The scary, humiliating actuality of surviving homelessness in California

Decided to safe her household’s future, Evelyn leaves her gang-plagued California desert city of Lancaster together with her husband and 5 kids. Utilizing her aunt’s deal with, the 29-year-old waitress enrolls her 4 oldest in Monterey Park’s much better public colleges. She manages to maintain them there, even whereas fleeing her violent husband and toggling between rundown motels and scary, sleep-deprived nights in a 2008 Toyota Highlander.

The El Salvadoran American protagonist of Jeff Hobbs’ fourth work of narrative nonfiction, “Looking for Shelter,” is not any saint. She makes questionable selections that skirt the legislation and probably endanger her kids. However each her fortitude and her motives appear heroic. In Hobbs’ telling, Evelyn is much less a sufferer of a society that countenances widespread homelessness than a survivor of each problem life can throw at her.

But, as Hobbs factors out, that’s inadequate trigger for celebration. “Survival isn’t clear or elegant; there is no such thing as a music to it, no fandom, no accolades; it doesn’t maintain clear strains, clear paths, pauses for relaxation or reflection; it doesn’t really feel fulfilling or noble, strengthening or cleaning, religious or redemptive,” he writes. “Survival is a scary, humiliating, filthy mess.”

“Looking for Shelter” is, Hobbs notes, “primarily a piece of reconstructive journalism.” He pieced collectively Evelyn’s story and that of Wendi Gaines, a social employee who helps her, largely by after-the-fact interviews. (He identifies Evelyn and her kids solely by first title.)

Hobbs is a practiced hand at this system, as exemplified by “The Brief and Tragic Lifetime of Robert Peace”, winner of the 2014 Los Angeles Instances Guide Prize within the “present curiosity” class. That absorbing story — of one other flawed however sympathetic character, who was each Hobbs’ Yale roommate and a drug supplier — needed to be reported and written postmortem.

Within the case of “Looking for Shelter,” Hobbs may have chosen a special route. The Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond shadowed a number of (nameless) households as they tried to stay housed, which enabled him to breed their dialogue verbatim in his 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning e book, “Evicted.”

Hobbs, in contrast, writes that he “struggled ethically with the prospect of spending … any period of time embedded alongside a household’s saddest, hardest, darkest moments on the road after which leaving them there to return to my own residence.” He opted to attend till his topics’ lives had stabilized.

Regardless of this self-imposed limitation, “Looking for Shelter” is remarkably vivid and detailed, in addition to deeply empathetic. Hobbs, a onetime novelist, doesn’t simply recount occasions; he confidently probes his characters’ psyches, parsing their motivations and feelings.

Often, reaching for a poetic phrasing, his prose can flip imprecise or labored. About Gaines and her then-husband, he writes, “Possibly she painted within the corners of his personal descriptions of himself together with her personal palette of the form of life she felt she deserved.” At one other level, he infelicitously describes Evelyn’s “particular unfolding state of affairs” as being “as plain as a mom’s hope, as knotted and psychotic as American energy constructions.”

Hobbs’ nice reward lies in immersing readers in his narrative, retaining us rooting for his topics regardless of their missteps.

Evelyn is a survivor of each childhood sexual abuse and an abusive relationship with a gang member with whom she had two sons. Her transfer to Monterey Park can be a transfer away from her previous. However it’s undercut by her confusion in regards to the Part 8 federal housing voucher system. She has certified, however within the fallacious geographic space. And with lengthy wait lists, acquiring a voucher in both location is probably going years away.

Evelyn does discover work as a server at Applebee’s. However her husband, Manny, the daddy of her three youngest kids, principally spends his days consuming. She leaves him solely after he punches his stepson Orlando and chokes her. By then, she is pregnant with a sixth baby. Fearing contact together with her rageful husband and enmeshment in a system she understandably distrusts, she by no means pursues Manny for baby help.

Nor does Evelyn take full benefit of the restricted social security web for households comparable to hers. “She needs town’s social staff nowhere close to her children,” anxious that she is going to lose them, or that they’ll be uprooted from the colleges they now love, Hobbs writes. However Evelyn could not see clearly sufficient how a lot they’re affected by the instability and grinding poverty of their lives.

Hobbs writes that he sought to blow up “the dominant, facile presumption that most individuals who find yourself with out shelter achieve this on account of drug habit and psychological well being challenges.” Evelyn represents one other giant subset of the homeless: single-parent households.

Hobbs is conscious that some readers could condemn Evelyn for her household’s dimension; lots of her mates and family are equally judgmental. As a counterweight, he emphasizes how devoted a mom she is — and the extent to which her kids buoy her relatively than weigh her down.

He additionally experiences on the challenges confronted by Evelyn’s oldest son, Orlando. Left an excessive amount of on his personal, he falls in with a tough crowd and is caught up in a violent theft. Awaiting trial, he’s consigned to a juvenile facility, the place his (relative) innocence issues lower than having cash for lawyer.

Gaines’ story, which Hobbs braids with Evelyn’s, is tumultuous. Already the mom of seven, one in every of them severely autistic, she, too, marries a bodily abusive man. He expels her from their house earlier than she gathers the energy to go away. However she shortly finds shelter and new goal by a spiritual nonprofit, Door of Hope, which provides transitional housing and social providers.

Evelyn, too, will lastly encounter that group, and Wendi Gaines, and the opportunity of a brand new, extra steady life. However, as Hobbs factors out, California’s tens of 1000’s of unhoused households and people, no much less sympathetic and deserving, nonetheless await assist. The current fires, displacing 1000’s extra, have solely made the difficulty extra pressing.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.