Out of a hotel, into a home
The hard choices facing homeless families
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories in The Taos News exploring the faces and root causes of homelessness in Taos County and the people looking for solutions. We invite you to send us your own stories of homelessness. Email editor@ taosnews.com or comment on our Facebook (facebook.com/taosnews/), Twitter (twitter.com/taosnews) or website (taosnews.com).
Shannon Cisneros had a nice house in Albuquerque, a good car and worked hard as a caregiver at a senior center. She never thought about being homeless, not until she fell behind on rent.
She came home one day to find a notice taped to the door. It said she and her two teenagers had three days to move out.
That was two years ago, the week before Christmas. Cisneros remembers packing away the lights and ornaments, taking down the tree, putting it in a storage unit. She stuffed what she could in her car. Big things, like the washer, got left behind.
It would be months before she and her family had a house to call their own again.
Cisneros’ experience of being homeless is like a lot of women who pass through Taos or were raised in the area. She never slept on the streets or had to send her kids to live with family. Yet she had to work harder than ever before and take help — from government programs, nonprofits and friendly strangers — to keep that from happening.
‘One day to the next’
Just a few years ago, everything seemed to be going well for Cisneros and her family in Albuquerque. Cisneros was living life, “not even knowing everything could be gone from one day to the next.”
She had been separated from her abusive partner but when he died, she had to make up for the money that abruptly stopped coming.
Cisneros worked at a senior facility in Rio Rancho and started to take every shift she could. But she couldn’t keep up with all her bills and debt, she said.
“The more you work, the more bills you have. The more paychecks you get, the more taxes they take. It just was never enough,” she said.
During that time, Cisneros worked so much she only slept only a few hours a night. It was “putting a lot on my body,” she said.
Her hands and bones hurt. She tried to get treatment but was put on a waiting list, she said. Like the bills, the physical burden got to be too much.
She hurt too much to go to work and lost her job, she said. She was without a paycheck and enough money to make the next month’s rent.
That’s when she got the eviction notice and started packing.
Cisneros made plans for her and her family to stay with a friend in Taos for a couple of weeks. At least they’d have a place to rest and regroup.
For everything she couldn’t immediately take with the family, a storage unit made sense. It was a safe place to keep the nonessentials that still meant a lot: the Christmas tree and decorations her kids made, plus a couple of her dad’s paintings, the only stuff of his she still had.
They made it to Taos, but the arrangement with her friend didn’t work out. They didn’t have the place or the time to plan their next move. But she still had to figure it out.
Hotel life
In the realm of government and nonprofits, homelessness is an umbrella term to describe many different situations. Some folks stay in emergency shelters or sleep on streets and park benches. Some people stay in their cars or other places not meant for human habitation. Some get out of jail with no place to go. Some are young people on their own. And some people are like Cisneros and her children: families without stable, longterm housing and significant barriers to getting it.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, about 35 percent of the homeless population in the United States are adults and children in families. Across the board, women lead the vast majority of those families.
On a one-night count in 2017, that number was estimated to be about
58,000 households, or more than
184,600 people. In New Mexico, 191 family households were experiencing homelessness the night of that count, according to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. But that total can change on any given night.
A lack of housing for low-income people is one of the main causes of eviction, instability and homelessness, according to the national alliance.
When Cisneros’ plan to “double up” (another type of homelessness) with her friend fell through, Cisneros used what money she had, including loans, to keep herself and her kids warm and with a roof over their heads.
She got a hotel room. Without local friends, she didn’t have anyone to ask about where to stay. She spent a few nights at a good hotel, she said, but it was too expensive: $100 a night. She called around and found some $80 options. But one was too rundown to consider. She did finally find a clean place that would let her pay by the day, or, when she had the money, a week at a time.
At first, living in a hotel wasn’t so bad. “For the kids, to them, getting a hotel was a fun thing, something we did on vacation,” Cisneros said.
Soon enough, that was fading into the difficulties of trying to make the situation work.
“It just went on and on,” she said. Without regular money, Cisneros lost the storage unit in Albuquerque. The Christmas decorations and her dad’s paintings were gone. All they had was what was in the car and what they could keep in the hotel room.
But even that wasn’t stable.
‘I had seen the worst turn in my life.’
— Shannon Cisneros