Ineligible for shelter, family lives in minivan

Robin Lemieux, a single mother of four from Haverhill, lives with her children in the family's eight-year-old Dodge Caravan.

With almost all the family's income going to food, car payments, and fees to store their possessions, Lemieux said she cleans houses and does her best to provide for her family.

Evicted from her apartment in May and earning $294 a week as a housekeeper, Lemieux, 39, recently learned that the money she earns and the $500 a month in federal disability benefits her 10-year-old son receives for bipolar disorder disqualify her family from staying at one of the state's 90 shelters for homeless families.

"It's ridiculous; they're treating me as if I'm rich," she said, after officials denied her application for shelter.

The decision by caseworkers at the state Department of Transitional Assistance followed an announcement this month that the welfare agency had stopped a practice that cost the state more than $50 million over the past six years. Last August, the agency paid on average about $100 a night for 599 families to stay in motels; this month, officials reduced the number to zero and vowed not to resume putting families in motels.

The question, homeless advocates now ask, is where are all the homeless families and how many have ended up like the Lemieuxs?

"With the complexity of rules and regulations governing the state's emergency family shelter system, hundreds of families experiencing homelessness are denied access to shelter," said Robyn Frost, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless. "Without the safety net of shelter, these families are left with few choices and often seek shelter in untenable situations, such as overcrowded double-ups, campgrounds, the streets, or in their cars."

While state officials declined to comment on Lemieux's case, they said they have made progress in the past year to help homeless families, who in fiscal 2004 received $70 million in state aid, an increase of more than 80 percent since 1999. The welfare agency's progress, they said, includes self-sufficiency plans for every homeless family, an increase in fiscal 2004 of nearly 150 rooms at state shelters, and pilot programs that have put families directly into state-subsidized apartments, rather than motel rooms.

In the past year, the agency placed an additional 208 employed homeless families in private apartments with 12-month leases. The agency paid $6,000 for each lease; in the past few years, it would often cost the state as much as $3,000 a month to keep a family in a motel, and on average families stayed there for about six months.

Changes over the past year have added capacity to the shelter system, removed bottlenecks, and moved more than a thousand homeless families into housing, agency officials said. But the income limits, they acknowledged, mean that their reach is limited and that many of the working poor like Lemieux often have to fend for themselves to find affordable housing.

"Family homelessness continues to be a very big issue," said John Wagner, the welfare agency's commissioner. "But there are certain issues that are meant to be addressed by the emergency shelter system and others by affordable housing. . . . We don't have flexibility in determining state laws."

The main problem, advocates for the homeless said, results from rules passed by the Legislature in recent years that have made families such as the Lemieuxs ineligible for shelter. Two years ago, lawmakers reduced the annual income limit for a family of four to qualify for emergency assistance, from $24,505 to $18,850. Last year, they voted to count Supplemental Security Income from the federal government as part of a family's income.

The results, advocates said, are visible in statistics the Legislature requested for the first time this year from the welfare agency: Of nearly 3,000 families who applied for shelter in the first six months of this year, the agency denied rooms to 50 percent.

The rules implemented in the past two years put Lemieux $150 over the monthly income limit.

For her and an unknown number of others, the state's income limits and a general lack of affordable housing mean that the best option for her children is the cluttered minivan, which she parks in lots around Haverhill or various remote places in the area, until police tell her to move.

Since her last landlord evicted her over a dispute about heating, Lemieux said, she and her children have camped out in a tent borrowed from friends, unsuccessfully sought housing and benefits in New Hampshire, and from time to time have stayed at her 73-year-old mother's one-bedroom apartment. She would stay with her more often, but her mother lives in a housing complex for the elderly, which only allows visitors a few days a year, she says.

"Right now, I have nowhere to turn," Lemieux said. "I feel like there's no one out there to help us."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.