The Changing Face of Homelessness
Part 1

On a hot Texas night, a young couple looked up into the sky and saw a blue moon. The man, a Native American, told his wife that a blue moon heralded big changes. After going through a streak of hard luck, everything would come out fine in the end, he said.

That was seven months ago.

The man is now in jail for a parole violation and the woman was kicked out of her lodging and fled north to Virginia where she lives with their two children, and the one not yet born, in a homeless shelter.

Shannon now hopes for the sunny side of the blue moon.

She still remembers his parting words. "'Just go to your parents in Virginia and we'll start all over,' he said. 'With a new baby that's just wonderful. That's what we need.'"

Shannon has lived at ESI Connections, a shelter in downtown Richmond, for three weeks now.

She's trying to get off drugs and alcohol and secure a better life for her two young children, ages 3 and 4, and the baby she'll have in five months.

With help from the shelter staff, she's gotten regular prenatal appointments, daycare for her children and public assistance.

She hopes to get her education back on track and become a nurse.

While to her, the troubles of being homeless are very personal, Shannon and her preschool-age children are part of the changing face of homelessness in America and in Virginia.

In the popular mind, a man with dirty, ragged clothes holding a cardboard sign begging for help symbolizes homelessness.

Beneath that stereotype lies a different reality, however -- the legions of women and children who are living in the streets, in shelters, in cars, in transitional housing or doubled up with relatives and friends.

Today in America more than 600,00 families and more than 1 million children are homeless, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Families represent almost 40 percent of the homeless population, a portion that's nearly one and a half times what it was in 1985, according to a U.S. Conference of Mayors report.

From the 1980s to the present, several trends have contributed to this new social ill.

Cutbacks in welfare benefits, rapidly increasing rents and a lack of low-income housing jeopardized the stability of people with low or fixed incomes.

Simultaneously, the number of female-headed households dramatically increased.

The population of homeless families swelled from negligible numbers to the current figures.

Nationally and locally, children under the age of five make up roughly 40 percent of all homeless children.

Women and children make up the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population in the nation and here in Richmond.

To give just one staggering indication of the problem, the National Coalition for the Homeless reports that nationally, the average age of a homeless person is 9 years old.

That's the age when children should be entering the fourth grade, learning their multiplication tables, accelerating their reading abilities, playing sports for a team or just hanging out and playing Nintendo with other kids.

But homeless women and their young children lead lives marked by trials and tribulations that many can only imagine: crowded, unsanitary and unsafe conditions; frequent moves; domestic violence; illness; deep poverty; and despair.

to Part 2...