Little help for families down on their luck

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, Aug. 12, 2005 | 5:17 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

August 13-14, 2005

Next to a broken-down school bus in a Henderson lot one recent morning, a copy of Dr. Seuss' "Cat in the Hat" sat on an upside-down table.

Surrounded by at least a dozen cars and trucks, piles of scrap metal and puddles of grease and oil, the bus was home to 26-year-old Angela Dima, a single mother of two girls, ages 4 and 18 months.

"I brought my whole life with me," Dima said, motioning to the table and bags that lay around it.

Hers is one of dozens of homeless families who have found it hard to juggle child care, the search for work and a place to live and coping with temperatures in or near the 100s in a valley with few services for families down on their luck.

More than 50 families have sought help with those issues since early July, said Terry Lindemann, director of Family Promise, a nonprofit organization.

Those families -- and Lindemann -- are reaching frustration's limits, she says, because they are finding nothing but blind alleys in their search for a way off the streets.

Chronically homeless men may use the most resources in shelters and other programs, but it is families who face the greatest risk from homelessness.

"Always among them there are going to be children," Lindemann said.

She says there needs to be day shelter in the summer for families and a night shelter year-round, as well as more affordable housing and child care to help families such as Dima's.

And in the short term, there ought to be one phone number serving as a source of information on all services in the valley so people such as Dima don't spend most of their days calling around for help -- usually to find there is none, Lindemann said.

Families, many of whom don't have cars, wind up taking buses or walking from one closed door to the next.

Dima did it in 115-degree heat.

A look at Dima and her daughters, and Margaret Woods and her four children -- another family who recently called Lindemann for help -- shows the obstacles families without housing face.

Dima said she put her daughters and belongings in a car in Prescott, Ariz., on July 17 after her boyfriend -- the father of Jade, her 18-month-old daughter -- walked out on them.

After nearly three years with him, he had recently lost a job, become increasingly violent and had begun smoking methamphetamine and drinking, she said.

The Prescott Police confirmed that her boyfriend had been arrested three times since May 2004, twice for domestic violence-related charges. Dima had complained to the police "a bunch of times," a police clerk said.

Lindemann said about 30 percent of the calls she gets are from single mothers who say they are fleeing domestic violence.

Dima chose Las Vegas because her mother, Jayne Dima, lives here. On the way, less than an hour away, Angela Dima's car ran out of gas. She didn't have a dime after calling her mother, who had to drive down U.S. 93 to rescue them, she said.

But Jayne Dima lives in her truck driver boyfriend's house with his parents, who suffer a range of ailments. So when Dima and her children arrived, they wound up sleeping in a broken-down school bus that Jayne Dima's boyfriend had stored in a lot with other cars and trucks that he works on.

A runaround

Sitting recently in the school bus as it started to bake under the midmorning sun, Dima had just said, "dinner," when she meant to say,"breakfast."

"It's just that the days are so long," she said, partially to herself. Her eyes became moist.

She laid out the events of her first week in Las Vegas.

On Monday, July 18, she unloaded her U-Haul in the lot next to the bus.

On Tuesday, July 19, she went to the state welfare office since she had been receiving $300 a month in rental assistance and $300 in food stamps in Arizona.

She was told it would take until August to get her benefits transferred. The clerk at the welfare office gave her a list of services in the valley.

The following day, armed with the list, her mother took her to Shade Tree, the valley's only shelter for women.

She said she was interviewed, shown to a bunk bed with her children, and while she was figuring out what to do next, an employee asked her what she was doing there. The employee told her the shelter's rules were that the girls could not eat without socks.

Dima said she had no socks with her; she said the employee repeated the rule.

Dima went back to the parking lot and caught up with her mother. The four of them gave up on the shelter, thinking something better must be out there.

Dima called Lindemann and was put on Family Promise's waiting list.

Family Promise is a network of 19 churches, synagogues and mosques that shelter up to four homeless families at a time, on a rotating basis. Lindemann and her staff work with the families on plans to get them into housing.

Recently, the organization acquired an apartment. One family at a time can live there for up to three months once the family's situation has stabilized.

Family Promise is the only area program that allows families to stay together while they are getting on their feet, Lindemann said.

Shade Tree is for women and children. The Las Vegas Rescue Mission downtown has spots for single fathers and spots for single mothers, up to a week at a time. The Salvation Army also allows parents of each gender to stay with their children, separated from single men and women by tables in a large room. Families can stay up to 30 days in that shelter.

By the middle of her first week in the valley, Dima had used her mother's cell phone to call all the shelters in town. They were full -- including Safe House, a shelter for victims of domestic violence.

On Friday, July 22, she applied for Clark County Social Service's rental assistance, a voucher the agency provides to eligible individuals or families when a willing landlord is found.

She left the office having qualified, but with no idea where to find an apartment at $625 a month.

Some of this was done with her mother giving her a lift. Some was done using the bus.

She also noticed about halfway through the week that one thing she hadn't brought with her from Arizona was medicine for her depression.

Getting more would mean another day in her schedule -- a visit to a state mental health clinic, a diagnosis, a prescription.

But first, a roof. Or a job. Or day care. She wasn't sure, she said.

