No Place Like Home

The sales rep stationed at the front door of the Kroger supermarket in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, knew a family of attractive marks when she saw one. Here was a nice-looking young couple with their cooing newborn in the shopping cart: perfect targets for a high-speed spiel. "Have you had a family portrait yet? We're running a special deal this week, one 10 by 13-inch portrait, a $60 value, right now for just $8. Oh, the baby's so cute. Can I sign you up?"

The notion was a beguiling one professional photographs of their adorable Debraysha but Phenom and De-Shawto Cochran felt the need to magnify the saleswoman's small print. "How much will it cost me?" Phenom interjected hopefully. "Eight dollars, just $8," said the rep, a tad more slowly. "Oh, I don't have $8 right now," Phenom replied flatly. The woman finally retreated as the Cochrans pushed their cart toward the produce aisle.

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Phenom, 26, was not giving the rep the brush-off. She did not have $8. She had $6--a neatly folded $5 bill and a one tucked inside her jeans pocket. That was the Cochran family's nest egg.

De-Shawto (pronounced De-Shawn-toe), 28, and his wife knew it would be a while before they could afford the sort of professional photos of Debraysha that they had got for their two older children, Moriah, 10, and De-Shawto Jr., 8, when they were babies. The Cochrans have been homeless since August, and money's tight for a family that lacks a place to call home.

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The Cochrans are the working poor on a losing streak. Until October, De-Shawto had a job at the Wal-Mart deli counter; Phenom drove a pizza-delivery van until her pregnancy made her too sick to continue. Now a few days a week, De-Shawto gets up before dawn at their temporary home at the Barbara Bonner Family Shelter and heads off to work prepping cars to be sold at a local auto-auction facility. He's lucky to take home $50 a day.

As they scour the grocery aisles for the best value in luncheon meat, the Cochrans, like many homeless families, are invisible to the rest of the world invisible not because they provoke people to look away in discomfort or guilt but because they look and act no different from the rest of us. These are not the deranged homeless ranting in their portable bedlam, a ratty blanket near a street heat grate. Families like the Cochrans live in our neighborhoods, go to our churches, attend the same public schools as our kids. And in Columbus there are more of them every day: demand for shelter by families with young children is up 14% over last year and rising faster than requests by single adults. In other words, the Cochrans are us after the roof has fallen in.

Phenom and De-Shawto are young parents with a long history. The Columbus natives have known each other since middle school, they went on their first movie date together (a comedy about upward mobility called Livin' Large) at 15, and both dropped out of school in the 11th grade, a move they regret deeply. They say they still plan to get their GEDs, or high school equivalence certificates. And they share a similar dream for their children. "I want to see them go to their proms and graduate," says Phenom. "I want them to succeed at things we didn't."

Like staying in one place: the Cochrans have lived in eight homes. On Aug. 29, they were forced to leave the two-bedroom apartment where they had comfortably resided for two years in a scrappy east-side section of Columbus. Blindsided by a hike of almost 50% in their rent, they would have had to pay $500 a month to remain in their home. De-Shawto's $230-a-week take-home pay at Wal-Mart was not enough to support the family. So they scrambled to find a new place within their housing budget of about $400 a month, reasonable for a low-rent city like Columbus. But at a time when houses are appreciating well ahead of wages and the stock of cheap rentals is shrinking, such finds have become rare. The Cochrans applied at a score of apartment buildings and did not get a single call back. "I was hoping and praying something good would happen at the last minute," says Phenom, who was six months pregnant when they were evicted. "I didn't want to bring my baby into the world this way."

She and De-Shawto did not let their emotions cloud their common sense. For $69 a month, they rented a large storage space at a U-Haul facility and started moving their belongings there. The Cochrans kept only the essentials: two large duffel bags with clothes, several tote bags for toiletries and a few toys, and a TV. Left behind: the furniture, the winter clothes and an artificial Christmas tree they had bought in 2001 when things looked brighter. Then they drove their cantankerous 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme to the Interfaith Hospitality Network, Columbus' sole portal for homeless families. Before arriving there, Phenom and De-Shawto dropped their kids off at school. They had briefed the children that they would be spending the night in a shelter. "I wanted them to understand that being homeless doesn't mean you're a bad person," Phenom says. The kids took it stoically. "They were a little sad, but they didn't say much," De-Shawto recalls. "I told them we wouldn't be down there that long."