Suburban homelessness: there but for the grace of God ...

Hotels have always served people who need an off-the-record place to live—sex workers, drug dealers—and the Ramada has its share of people who are hiding out. (Bounty hunters come to the hotel so often that the weeklies know their names and say hi.) But in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Ramada’s clientele shifted away from such regulars to include suburban families who had been used to staying in hotels only on vacations. Many of the families still had incomes. Some had long been struggling members of the working class, fighting to stay better than broke; others had fallen suddenly out of the middle class.

Across the country, suburban poverty rose by more than half in the first decade of the new century. Families now find themselves navigating landscapes that were built around wealth: single-family houses that are sold, not rented; too few apartment buildings; and government agencies hidden at the far edge of the suburban ring, more responsive to trash-pickup complaints than rising hunger rates.

The Ramada families became homeless because they could no longer pay rents and mortgages and found little help to slow their fall. In 2011, Colorado ranked eighth in foreclosures nationwide. When families in Jefferson County, which encompasses Denver’s western suburbs, lost their home in the recession, they flooded a market that had the lowest number of rental vacancies in ten years. The Section 8 program in the area dispenses vouchers through a random lottery that typically has about 2,500 applicants; in any given year, only 30 to 40 spots become available. The school system, which keeps the best records of homelessness in the county, says the number of homeless students rose from 59 in 2001 to 2,812 in the current school year. Unable to find another home and unable to find space in the county’s shelters, which hold fewer than 100 beds, the new poor disappeared into the suburban landscape wherever they could find a roof. With nowhere else to go, they turned the Ramada Inn into an impromptu SRO.

“Homeowners lost their homes, and here we are,” says Bonnie, a 53-year-old who lives with her husband and son in the Ramada. “This is where the homeowners are.” Bonnie’s family used to live in the small brick ranch in southwest Denver she’d grown up in; as an adult, she stayed and helped her father pay off the original mortgage. But during the mortgage boom, she and her husband, Andy, took out a home-equity loan. Nationally, $1 trillion in such loans were doled out in those years. Like subprime mortgages, these were often loans with hidden fees and adjustable rates that eventually made monthly payments impossibly high. When the crash came, the destruction didn’t differentiate between those who’d become new homebuyers with bad subprimes and those, like Bonnie and Andy, who’d taken out loans on houses they already owned.

Veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan (or in many cases, both) had an unemployment rate of 10.9% in August 2012, according to new data released by the Labor Department on Wednesday. Among nonveterans, the unemployment rate was 7.9% at the time.

Among the broader population of veterans who have served on active duty since September, 2011 — wherever they served — the unemployment rate was 9.9%, still significantly higher than for both non-veterans and for veterans of earlier conflicts. Those who served during the first Gulf War had an unemployment rate of just 5.9%.