Anchorage Daily News

Barb Neeson pulls into the parking lot at the Big Timber Motel. Rain trickles from a heavy sky. Cars splash by on the Glenn Highway.

"This place? If you stay here more than a week, they don't provide toilet paper," she says, fishing a garbage bag of baby clothes from the back of her van.

Past a sign for the Show Boat strip club, up two flights of stairs, Neeson knocks on a door that's missing all its numbers. Trilisa Carroll peeks out, a toddler at her knees.

Carroll is 22. She's been homeless on and off for a year. She moved with her boyfriend and daughter into the motel in April. Her third child, a son, was born a week ago. He sleeps in a bassinet wedged in the corner, his tiny chest moving up and down.

As homeless parents go, Carroll is a tough case. She has a previous eviction and bad credit. Her boyfriend is working three jobs but he has a criminal record, making him unattractive to landlords. Carroll can't go back to a shelter. Other caseworkers have done what they can.

In the motel room, where two beds take up all the space and wet blue light leaks under the door, the family is one missed payment away from the street. Neeson is used to that.

She has a way with people who've used all their chances.

A street-wise advocate for children living with their parents in cars and motels and campgrounds, Neeson's a renaissance caseworker, a professional puller of strings, a one-woman social program called Beyond Shelters. She deals almost exclusively in complex cases: homeless parents with mental illnesses or criminal records, disabled kids and huge families, single mothers who've burned bridges with shelters and housing agencies, fathers who've lost their homes or jobs or both at least in part because of bad choices they've made.

Since March, Neeson's been trolling the city in a van packed with duct tape and toilet paper, secondhand children's clothes and tarps, coaxing families sleeping in highway pull-outs and squatting in malls to come to shelters. From shelters, she's found them homes.

"People do make choices and some of those choices aren't so good," she said, "but sometimes it's all they know."

Women cling to the wrong kind of men. Men cling to the wrong kind of women. Parents get overwhelmed and make mistakes. Being poor means it's easier to lose all you've got. Neeson knows because she's been there. She knows about public assistance and the food pantry line. She raised three children, including a son with Tourette Syndrome, all on her own. Thirty years ago, on the run from an abusive boyfriend, she lived for almost three months in Russian Jack Springs Park, sleeping with her infant daughter in the cab of a truck. Things move so fast in the lives she's trying to turn around, she doesn't have time to pass judgment.

CHAOS

Beyond Shelters is funded by United Way, run by Catholic Social Services and aided by a long list of social service organizations, churches and the Anchorage School District. The objective is to get kids off the streets.

Homelessness spins everything else into chaos. Children don't get to school. Work schedules are disrupted. People are forced to turn to the system, Neeson said. The majority of her clients are young mothers and single fathers. Frequently they have more than three children. So far she's put 10 families in homes and she's worked with 40 more. Others are waiting for her help.

Neeson uses contacts at private and public social service agencies and churches to craft plans for the hard-to-help. She comes up with rent deposits and double strollers, cases of noodles, formula and rides to the doctor. She cuts deals with landlords and bosses and hotel managers. She holds hands in delivery rooms and funeral parlors. She carries two cell phones. Sometimes they ring at once.

At the motel, Carroll's toddler scampers across the worn carpet, a dangling pacifier clipped to her shirt. A minister is giving a sermon on the TV. Neeson rubs sanitizer on her hands and scoops up the baby.

Neeson has zeroed in on an apartment for them, she says. She just has to convince the landlord. Does Carroll need a ride to church on Sunday? Does her boyfriend have bus fare for work?

Carroll sorts through the baby clothes. She has to get a bus to Muldoon to turn in a form for the baby at the public assistance office.

"No problem," Neeson says. She'll drop it off.

In the upended lives of the homeless, obstacles big and small stack up. There's paperwork, the bus schedule, the shelter schedule, the job schedule, the ordeal of the laundry and showers and food pantries. For people who are already overwhelmed, it's easy to lose track of things, one missed appointment or misplaced form cascading into another.

Neeson reminds people of appointments; she keeps a medication schedule for sick kids. She schools parents on keeping a calendar.

"I want to show them something -- to think ahead on things, to kind of organize things," she said. "That's really hard when they're in the shelters and moving from place to place."

But it's the key to getting into a permanent home.

Back in the car, on the way to Muldoon, one of her phones rings. It's a father of three living with a friend in Mountain View. She's been trying to get him to come to a shelter. He wants to go to the laundromat, he says, but there's no bank in Mountain View; he needs quarters and he's low on gas.

Laundry isn't just laundry for people living on the edge. Not being able to stay clean tips off the world that a life is starting to fray.

"Do you want to meet me at the laundromat?" she asks. "Or do you want me to come to you?"

'MOM'

At Safe Harbor Inn, a transitional housing program in Fairview, Neeson pushes open a door on the second floor.

