdotally, area shelters say they are serving full houses with, in some cases, record numbers of homeless people and did so all summer — a time when shelter populations typically drop.
In August, the Council Bluffs shelter where the Marsh family is staying, Micah House, served families from 10 states outside Iowa and Nebraska. Last year at this time, it was six states. Year-to-date through August, the Continuum of Care's count at the Omaha area's three emergency shelters tallied 393 people whose last ZIP codes were outside the two states.
Nebraska and Iowa continue to rank among the top in enviably low unemployment rates that are significantly less than the nation's average. The states benefit from diversified economies, including a relatively strong agricultural sector, and older, more educated workers, said economist Eric Thompson with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bureau of Business Research.
Nebraska was even among 18 states where the poverty rate fell in 2008, though it's unknown what happened as the recession continued into 2009, beyond the point measured by the Census Bureau.
Still, neither Nebraska nor Iowa is immune to economic pain. Those who tend to feel it most sit at the bottom of the economic ladder, where any income decrease can mean a jarring lifestyle change.
“If you're living paycheck to paycheck and there's a decline, then you're in real trouble,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute.
And though some economists say indicators point to a recovery under way, it is widely believed that jobs and wages will be slow to follow.
That's bad news for the Marsh family and the others in similarly tenuous situations, as well as for the state and nonprofit agencies trying to help them.
Caseloads for workers at the Iowa Department of Human Services “are really off the charts,” according to the department's spokesman, Roger Munns.
Front-line workers who process applications for food stamps, welfare, Medi- caid and government-subsidized child care have caseloads now “well above 500,” Munns said.
“It used to be that 350 was high,” he said.
MOHM'S Place, a Council Bluffs center that serves meals to the needy, recently put up posters limiting the number of free loaves of bread people could take, because so many people were showing up.
The Municipal Housing Agency of Council Bluffs has a wait list of 300 names — two years long — for Section 8 subsidized rental housing.
A Salvation Army transitional living center in Omaha is seeing families' time there stretch by at least two months because it's taking longer for adults to find jobs. The agency also is getting more requests for assistance from first-time users.
The Omaha-based Nebraska Food Bank, which serves more than 360 agencies in Nebraska and western Iowa, said that while donations have grown 10 percent, need has grown more — by 30 percent.
And several suburban school districts are reporting increases in their free and reduced-price-lunch student population. Bellevue's count, for example, is nearly a third of its student body; last year, one-fourth of the district's children qualified.
“I do think much of this is recession fueled,” said Del Bomberger, executive director of the Stephen Center, a homeless shelter in south Omaha.
Mike and Maggie Marsh had a few strikes against them when they left Omaha in January for the promise of an oil-field job for Mike near Hebron, N.D. Bad choices had led to a disintegration of family support, and the married couple were on their own when they headed north with then-6-month-old Madison.
The oil-field job never panned out; the company had laid off employees when they arrived. But Mike Marsh, who has a background in construction, found a $10.50-an-hour job installing concrete. Maggie Marsh, who has three years of college, got a retail job for less than $8 an hour.
Between the two, they were able to rent a house. Then, Mike Marsh lost his concrete job in June. They had to replace their 1995 Ford Taurus, and the early-1990s Blazer ate up precious gas money during long drives from Hebron to Dickinson (40 miles west) and Bismarck (60 miles east) to apply for other jobs.
On Aug. 22, they landed at Micah House, a 90-person women- or families-only homeless shelter that has been running wait lists of 100 or more.
More than half of the residents sheltered in August were from the Omaha-Council Bluffs area. But the shelter's record of client ZIP codes shows it also housed people from 10 other states: Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Wisconsin.
Last month, residents came from Colorado, Louisiana and California. A family with six children from Oklahoma City called ahead to reserve space.
Serving out-of-state people is not uncommon at Micah House. Serving as many is.
Bobbie Nielsen, Micah House program director, said what draws people here is usually a family or friend connection and the area's reputation for having weathered the recession better.
“They come thinking they can get help from family and friends,” Nielsen said. “Often those family and friends are on the edge also.” And once they get here and the actual cost of putting up someone else becomes apparent, she said, “that's when the struggle really begins.”
Such was the case for unmarried couple Ashley Montgomery and Timothy Pacheco.
Both had their share of problems before the recession hit, but they soon found even low-wage jobs hard to find in the Denver area, where they lived.
They got one-way bus tickets to Omaha on the promise of a friend who could put them up. But the father of the friend's children wanted to move in and wanted the two out.
So Montgomery, 20, and Pacheco, 27, bummed a ride with a stranger to a truck stop in Council Bluffs and spent several nights sleeping outside: in a cornfield, near a gas station and at Carter Lake. They landed at Micah House for a while before they split.
Pacheco got a bus ticket to Oklahoma. Montgomery got picked up by her stepfather, a truck driver, headed back to Denver.
The Marshes have had some luck. Maggie got hired to conduct telephone surveys for $9.75 an hour and a chance of earning more. She was to start Monday.
Mike, meanwhile, has 15 job applications out, and is looking beyond construction.
They can stay at Micah House until Maggie's first paycheck. By then, they hope to be moved into an apartment, helped by a nonprofit agency that provides transitional housing for the homeless.
Contact the writer:
444-1136, erin.grace@owh.com
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