The scary, humiliating reality of surviving homelessness in California

Determined to secure her family’s future, Evelyn leaves her gang-plagued California desert town of Lancaster with her husband and five children. Using her aunt’s address, the 29-year-old waitress enrolls her four oldest in Monterey Park’s far better public schools. She manages to keep them there, even while 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, “Seeking Shelter,” is no saint. She makes questionable decisions that skirt the law and potentially endanger her children. But both her fortitude and her motives seem heroic. In Hobbs’ telling, Evelyn is less a victim of a society that countenances widespread homelessness than a survivor of every challenge life can throw at her.

Yet, as Hobbs points out, that is insufficient cause for celebration. “Survival is not clean or elegant; there is no music to it, no fandom, no accolades; it does not hold clean lines, clear paths, pauses for rest or reflection; it does not feel fulfilling or noble, strengthening or cleansing, spiritual or redemptive,” he writes. “Survival is a scary, humiliating, filthy mess.”

“Seeking Shelter” is, Hobbs notes, “primarily a work of reconstructive journalism.” He pieced together Evelyn’s story and that of Wendi Gaines, a social worker who helps her, largely through after-the-fact interviews. (He identifies Evelyn and her children only by first name.)

(Scribners)

Hobbs is a practiced hand at this technique, as exemplified by “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace”, winner of the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the “current interest” category. That absorbing tale — of another flawed but sympathetic character, who was both Hobbs’ Yale roommate and a drug dealer — had to be reported and written postmortem.

In the case of “Seeking Shelter,” Hobbs could have chosen a different route. The Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond shadowed several (anonymous) families as they tried to remain housed, which enabled him to reproduce their dialogue verbatim in his 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Evicted.”

Hobbs, by contrast, writes that he “struggled ethically with the prospect of spending … any amount of time embedded alongside a family’s saddest, hardest, darkest moments on the street and then leaving them there to return to my own home.” He opted to wait until his subjects’ lives had stabilized.

Opinion

What’s the secret to motherhood? How 20th century scientists got it wrong

In her book “The Good Mother Myth,” Nancy Reddy details her own lonely first year as a mom and pushes back against dubious conclusions about parenting.

Jan. 14, 2025

Despite this self-imposed limitation, “Seeking Shelter” is remarkably vivid and detailed, as well as deeply empathetic. Hobbs, a onetime novelist, doesn’t just recount events; he confidently probes his characters’ psyches, parsing their motivations and emotions.

Occasionally, reaching for a poetic phrasing, his prose can turn vague or labored. About Gaines and her then-husband, he writes, “Maybe she painted in the corners of his own descriptions of himself with her own palette of the kind of life she felt she deserved.” At another point, he infelicitously describes Evelyn’s “specific unfolding situation” as being “as plain as a mother’s hope, as knotted and psychotic as American power structures.”

Hobbs’ great gift lies in immersing readers in his narrative, keeping us rooting for his subjects despite their missteps.

Opinion

Is the Southwest America’s obscure hinterland — or its rightful heartland?

Kyle Paoletta’s “American Oasis” explores the history and culture of Las Vegas, Phoenix and other cities in a region that in some ways embodies the national spirit.

Jan. 7, 2025

Evelyn is a survivor of both childhood sexual abuse and an abusive relationship with a gang member with whom she had two sons. Her move to Monterey Park is also a move away from her past. But it is undercut by her confusion about the Section 8 federal housing voucher system. She has qualified, but in the wrong geographic area. And with long wait lists, obtaining a voucher in either location is likely years away.

Evelyn does find work as a server at Applebee’s. But her husband, Manny, the father of her three youngest children, mostly spends his days drinking. She leaves him only after he punches his stepson Orlando and chokes her. By then, she is pregnant with a sixth child. Fearing contact with her rageful husband and enmeshment in a system she understandably distrusts, she never pursues Manny for child support.

Nor does Evelyn take full advantage of the limited social safety net for families such as hers. “She wants the city’s social workers nowhere near her kids,” worried that she will lose them, or that they’ll be uprooted from the schools they now love, Hobbs writes. But Evelyn may not see clearly enough how much they are suffering from the instability and grinding poverty of their lives.

Opinion

‘No Place to Bury the Dead’ is a moving meditation on migration, displacement and loss

Karina Sainz Borgo’s second novel unfolds in a cemetery near the border of an unnamed Latin American country beset by plague, exploitation and rebellion.

Dec. 11, 2024

Hobbs writes that he sought to explode “the dominant, facile presumption that most people who end up without shelter do so as a result of drug addiction and mental health challenges.” Evelyn represents another large subset of the homeless: single-parent families.

Hobbs is aware that some readers may condemn Evelyn for her family’s size; many of her friends and relatives are similarly judgmental. As a counterweight, he emphasizes how devoted a mother she is — and the extent to which her children buoy her rather than weigh her down.

He also reports on the challenges faced by Evelyn’s oldest son, Orlando. Left too much on his own, he falls in with a rough crowd and is caught up in a violent robbery. Awaiting trial, he is consigned to a juvenile facility, where his (relative) innocence matters less than having money for a good lawyer.

Gaines’ story, which Hobbs braids with Evelyn’s, is tumultuous. Already the mother of seven, one of them severely autistic, she, too, marries a physically abusive man. He expels her from their home before she gathers the strength to leave. But she quickly finds shelter and new purpose through a religious nonprofit, Door of Hope, which supplies transitional housing and social services.

Evelyn, too, will finally encounter that organization, and Wendi Gaines, and the possibility of a new, more stable life. But, as Hobbs points out, California’s tens of thousands of unhoused families and individuals, no less sympathetic and deserving, still await help. The recent fires, displacing thousands more, have only made the issue more urgent.

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