Hidden homeless: A dive into Bonner County’s growing problem

Joanne Barlow has a waiting list of nearly 30 people looking for somewhere to live.

At 75, Barlow, a retired social worker and director for Bonner Homeless Transitions, fields calls every day — both from people looking for long-term housing, and those seeking temporary shelter.

Sometimes the calls are from people who just got off the train, or people living in their cars, or homeless teenagers. Sometimes she gets calls from people who come up to ski and mistake the program for some sort of hostel.

Barlow stresses, though, that Homeless Transitions isn’t a shelter — it’s a program that charges a reduced rent for people who can’t afford normal housing prices. And for the past several years, it’s been completely filled up.

Residents at Bonner Homeless Transitions pay rent, and are required to be working within 30 days of their arrival. There are strict rules about outside visitors, and no drugs or alcohol allowed.

Still, when Barlow pulled up the waiting list on a dreary September day, there were 27 people in line, including families and individuals, with no openings.

“When I start calling people, you know, that 27 will shrink, people have moved on or whatever,” she said. “But I get daily calls.”

Homelessness in North Idaho

In 2018, Idaho had 27,716 households where severe housing costs burdened living in poverty, a 28% increase from 2017, and 16,108 households doubled up and living in poverty, a 74% increase from 2017, according to endhomelessness.org.

“I call them the hidden homeless,” Barlow said. “You don't see the homeless in Sandpoint, as you do in big cities. You do not see them laying in the streets or whatever. They're hidden. They're hidden in the hills and hidden in tents. They're hidden wherever they can.”

Some, although not all, of Idaho’s homeless choose to live outside and away from people.

Phillip Minton, 71, said he has lived in an encampment near the lake for the past two years, which he keeps hidden and camouflaged. He calls himself homeless by choice, although he was also recently approved for subsidized housing, and keeps a flier with photos of the apartment he’s hoping for in his wallet.

“I get along well with animals and the woods, and that is the truth,” he said. “I'm in your world not of it.”

But even accounting for homeless individuals who might be willing, or even happy to live in a way traditionally thought of as homeless, many others are not.

For many Idaho residents living paycheck to paycheck, there’s little to no money leftover to save, and even briefly losing one’s income can lead to eviction.

Tomi O’Fallon said she had never expected to become homeless. Her family wasn’t poor, and the local resident had a job. But a while back, O’Fallon hit a rough patch in her life and lost her job as a caregiver.

“I was homeless and unemployed all at once,” she said.

O’Fallon started coming to the Monday night soup kitchen at the Hoot Owl Cafe in Ponderay, which serves many community members with and without housing, because she met the organizer, Savannah Mort, through a mutual friend, she said.

O’Fallon is no longer homeless, but said finding people she could connect with was a huge help for her. For a while, she took a break from coming because of the COVID-19 pandemic. When she returned, people remembered her and asked where she had been. Being cared for and having a community, she said, made a huge difference in getting back on her feet.

“It's not just a meal,” she said. “These people wait on you like it's a privilege to know you … The other soup kitchens don't do that. And it's not criticism. But this is like, this is something pretty special.”

Community is an essential part of helping people out of homelessness, said James Noriega, executive director of Union Gospel Mission.

His organization is different from others in the area in that it is heavily faith-based. Homeless men are provided housing as part of a program but also required to follow certain rules. Residents do chores, have daily Bible studies and eat meals together.

Much as the name suggests, spreading the gospel, and using faith-based approaches to personal growth, are key tenets of Noriega’s program. But even aside from that, he believes there is one thing that sits at the root of every case he’s encountered:

“The same problem threads through [each case],” he said. “Community failed them somewhere. And they were left to figure it out alone. We were never designed that way. I don't care if you are a Christian or not a Christian, we were just made to be communal, interdependent, not independent. And once we lose that, we're going to medicate it, it's just too tough to be alone. It's too lonely, it's too painful.”

On one particular Monday evening, O’Fallon was at the Hoot Owl with a new friend she met there, Mark Broggi. Broggi has never been homeless, he said, but he’s come to the soup kitchen for a while and knows several of the locals who are.

One problem he’s seen affect many homeless individuals is a lack of mental health care, he said. Generally speaking, connections between poor mental health and homelessness have been well-documented for decades.

Anecdotally, Broggi said he’s seen many homeless individuals with some sort of mental health problem that goes unaddressed. One woman he spoke to, Broggi said, was an example of this.

“I just felt like she was just so happy that I took five minutes to talk to her that morning,” Broggi said. “I felt sad watching some of the people walking through the square that just took a big wide arc around her. And all she was saying was, ‘Hi, good morning.’”

More challenges ahead

Homelessness is not a new problem, but it seems to be getting worse. If a lack of mental health care or community support makes people vulnerable to homelessness, the fact that the county has a limited number of jobs that will support most local housing costs often keep people there, Barlow said.

