Seeking shelter A working mother, her children, and a story of homelessness in America

This modern-day horror story is a heartbreaking account of an unhoused family attempting to navigate American municipal, employment, and education systems. Evelyn, Manny, and their five children didn't fit any clichés about homelessness. Married American citizens, both adults worked full-time and had over $4,000 in savings when they left their southern California community for L.A. suburb Monterey Park in search of better schools. Evelyn filed online for Section 8 federal assistance and was excited when her application was accepted, not realizing that qualifying to apply and receiving actual approval were two separate, equally daunting tasks. In 2019, they moved north and almost immediately faced a downward economic spiral involving cheap motels, shelters, and increasingly nerve-wracking instability compounded by COVID-19, legal problems, hunger, and incarceration. Hobbs (Children of the State, 2023) offers this reconstructive journalism account based on personal memories, news stories, site visits, and statistics. From this compelling read with richly drawn characters, Evelyn and her kids emerge as survivors. This is both an indictment of overwhelmed social services and a quietly optimistic celebration of resilience.

A mom struggles to keep a roof over her family's head in this poignant saga. Hobbs (The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace) profiles "Evelyn," a mother of five who moved her family from Lancaster, Calif., to Los Angeles in 2018 for the city's well-regarded public schools, planning to use Section 8 housing vouchers to make rent and unaware of the program's yearslong waitlist. Finding only a low-paying waitressing job and going through a final break with her abusive husband, Evelyn and her children end up in a series of ever more precarious housing situations--a motel, an unfinished garage for $100 a week, and then motels again through an emergency one-night motel voucher program (the unreliability of which leaves the family spending many nights in Evelyn's SUV). They eventually find stable, long-term housing at a shelter, allowing Evelyn to save up and retrain as an accountant. However, after the family moves into a subsidized townhouse, an expensive setback--paying legal fees when one of her sons is arrested for shoplifting--leads to yet another eviction. In evocative vignettes, Hobbs paints Evelyn as an exemplary mother and worker navigating a bureaucracy seemingly designed to make her fail--for instance, she has trouble finding a second job because she has to be on the phone at exactly 5:01 p.m. every night to get a motel voucher. It's an eye-opening look at how the housing crisis extends far beyond what's visible on the streets. (Feb.)

An account of homelessness and precarity as seen through the eyes of a woman and her family. "Evelyn is really tired of the desert and its people." Evelyn, a second-generation Salvadoran with a large extended family in the California town of Lancaster, is 29 when we meet her, with five children to take care of and a husband who is steadily descending into joblessness and alcoholism. Evelyn is nothing if not aspirational, and she has her eyes set above all else on living in a place with good schools for her children. The problem, as Hobbs notes, is that for working-class people, living in a place with good schools requires housing far beyond their means. A few aid programs exist, but, Hobbs adds, "the demand and supply within this effective but finite social safety net are increasingly imbalanced, the waiting lists in cities like Los Angeles tens of thousands of names long." Racism, sexism, and classism complicate poverty--and in Evelyn's case, so does a failed marriage: when she leaves her husband, taking the children, "they will not have a stable home again for nearly five years." Hobbs, author ofThe Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, follows Evelyn on a journey that finds her able to earn only enough to afford rent and utilities--or food for her family of six--until finally she finds assistance through a charity called Door of Hope, a door that opens only to a lucky few of what Hobbs estimates to be at least 120,000 unsheltered people in Los Angeles County. One reason, Hobbs notes, is that well-heeled neighbors don't want group homes or section 8 housing next door, not even in progressive California. A well-intended work of advocacy journalism that points to the endless obstacles attendant in helping those in need. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.