Far from the big city, the hidden toll of rural homelessness

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/us/11homeless.html?hp&ex=1160625600&en=d55e8b1a2e6fb620&ei=5094&partner=homepage


TRINIDAD, Colo. — As the Bush administration promotes a widely praised multibillion-dollar effort to end chronic homelessness in cities like Washington and San Francisco, a growing outcry is rising from rural areas that worsening problems far away from urban centers are being overlooked.

Rural homelessness has always taken a back seat to the more glaring problems in cities. Most studies estimate homeless people in small towns account for about 9 percent of the 600,000 or so homeless nationwide. But local officials and advocates for the homeless in small towns say that economic distress in recent years, including closing plants, failing farms, rising housing costs and other troubles, has left more people without homes and in greater need of help. Real numbers are hard to come by because most rural areas, where homeless services often means ad-hoc help from church groups or volunteers, are far behind a parade of cities taking head counts.

“We are concerned that the focus on chronic homelessness may have the unintended consequence of shifting services away from families and rural communities,” said John Parvensky, executive director of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, one of several groups pushing the federal government to turn more attention to rural areas.

Among the homeless here is John Lobato, who offered a tour of his surroundings — the abandoned shuttle bus where he sometimes sleeps, the makeshift assortment of pallets, mattresses and blankets where he and other men pass time, often drinking, and the Purgatoire River, where he bathes.

Sometimes he takes his medicine for schizophrenia, Mr. Lobato said, sometimes not. Sometimes he sobers up for a while, but then the bottle calls. “I know I need help,” he said, before embarking on a search for a liquor fix at midday in this isolated town 180 miles south of Denver. “But I don’t know where to get it.”

Until recently, many small towns like Trinidad coped with those who panhandled or set up makeshift encampments in the woods with what Lance Cheslock, director of La Puente, a shelter in Alamosa, near here, calls “Greyhound therapy.” They handed out bus tickets.