Working, yet homeless

Martin Kuz

Sunday, March 21, 1999 | 9:34 a.m.

The car eased up to the front gate of MASH Village in the predawn hours. From the passenger seat, Ginger Diltz glanced at the driver, her coworker at a downtown casino.

Diltz's friend peered at the fence-enclosed homeless center at 1559 N. Main St. "Looks like a prison," she finally said. But her eyes said something more: "You have a job. Why do you live here?"

Diltz, 35, has absorbed that stare more than once since moving into MASH in August with her husband, Ron, and her five children. She earns $6.50 an hour plus tips as a Keno runner at the Fremont; he makes $6.25 an hour patrolling condominium complexes and trailer parks as a security officer.

The combined income falls shy of what they need to support their family, forcing them into the center -- and into a sizable yet largely invisible demographic known as the working homeless.

"People don't really know what's going on," Ginger Diltz, who doesn't make a habit of telling coworkers where she lives, said. "They're totally innocent about the problem."

Nearly one-fifth of the 12,000 to 18,000 homeless people in the Las Vegas Valley hold part- or full-time jobs, according to the Southern Nevada Homeless Coalition. The presence of 2,400 to 3,600 workers in the local labor force who lack permanent shelter contradicts the stereotype of the homeless as inveterate freeloaders, SNHC Chairman Brian Brooks said.

"Most (homeless) people want nothing more than to be working and getting back on their feet," he said.

"But most people don't realize that the homeless want to work. They think they just want to leech off society. That's not true."

The working homeless stand apart from day laborers and the chronically unemployed who comprise the perennial underclass. Undone by circumstances, bad decisions or both, they are low-income workers seeking respectability -- and a place to call their own.

In Las Vegas the working homeless find themselves stretched between low-wage jobs and a shortage of affordable housing. UNLV's Center for Business and Economic Research pegs the average monthly rental rate for apartments in Clark County at $661. For workers earning $6-$8 an hour who have families to feed, the chasm between their income and the rent can be too wide to bridge, center director Keith Schwer said.

"People are able to get into the work force, but the pay isn't commensurate with their needs," he said.

The Rev. Joe Carroll, president of MASH Village, put the quandary in colder terms: "If you're making $6 an hour, where do you find a place to live in this town?"

The answer is MASH Village, in the Diltzes' case. The couple arrived in Las Vegas last summer after the security company Ron worked for in Oklahoma City closed and transferred him here. Leaving most of their belongings behind in storage, they piled into their Mercury Sable along with the kids, Ginger's brother, a close family friend -- and all of $300 in savings.

Life unraveled from there. The Sable died minutes after chugging over the Hoover Dam. Ron managed to sell the car for $200, and his company chipped in another $100 to help him out. The money enabled the family to stay in a hotel for three days before space became available at MASH.

The family, which lived comfortably enough in public housing in Oklahoma, planned to do the same here, only to learn they would have to wait at least a year for an apartment to open up. But because both had nailed down jobs with the security service, they figured their stay in MASH's transitional-living facility would last at most a few weeks.

Seven months later, they're still stuck in the center's dorm-like rooms, wondering how they ended up like this.

"It's real difficult," Ginger Diltz said in a faint drawl that betrays her Tennessee roots.

"There's times when we become totally stressed out. It feels like we don't have anything."

Ron Diltz, 33, admitted he neglected to research Las Vegas before the move, anticipating that the family would find a way to scrape by. But Clark County's population of 1.25 million almost triples Oklahoma City's, and the cost of living in Las Vegas is considerably higher than he expected.

Now, even with Ginger earning more money at her casino job, the family feels cornered. The children, ages 3 to 15, go stir-crazy in MASH's controlled environs. Ginger frets about the family having no health insurance. Ron, who blames himself for putting them in an uncertain situation, says the anxiety has given him an ulcer.

"Being homeless beats down your pride. It's like jumping up and stomping on it," he said.

"A man is supposed to be taking care of his family -- there's a lot of shame."

Advocates and government officials predict the number of working homeless in Las Vegas could rise as the promise -- some say mirage -- of cheap living and plentiful jobs continues to beckon the working poor. It's a sobering possibility in a city where the fastest-growing segments of the homeless population are women and the elderly.

Finding a place to live in Las Vegas remains a thorny concern for low-income laborers despite a 6 percent to 7 percent vacancy rate in the local rental housing market. The short answer as to why: Landlords typically ask for the first and last months' rent up-front from potential tenants. Tack on security and cleaning deposits, and moving into a $500-a-month, one-bedroom apartment can cost $1,200 to $1,500.

That's far too steep for someone new in town starting a job at around minimum wage, said Ed Ficker, manager of Catholic Charities' employment services center.

"How do you afford that? At $6 an hour, where in the world do you live? You just can't get it done," he said.

Nor does public housing provide much relief. The Clark County Housing Authority has a 98 percent lease rate on its 4,000 units. A year ago the agency stopped taking applications for its rental-assistance program, and currently more than 3,000 people languish on the waiting list. The authority has no plans to accept applications for another six months to a year because of the backlog, Deputy Executive Director Gustavo Ramos said.

Similarly, the 2,000 applicants for the agency's low-income housing program will wait an average of 18 months to slide to the top of the list. Overall, Ramos estimated that the agency meets "maybe 20 percent" of the valley's public-housing demand.

