It’s always been tough for Kathy Campbell to make ends meet. Moving from apartment to apartment and job to job, she said she doesn’t have a place to call home.

Campbell barely makes enough money to pay her rent, let alone her monthly utilities and food expenses, even with the little help she gets from welfare. To complicate matters, she has to provide for her 2 1/2-year-old son, Christopher, with day care, costing an additional $400 each month.

Campbell applied for welfare so she would have enough money to buy food and clothes for her son.

“I would never ask for help if it wasn’t for Christopher,” she said. “It’s hard to admit you can’t make it by yourself.

“Last month we received $73 of food stamps — that lasted only a few weeks. This month they cut it back to $54. Who knows if we’ll get anything next month?” Campbell said. “Every time you get ahead, they take away any help they gave you, and you are right back to where you started.”

Campbell works 12-hour days as a baker in the Memorial Union on the Iowa State campus. With little aid from welfare and no child support from Christopher’s father, Campbell’s paycheck represents her only income.

Though she attended college for three years in California, her job prospects were slim. She moved to the Ames area from San Diego a year ago, thinking the cost of living in the Midwest would make it easier for her and her son to find a decent place to stay.

After a losing battle to find an apartment she could afford near the Union, Campbell and her son are without a place to stay — they are homeless.

Out of desperation, Campbell visited the Emergency Residence Project, a homeless shelter in Ames, looking for a safe place to stay, but the shelter was full. She and Christopher were turned away.

Not uncommon

Vic Moss, Director of the Ames Emergency Residence Project, has to turn away families like Campbell’s all the time. During the busier summer months, Moss said his two shelter facilities are almost always at maximum capacity.

According to the 1990 census, 14 percent of Story County’s population lives below the poverty level. The census also found that 4 percent of ISU students live below the poverty level.

Moss said those statistics show that Ames is definitely not a “user-friendly town.”

Not including the number of students living below the poverty level — since for many, the situation is not permanent — nearly 8,000 people, or 3,000 households in Story County, live below the poverty level. Poverty is defined by an income of $12,000 a year or less for a family of three, with another $2,000 factored for each additional family member.

Moss opened the Emergency Residence Project’s doors at 225 South Kellogg Ave. 10 years ago to provide short-term shelter, food and care for homeless people in the area. The shelter is operated by a board of directors that represents 16 local religious and social service organizations.

Moss lives with his family at the shelter during the week to manage the daily operations of the facility with help from support staff on evenings and weekends.

Funding for the shelter is provided through local donations, religious organizations and the United Way. The shelter also uses grants from the city of Ames and Story County.

“It became evident when we opened up this facility that we couldn’t count on any funding at the federal level,” Moss said. “We really rely on local support to keep going.”

In addition to providing food and shelter for its clients, the Emergency Shelter Project offers services to help people find clothing, employment and permanent housing, often helping Story County families avoid eviction with money for down payments or back rent.

Expansion in the works

The shelter has added rooms and doubled its bed capacity since opening. Moss said additional space has also been rented in motels during peak periods to help provide for everyone who needs assistance. The main shelter can house 16 people. An adjacent house provides family housing on a long-term basis.

Families and individuals can stay in the main shelter for up two weeks. Residents of the adjacent facility are allowed a maximum stay of six months.

The Emergency Residence Project, with the help of local religious groups, is working on the renovation of another house next to the shelter to provide even more “transitional” housing for families.

Moss hopes to have the house completed sometime this fall, but, he said, even with the two additional apartments in the house, space will be scarce.

“Just yesterday we had a family come in here looking to move into the longer-term housing,” he said “They were living in their car and the woman was pregnant and was getting quite uncomfortable trying to manage in such a cramped area.”

Though the shelter was full, the Emergency Residence Project arranged to put the family up in a motel room for the next week.

Problems long-term

Moss said most of the cases the Emergency Residence Project deals with in Story County are long-term poverty problems.

“This is just one stop among many for most of these people,” Moss said.

It’s that sense of hopelessness, he said, that can weigh on him and his staff.

“We see their faces and deal with people in these tough situations day in and day out,” Moss said.

Moss said he became interested in working in social and human services while taking sociology and psychology classes at Iowa State.

After graduating from college, Moss found a job working in an old-age administration program, helping the elderly. Moss later worked as a social worker and a child abuse investigator.

Despite his experiences, Moss said he’s learned that “You can’t compensate for growing up in a lousy home.”

Many of the individuals and families Moss helps are locked into a cycle of abuse and mistreatment as children, affecting them as adults with their own children.

“I’ve seen people I helped when they were kids, grow up, locked into the system, show up here as adults,” Moss said.

The shelter also gets its share of clients with alcohol-related problems, but few drug abusers. “I would guess that about a fifth of the people who stay here have a problem with alcohol,” Moss said. “Such problems become apparent the first time they get paid when they will come home late because they are inebriated.”

Mental illness is the most common problem at the Emergency Residence Project.

“It’s hard to put in numbers because there’s no consensus on just what constitutes mental illness,” Moss said. “We do have a lot of people who have mild personality disorders, who are moderately slow and might have some personality quirks that just make it that much harder for that person to be employed.

“Most of them are ineligible for any help — there’s no easy way to get assistance for people suffering from mental illness,” he added.

Situation not unique

The homeless situation in Ames is not unlike other areas. Though Story County has one of the highest poverty levels in central Iowa, some southern counties, especially those around river towns, have a high poverty level as well.

Moss said the concentration of wealth, income and power in the hands of a few Story County residents contributes to the homelessness problem. He said the top 1 percent of the county’s wealthiest residents annually earn about as much as the bottom 40 percent.

“These figures are starting to look more and more like those of a third world country, not the United States,” he said.

Moss said part of the problem with the homeless population in Ames is the phasing out of much of the middle to lower income housing in the area. He said two-thirds of the blue collar workers in the Ames community can’t afford to live here.

“Many people living off minimum wage are spending over 75 percent of their paycheck for housing,” Moss said. “Ames is becoming too exclusive a town for them. They can work here, but they’re not good enough to live here.”

Moss said America’s middle class is slowly being destroyed as the poor become poorer and the rich get richer.

“A lot of professional, well educated Americans are doing better than ever, while the poor are even worse off,” he said. “It used to be that the average high school graduate could get a job in industry and make a decent wage and afford their own home and have an acceptable lifestyle, but now that can’t be done — the jobs just don’t exist.”

Solution not at hand

Moss said there is no simple solution to the ever-growing problem of homelessness.

“Minimum wage is the only protection that most of the people working service jobs have,” he said

The future looks bleak for poverty victims. Moss said the minimum wage isn’t likely to increase soon and conservative politicians have little sympathy for the poor.

“The rumble of the next election is looking ominous. There just seems to be a general lack of concern at the federal level for what’s happening to these people. They’ve basically turned their backs on the homeless,” Moss said.

And, he said, homelessness is just the beginning.

“Poverty is a factor in child abuse, divorce and other family problems. Homelessness is just the tip of the iceberg,” Moss said. “For every person who is homeless there’s three to four people who are near homeless. There’s a huge reservoir of people living on the edge of poverty and they just keep falling off.”

The Emergency Residence Project is looking for individuals committed to combating the poverty problem in the Ames community. Workers are paid to work night and weekend shifts at the shelter. Anyone interested should contact Vic Moss at 232-8075.