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Homeless in Fauquier
This is the first in a series of stories on homelessness in Fauquier County.In the fourth month of her pregnancy with twin boys, Nicole Thornley was ordered to bed rest. Unable to continue in her job as a massage therapist, she watched helplessly as the family’s bills began to pile up. Without her income, she and her husband, B.J., couldn’t keep up, falling behind on payments and eventually getting evicted from their Marshall home.
Born in May 2005, one of the twins, Micah, had a severe cranial-facial birth defect that required intensive care and an extended hospital stay. When he missed too much work caring for his wife and newborns, B.J. lost his job.
Thankfully, they were able to lean on family for help. Nicole’s mother took in her oldest son, Corey, for several months, and the couple shared a room in B.J.’s parents’ home with the infants.
“We had this tiny room, not even a small bedroom, more like a little office. There was the twin bed, the cribs, and dressers stacked on top of each other,” Thornley recalled. “We were miserable. We lived like that for almost a year.”
Though both Nicole and B.J. had been working full time, it didn’t take much to push them over the edge into homelessness. That’s true, in fact, for most of Fauquier County’s homeless population.
Long considered one of the wealthiest counties in the state, Fauquier County has a problem with which most of its residents are unaware. Though you don’t see them sleeping on the streets, the number of homeless people in the community is growing, pushed by a worsening economic picture as well as by social conditions.
“So many people in our society live close to the edge, but many of our folks don’t have family as the back up that we have,” said Ed Childress, executive director for Fauquier Family Shelter Services, the agency that oversees The Haven, an emergency homeless shelter in Warrenton, as well as Vint Hill Transitional Housing, a two-year program that helps the homeless regain stability.
Fauquier is also home to Victory Transitional House, a one-year program operated by Community Touch near Bealeton.
“It’s usually not just one issue that brings people to the shelter,” said Sabine Scholz, a case manager at The Haven.
Others familiar with the problem agree, citing a wide range of causes of homelessness, from stagnant wages, rising costs for basic needs, and increases in health care, to relationship break ups, substance abuse, and mental illness.
Interviews with residents of all three local homeless shelters bear out their assessment. These residents ? white and black, young and old ? each have a story to tell, revealing the unique but not uncommon set of circumstances that led them down the path of homelessness.
“Wages for the working poor have remained constant and housing costs have continued to grow,” said Childress. “When I was a kid, there was a janitor that worked in my school who had a family about the same size as mine, and they lived with dignity. You can’t find that anymore,” he said.
Financial advisors urge people to save money and create a cushion on which to live in emergencies. For many, that’s simply impossible as they scrape by paycheck to paycheck to live, said Childress. For others, the problem is that they have never learned the budgeting skills necessary to build a savings account and strong credit.
Well-publicized problems in the housing industry have also had an impact on those living on the edge in Fauquier, according to Tyronne Champion , executive director of Community Touch.
For the first time since his shelter opened in November 2003, Champion is greeting people at his doorstep who have been displaced by foreclosure. “They have no place to go. It’s a tough housing market, and that’s making it worse this year,” he said.
Annie Cato, program coordinator at Vint Hill concurred, noting she has received a ton of inquiries from people who reference pending foreclosures.
“Population pressures have created sky-high housing costs,” Childress added. “It’s scary because lots of folks are caught in that situation.”
Add those facts to rising gasoline and food prices, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster for many people who find their paycheck is not enough to cover it all. “If your salary remains constant and the cost to fill up your car goes up, you’re in trouble,” said Childress.
Increases in health care costs are another huge problem, Childress said. “Just about everybody here (at Vint Hill Transitional Housing) is here because of health care costs. They’ve been uninsured or underinsured. I’m not sure anybody here is here only because of health care costs, but it’s certainly a contributing factor.”
Social issues are another huge part of the problem.
“We see a lot of young moms with young children. The relationship falls apart with the man, or there is job loss, and they can no longer afford to rent,” Childress said. “Or, she has had no job and has no money,” he added, describing a common situation among residents at The Haven.
Often, these displaced women will turn to family for help initially. “The family takes them in, it starts off with good intentions, but the fiscal burden is too much,” said shelter coordinator Rick Avery of The Haven.
The vast majority of participants in the Vint Hill program are single women, said Cato.
“We have a lot of situations with single moms who don’t receive child support. Right now, only one of 12 single women in the program receives child support from her children’s father,” she said. “With high child-care expenses, these women really need that support. In some cases, that has thrown them into homelessness.”
In many cases at The Haven, women are unemployed or underemployed, having relied upon their man for support.
Shelby Randall, for instance, is a 30-year-old mother of two who had been living with her boyfriend and hadn’t worked since 2005. When troubles at home forced her out, she had no job, no family nearby, and nowhere to go.
“We see a lot young people,” said Scholz, adding that the shelter is also home to a large number of elderly residents who cannot make it on a fixed income or who are out of work with no place to go. “We get self-employed, accomplished people, who poured all of their money back into their business and don’t have a cushion.”
Some women have battered women’s syndrome and still other residents have experienced emotional trauma with which they’ve been unable to deal.
“Probably 60 percent [of The Haven’s residents] have had problems with alcohol or drug abuse,” said Avery, noting that active use is not tolerated at any of the facilities.
The next installment of this series will address how the three local homeless shelters work together, and independently, to offer residents hope for the future, balanced with concrete plans to help them stand on their own.
E-mail the reporter: lruby@timespapers.com .
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