Homeless Transitions has been serving the community for decades. But particularly in the last few years, Barlow said, there’s a greater need than she can accommodate.

Shirley Paulison, community engagement liaison for Community Action Partnership in Sandpoint, said in her 20 years in Bonner County it has never been more difficult to find affordable housing.

“We are a community in crisis right now,” she said. “There’s nowhere to live unless you have a really good job. With COVID especially, it’s gotten really bad.”

It’s still uncertain exactly how many people are truly homeless, Barlow said. As director of Homeless Transitions, she’s tried to write grants for research into the homeless population in the county, but those always fell through and collecting data on homelessness can be difficult.

Agencies like the National Alliance to End Homelessness report some homelessness statistics by state, with Idaho estimated to have 2,315 homeless as of 2019 and 13.2 homeless people per 10,000 residents. But those official estimates may be lower than the reality, Barlow said.

In North Idaho, a few different factors come into play: First, many residents are private and don’t want to share personal information. Some, like Minton, live outside in tents or shacks with no running water or electricity. By most official standards those residents would be considered homeless, but they don’t always see it that way, she said.

The final problem, Barlow said, is that there is often a stigma associated with homelessness. Some homeless people may worry they’ll be judged, or thought of as lazy.

O’Fallon said she remembers being worried people would judge her when she first started coming to the soup kitchen, she said, because she didn’t “look” like she was struggling.

“I still have nice clothes from when, you know — like ‘oh, this rich lady goes to the soup kitchen.’”

It is true that some people who’ve spent a long time with the assistance of programs such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs or Supplemental Security Income feel reliant on them, Barlow said. Those individuals usually never had the same opportunities or stability as their peers, and never learned how to do things such as manage a budget.

“[One resident], we got her a good job and she's making $25 or $30 [an hour]. She moved on,” Barlow said. “She was so excited. And then she asked me if she would still qualify for food stamps … It's scary to all of a sudden — you don't have that as a backup. Yeah, getting people moved on to the point where they're self-sufficient, sometimes is difficult because they've been in the system for so long.”

But many homeless residents do work, and even have full-time jobs, Barlow said. And today, those jobs often are not enough.

Usually, Barlow said, Bonner Homeless Transitions can alleviate the reason a person was homeless within a year. Residents get help to get on their feet and find jobs, she said. Normally that would mean they are able to transfer to rent outside of the program within a few months. But recently, even when residents get full-time jobs, it’s not always enough.

But in the past several years, Barlow’s ability to move her residents on has stagnated for two reasons, she said: Low wages, and high-cost, high-demand housing.

“We can't turn them over like we used to, because there's — they can't rent because of affordable housing,” she said. “That's the main thing right now that that would alleviate a lot of different issues.”

Noriega, who said he sees the need for community and addressing internal struggles to be some of the biggest problems causing homelessness, said he’s had trouble finding a place for the men who are ready to move on from the Gospel Mission. In his case, there is often a heightened uneasiness among potential landlords to rent to the men he works with, Noriega said.

“I just think it's a scary venture for people to house what was once a homeless person, or addicted, or recently jailed,” he said. “I have a guy [who’s been] turned down for housing quite a few times since I've been here, just solely because of his incarceration and that's part of that systemic issue,” he said.

Even for those who qualify for subsidized housing or other assistance, it can be nearly impossible to find somewhere to stay, Barlow said. The wait time for subsidized housing in Sandpoint is around two years.

For Paulison, many of her clients are people with disabilities or seniors on a fixed income. The rest, she said, are either working or looking for work. But just like Barlow’s clients, they run into the same problems. Low wages, high rental costs, and limited availability of subsidized housing.

“I have folks who have a disabled dad, [and] he has a housing voucher,” she said. “He can’t find a home. He’s homeless.”

Even when not accounting for other factors that contribute to homelessness, one definite reality for many Bonner County residents, Barlow said, is that even for those who have a job, housing security is not guaranteed.

“The wages have to match what the housing is. Because they're just — it's impossible,” she said.

Just as there are numerous reasons for homelessness, it isn’t a single solution to fix the problem. Individual homeless residents may need mental health support or help from their community and, at a larger scale, rapidly increasing housing costs and stagnant wages are also to blame.

Regardless of the numerous causes, and possible solutions to combat homelessness, it’s unlikely the situation will improve in the near future without a major intervention. Communities across the country may also see a spike in homelessness as the federal eviction moratorium is set to end in January.

“The moratorium on evictions ends Dec. 31,” Paulison said. “What is this community going to be like on Jan. 1?”

Rachel Sun can be reached at rsun@bonnercountydailybee.com and followed on Twitter @RachelDailyBee.