"It's almost as if we expect them (homeless families) to have a plan before they become homeless." Lindemann said.

Children in danger

Margaret Woods said she came to Las Vegas with a plan for her four children, her cousin and her cousin's 2-month-old daughter.

She said she saved up $1,500 from what she earned as a cook while staying at a Salvation Army shelter for three months in San Bernardino, Calif.

She said she sent the money to the landlord of a Las Vegas apartment she located on the Internet, and packed her extended family of seven into a Ford Crown Victoria.

When she got to Las Vegas, however, there was no apartment; she said it had been condemned.

Her time in Las Vegas by late July included staying seven days -- the maximum -- at the Las Vegas Rescue Mission; getting thrown out of Shade Tree when her 15-year-old daughter, Shakira, got into an argument with another teen; and sleeping one night in front of the women's shelter.

That night, Shakira slept on the hood of the car, while Woods' cousin Kim sat up all night on the sidewalk, keeping guard.

The next morning, the families got into the car and rode to a park at D Street and Washington Avenue for breakfast.

There, Woods said, a pair of Las Vegas marshals came up and asked them if they had slept in the car the night before. They asked about the baby's safety in the heat.

The marshals had Woods and her family follow them in her car as they basically retraced steps the family had already taken: the Rescue Mission had already sheltered them, Shade Tree had kicked them out, other shelters were full.

The marshals then took them to Child Haven, a shelter run by the Clark County Family Services Department.

Woods said she was asked to fill out forms on herself, her cousin and her children. She thought she would be helped into housing.

The marshals asked her to leave the building to get some paperwork in the car. When she and Kim were outside, the officers told them the children would be staying in the shelter for their own safety.

She said the marshals wouldn't let them go back into the shelter to say goodbye or leave clothes for the children, or tell Child Haven officials about how to care for their children.

"When I asked them if we could say goodbye, they said it would just make it harder," Woods said, sobbing as she sat on the curb.

"They took my babies ... the police lied to me."

Diana Paul, Las Vegas city government spokeswoman, said the children were left at Child Haven "because we felt the parents were unable to adequately provide for the children, and we were concerned with their welfare and lack of necessities."

Family Court Judge Gerald Hardcastle said "the law says children can be removed from parents if the children are in imminent danger" and that "it becomes a judgment call on the part of authorities" about which situations are dangerous.

At the same time, he said, "the law doesn't talk about how to handle the details of removing children" adding, "marshals aren't trained social workers and may be subject to some review."

Paul did not comment on how the children were removed.

Susan Klein-Rothschild, Family Services director, said the law prohibited her from commenting on an open case, but that her agency's policy is "to try to engage parents, let them know what's going on and make a plan."

She said the overriding goal is to reunite children with their parents or other family members.

She added that she believes "it's deplorable to lie."

As for whether this is happening with other homeless families, Lindemann said, "I've been told by every homeless family living in cars that police come and take children away from them."

Paul, the city spokeswoman said, "This is the first incident we've had like this this year."

One step at a time

Like Dima, Woods said she called shelters and programs around town from a list for days, seeking everything from diapers to a place to spend the night, only to find answering machines. She has her own cell phone.

"I hear that a lot -- that people don't get their calls answered," Lindemann said.

That is another reason one phone number is needed that could ring at a centralized location where information on all available services could be updated daily.

Meanwhile, Woods and Dima eventually ran into the director of Straight From the Streets, Linda Lera-Randle El. As her organization's name implies, she is one of the few people who comb the valley's streets trying to help the homeless.

She explained to each family the systems in which they had become involved and tried to walk them through a plan.

Woods has since been in court several times and still has not been reunited with her children because social workers are interested in seeing the family develop a more stable situation.

On July 20, a Family Services social worker said the children would be released to the Los Angeles foster care system if they went back to California. Woods decided she didn't want that and began putting together a plan -- an application for a telemarketer's job and Clark County Social Service's rental assistance -- to build a life in Las Vegas.

Klein-Rothschild said her agency's investigation will result in recommendations meant to "minimize the risk of harm" and repeated that her agency's goal is to reunite children with parents or other family.

Meanwhile, Lera-Randle El put Woods and her cousin up in weekly motels.

As for Dima, she finally squared away an apartment with the county's rental voucher Wednesday at the Moulin Rouge apartments downtown, one of the few area locations left where a single person can find a room with a $369 voucher, or a family such as Dima's, with $625.

Dima still doesn't have her welfare benefits in place, but that's just as well since getting them would mean she would no longer qualify for the county vouchers.

Meanwhile Dima and the children have also gotten lost on the bus en route to several false starts with programs that couldn't help them.

And Lindemann's program remains full and overwhelmed by calls for help, which she thinks has something to do with the recent heat wave. She thinks the heat drives homeless families over the edge and into the search for a way out.

"A lot of these people may be couch surfers, and then the people with whom they're staying get tired of them, or they're living in abandoned homes or cars and it gets too hot," she said.

Meanwhile, since what little shelters there are often won't take intact families, or breaks them up according to gender, Lindemann said most families on the street seek one thing:

"They're trying desperately to get to a place where they can remain together."