Two years ago Jenaie Scott had a $20 an hour cleaning job, which was plenty to cover the rent for a modest apartment on the west side of this state’s capital city.
But Scott lost the job in a 2013 downsizing, setting off a downward spiral that led her and 5-year-old son Jyaire into homelessness.
“I had other jobs, but they just didn’t pay enough, and eventually they put an eviction notice on my door,” Scott recalled. She and Jyaire moved in with relatives, then begged for space in the back room of a church and finally started sleeping in her car.
“I came here crying. I was so upset,” Scott said from the offices of Catholic Charities in Trenton, where she turned for help last year. With her strong history of work, she qualified for a local “rapid rehousing” program, which put her and her son in an apartment within a month.
The program paid her first month’s rent; Scott paid a share of the rent for the next two months and now is paying it all. She got a job at an Amazon warehouse, where she filled orders so fast her bosses made her a full-time coach for other workers. “Without this I don’t know where I’d be,” Scott said of the housing program.
The rapid rehousing strategy is based on the idea that in a majority of cases, a little temporary housing help can prevent people on the edge of homelessness from falling over it. It started with a few local experiments 30 years ago, worked well in pilot programs, and went national in 2009 as part of the federal economic stimulus package. Now used in every state, rapid rehousing is considered to be particularly effective for homeless families because it provides stability for children.
[For more of this story, written by Tim Henderson, go to http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/re...with-rapid-rehousing]
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