"It's Mom," she calls softly.

Inside, a ball game's on and a mother and a father sit with their two children, a 3-year-old and a new baby, both born with genetic abnormalities that render them disabled and fragile. The little girl, small for her years, lies on her back in front of the television, rocking and flinching. The mother feeds the infant, pushing a syringe full of formula through a tube directly into his stomach.

Poverty is only part of homelessness. Often, systems in people's lives have broken down, Neeson says. Maybe there's a disability or emotional problems that keep them from holding a job. Maybe there's domestic violence. Maybe they don't make enough at a job to pay rent and child care.

"I hear a lot of people say, 'Why can't they go to McDonald's and get a job flipping hamburgers?' But, McDonald's has criteria, you know? They do criminal background checks. Even if they have a job there, they can't pay rent and gas and child care."

The couple in the hotel came from Western Samoa because they needed better medical care for the children. They were living with family, but the house became too crowded. They are waiting for immigration papers to come through so they can legally work. They've been living in shelters for two months.

At one point they had a huge fight. Police were called. The father was charged with domestic violence. Neeson understood what happened. They were under stress. But she said she wouldn't work with them if it happened again.

"I told him, 'If you even think of doing that again, think of me sitting on your shoulder,' " she said.

That's when they started calling her Mom.

Neeson learned to do what she does from Head Start. She was a parent in the program, then became a volunteer, then took a job as a family advocate.

"When you are a young mother, you look for guidance, and me, not having family here, I looked into the community," she said. "The community helped me raise my kids."

HOME

Neeson's minivan threads through Centennial Park Campground, looking for a father and his children she heard might be living there. Rain thrums the tops of tourist campers. She slows near a lone tent pitched in the mud, scanning for evidence of children, for toys and little shoes at the threshold. Nothing.

The family, homeless for months, has vanished.

They have her cell phone number. When things get tough enough, or cold enough, they'll call. She's an expert at waiting.

When Neeson was living on public assistance and food stamps, her youngest son was diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome. His tics made him curse at strangers and howl unexpectedly and throw tantrums. At a grocery store, he'd pull all the food off the shelves.

"He's the one that taught me patience," she says. "There was times we sat on the floor for two hours just waiting for him to calm down."

Men in particular have a hard time in shelters, she said. First, there are fewer places for them to go, and second, they seem to have a harder time living by someone else's rules. When they go to social service agencies they are not treated the same, no matter what their circumstances, she said. They are looked at like they should be out working, not looking for help.

Felipe Hernandez, a single father of five, met Neeson when he was being evicted from a motel room. He told her he was thinking about turning his children over to the state.

"She basically said, 'You're a loving man, you're a good man, and I'm pulling for you because I know you can do this.' She kept saying that," he said. "No other person understood what I was going through. She knew, she just did."

His trouble started when his mother died. He became depressed and quit going to work at Chilkoot Charlie's, where he was a night janitor. He fell behind in rent. Neeson and caseworkers from McKinnell House and the School District convinced his boss to take him back. They helped Hernandez work out a schedule so he could come home to get his children off to school. On a day in early July, he and the children went with Neeson to see a house on Government Hill.

The children crowded her as she put the key in the door and turned the knob. It was a five-bedroom house, bigger than any they'd ever lived in. With assistance, he can fit the rent into his monthly budget. The children ran from room to room, looking in closets, admiring bathrooms.

Not all endings are happy. People refuse Neeson's help. Parents put their kids in unsafe situations and lose them.

On this day, like most, Neeson backs out of the Big Timber Motel and heads up into Mountain View. She knows the neighborhood well, with its pawn shops and blocks of low-end rentals. She lived there in some of her toughest years. In the parking lot outside the laundromat, she remembers the way she worried back then, wishing for just a little bit more in food stamps, for another can of soup at the end of the month. The father she talked to earlier pulls up nearby, the faces of his children peering out the back windows of the car. She gets out and hands him a roll of quarters.

Find Julia O'Malley online at adn.com/contact/jomalley or call 257-4591.

At a glance

• The number of homeless children in Anchorage has grown 13 percent since the 2003-2004 school year, according to the Anchorage School District. In 2007-2008, there were 2,832 children without permanent places to live, according to Patricia O'Gorman, program coordinator with the School District's Child In Transition/Homeless Project. O'Gorman blamed the increase on rising rents and the slipping economy.

• Housing costs in Anchorage are one cause. Since 2000, average rents have increased about 27 percent, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

• Median household income has only increased by 14 percent in the same time period, according to the U.S Census.

• The average minimum-wage earner must work more than 100 hours a week to afford rent for a two-bedroom apartment.

• Shelters across the city report an increase in the number of families seeking assistance

• Statewide the wait list for public housing is 5,000 families long, more than any time in recent memory, according to Kris Duncan with the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation.

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