Frustrated by the delay, low-income workers will compound their woes by turning to weekly apartments, which often charge higher rent than monthly complexes over a 30-day span. The weekly rate drains their savings, and all too soon a steady paycheck may not be enough to keep them off the streets or out of a shelter.

"If you're making $6, $7, $8 an hour and you have a family to support, that's not going to do it," Brooks said.

"You can be homeless faster than most people realize."

The reality of that prospect holds true even though Las Vegas teems with jobs in the hospitality and service industries.

Caretakers of the city image love to boast of Las Vegas' job-rich economy and its 3 percent unemployment rate. Left unadvertised is that many of those jobs hover close to the $5.15 minimum wage, Ron Huffman said. He is the supervisor of the Community Employment and Training Center in Las Vegas, an agency that helps the jobless find work as part of the state Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation.

"People think, 'Las Vegas -- the gaming capital of the world.' But a lot of the jobs that people get are service-oriented. Therefore, the salaries are low," Huffman said.

Unions not the answer

Moreover, the common retort to anyone who grouses about low wages -- join a union -- remains misguided, Huffman said. First, the working homeless often lack the money to sign up for one. And even if they do join, months may pass before they land a better-paying position -- unions dole out jobs based on seniority, giving dibs to laid-off workers and longtime members.

Greeted by higher costs and lower wages than expected, those migrating to Las Vegas also must cope with isolation from friends and family. In a town where everyone hails from somewhere else, low-income workers have no one to pull them back when illness, divorce, an eviction or some other calamity pushes them to the brink of homelessness.

"When you get in trouble in Las Vegas, you're really in trouble," Carroll said. "You don't have anyone to turn to. You're on your own. You don't want to ask your family for help -- they told you not to go to Las Vegas in the first place."

Mary Porter has felt the distance, physically and emotionally, from loved ones. A MASH Village resident since July 1997, she nurtures a touch-and-go relationship with her 34-year-old daughter, who lives in Dallas. Porter, 60, never married the father of her child, and she rarely has contact with friends and relatives in her native Iowa.

Fed up with the tight job market in Los Angeles, Porter moved to Las Vegas in 1987. She battled through a series of retail and secretarial jobs, bottoming out after she quit working for a now-defunct plasma center. The strain of that job saddled Porter with severe depression, a condition that kept her bedridden for three months in early 1997.

Carrying no money and less hope, her belongings stored in a friend's car, Porter dragged herself to MASH out of desperation. The center gave her a chance to breathe again, and these days she earns minimum wage as a part-time receptionist for the Nevada Department of Parole and Probation office in Henderson. She rises at 4 a.m. on Wednesdays and Thursdays to catch the bus across town to be at work by 8, but as Porter sees it, the early hours beat unemployment.

Besides, amid the "super snorers, super coughers and the wheezers and the ones who sleepwalk" in the women's communal-living center at MASH, a good night's rest is hard to come by, Porter said.

"You have to want to make it in life. You have to figure out what you want to do when you grow up," she said, laughing.

Hard work, not handouts

In that regard, MASH, Catholic Charities and other shelters offer employment programs that provide the homeless with job skills -- and a shot at once more living on their own.

MASH's transitional-living services include everything from substance-abuse counseling and anger-management classes to resume preparation and computer training. The facility holds 300 residents who can stay for a maximum of two years, paying 30 percent of their income as rent. Those who "graduate" from the program are eligible for reimbursement, Carroll said.

Catholic Charities' job service reintroduces homeless men to the work force, first through day labor and later with part- and full-time jobs. Ficker mans the phone trying to scrounge up 2,000 casual labor jobs a month for the program's 200 men, whether cleaning up construction sites or moving furniture. The results: Through the latter half of 1998 and the first two months of this year, 297 residents walked away from Catholic Charities with full-time jobs.

Both centers encourage residents to stick around at least until they complete the probationary period at their new job. Although premature turnover in the job program is inevitable, the philosophy aims at curbing recidivism while underscoring that hard work, not a handout, keeps a person off the streets, Ficker said.

"Just giving people food and a place to flop doesn't accomplish anything. If you just give it to them, they don't appreciate it. They expect a free ride," he said.

"Now, when a guy leaves here, he's got three to four months' rent saved up, he has a little stability. He's going to make it. He's not going to be back here."

That's the path Lee, 46, a worker in the Catholic Charities job office, intends to follow. A longtime roulette dealer who burned out on the casino business and fell on hard times, Lee, who asked that his last name not be used, has lived at the center since late last year. His stint in the job office has allowed him to learn more about computers, a skill he intends to parlay into a career once he's ready to leave the facility.

"I've been unsure of what I want to do, and this is a way of making a change slowly. I don't want to rush anything," he said.

Eager to move on

Excuse Ron and Ginger Diltz if they're a little less patient. They hope to depart MASH next month if they can save enough money to move into an $800-a-month three-bedroom apartment.

They paid about half that much for a government-subsidized unit of the same size in Oklahoma, but at this point, they'll take it. The Diltzes simply want some privacy, enough space for their stuff -- provided they find a way to haul it over from Oklahoma -- and a sense of self-sufficiency.

They simply want a home.

"Right now I basically think of myself as a middle-class homeless person," Ron said. "You just have to grin and bear it. We're trying."

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