FIRE HAS DESTROYED the low-rent apartment of a family of five, robbing them not only of all their possessions, but also of the only housing they could afford. The father works full-time, earning $9 an hour - not nearly enough to support a family and pay the kind of rent most landlords are charging these days. The mother stays home with their 11-month-old baby because the cost of daycare would exceed any wages she could earn. With the shelters full and nowhere to turn, the family is forced to take shelter in their beat-up station wagon. It becomes their new home.

Despite their situation, the parents make sure their two school-age children attend school as usual. But when the school administration discovers that the family is living in their car, the children are expelled because, technically, they are no longer residents of the town in which they attend school.

Unlawful expulsion from school is just one of the many legal issues that New Hampshire's homeless population is forced to deal with on a daily basis. With little or no income with which to enlist the services of an attorney, many of these homeless individuals turn to the state's legal services organizations to help them in their struggles.

New Hampshire Legal Assistance (NHLA) attorneys Elliott Berry and Lynn Tracy staff the Homeless Assistance Project out of NHLA's Manchester office. The project, which is partially funded by a state grant, attempts to address primarily the legal problems facing the homeless, but inevitably also deals with the myriad of other issues homeless clients face.

From the legal services perspective, Berry and Tracy deal with such issues as eviction defense (particularly in subsidized housing), protecting parental rights, dealing with local welfare offices and education law matters, as well as policy work to create more affordable housing.

Berry said that statistics on homelessness in the state identify only a fraction - perhaps 25 percent - of the actual homeless population: those who make use of shelters. Last year, there were a total of 225,000 shelter nights in the state, which means about 600 people each night stayed in state-funded shelters, according to Berry. He said that is the highest number the state has seen. But that figure doesn't take into account the homeless individuals who find themselves sleeping in cars, on the streets or under bridges. Nor does it include what Karen Makocy Philbrick, a housing advocate at Legal Advice and Referral Center (LARC), calls the "invisible homeless" - those who are doubled up with friends or relatives in inadequate living situations. "A lot of the homeless are not in the shelters or on the streets. There may be three families living in a mobile home or small apartment, all facing eviction because of it," said Philbrick.

According to Berry, the scenario described above in which a homeless child is expelled from school is all too common in NH. Federal law, he said, is quite clear in stating that children have the right to stay in the school in their "town of origin." State law, however, is much more ambiguous, and despite support of the federal law from the state's Dept. of Education, local school districts are resistant to putting tax dollars toward educating students that are no longer considered legal residents. "There's a big problem with children of homeless parents being unlawfully bounced from schools," said Berry.

"We'll get a parent in here saying, 'I'm trying to do the right thing. I may be sleeping in the car, but I'm taking the kids to school'," said Tracy. With the help of the Homeless Assistance Project or attorneys on the NHBA's Pro Bono or Reduced-Fee panels, parents can defend their children's right to stay in school despite the lack of a permanent residence.

Berry said that he and Tracy put in an "enormous amount of effort" to help low-income clients avoid eviction, which for many often translates into homelessness. Those clients in subsidized housing are especially vulnerable to homelessness because an eviction means loss of the subsidy, which would make it nearly impossible to find housing. "Prevention work is so important in these situations," said Tracy.

Makocy Philbrick and fellow LARC housing advocate Ellie Bean specialize in helping low-income clients to understand their tenant rights and, if appropriate, to defend against eviction. According to Makocy Philbrick, LARC handled 775 housing cases last year, which she said is actually down because of the loss of some housing advocates and because clients are calling with more complex issues than in the past - or calling repeatedly because they don't have representation. "The number of evictions is worse now, though," said Makocy Philbrick.

A lot of clients who are facing eviction and homelessness have a defense against the eviction, but don't have sufficient resources to obtain representation to put on that defense, Bean said. For those who have a defense, LARC provides legal advice or refers the client to the Pro Bono Program or NHLA's Homeless Assistance Program for representation. But because the eviction process can be a rapid one - it can take as little as four to six weeks - many clients can't find an attorney in time and are forced to represent themselves or offer no defense at all against the eviction.

"I talked to someone today, the sheriff was coming in two hours to lock her and her three kids out," said Bean. "Something like that is not unusual. It happens every day," she said.

For those clients who don't have an eviction defense, for whom there wasn't a "flaw in the process," as Makocy Philbrick puts it, all LARC can do is offer advice about the process, their rights and help them get as much time as they are entitled to to find affordable housing. "But these days even people with three months to find a place aren't able to," said Bean.

The extremely tight housing market in the state, and across the nation, as well as a failure to create enough affordable housing has exacerbated the homelessness problem. Berry and Tracy are involved in much policy work to try to increase the supply of affordable housing, such as addressing regulatory barriers to creating such housing, specifically local zoning laws that restrict multi-family or other low-income homes. Part of the problem, Berry said, is the "not in my backyard" mentality of most municipalities when it comes to building transitional or multi-family housing. Residents in three NH towns - Laconia, Ossipee and Plymouth - have spoken out against recent proposals for transitional housing in their towns. "Everyone is saying we have a problem, we need to do something, but we don't want to have it here," said Berry.

"The housing market is hugely distorted now - there has been an overwhelming failure to produce multi-family housing in the last decade," he said. "We are in times of a great housing shortage."

Because of that shortage, the work of advocates trying to prevent eviction and subsequent homelessness is crucial. "It's a lot different than four years ago because each apartment becomes that much more important. There's nothing else out there," said Bean.

Another major issue that the Homeless Assistance Project and LARC's housing advocates deal with is compliance with the local welfare system. State RSA 165 is a "very clear legal mandate to provide resources to the homeless," said Berry, but because local welfare is 100 percent property tax-funded, "the pressure is on towns to spend as little as possible," he said.

The homeless often encounter situations in which they are receiving less-than-adequate assistance from municipal welfare, said Tracy: some are provided tents and camping equipment to live at campgrounds, some are temporarily put up in hotels, some are given bus tickets to larger towns that have homeless shelters (what Tracy calls "bus ticket intervention"). According to Berry, there is a "myriad of unending issues" when it comes to local welfare providing a long-term solution to meeting the needs of the town's homeless. It is in these situations when Tracy, Berry, Bean and Makocy Philbrick must step in to help homeless clients defend their rights.

"In New Hampshire, the bottom rung of the safety ladder is the local welfare system," said Berry. "We do all we can to persuade the local welfare offices to 'relieve and maintain those people who are poor and unable to support themselves,' as the welfare statute mandates."

Bean said also that welfare payment issues are substantial when dealing with clients on the brink of homelessness. Missing a rent payment because of non-payment of welfare will surely mean eviction and homelessness. "Housing is such an issue that if a non-payment comes up, we step in and deal with town welfare. It needs to be addressed right away so the person doesn't become homeless," said Bean.

There are a number of other legal issues related to homelessness that the state's legal services organizations deal with. Among them is defending the rights of homeless parents when a DCYF caseworker threatens to take children away; helping a homeless client register a car without a legal address; defending homeless clients' rights in shelters; fighting the stereotype that manifests itself in actions such as fining the homeless for public lounging in parks.

Although the role of legal services organizations is to address the law-related issues surrounding homelessness, advocates are well aware that the problem goes far beyond legal advocacy. There are social and health issues such as mental illness and substance abuse problems. There are economic issues like lack of affordable housing. Legal advocates must turn to other programs and organizations, like the Community Action Program's Homeless Outreach Intervention Project (which Makocy Philbrick calls the "real in-the-trenches folks"), to help address such issues. For someone like Tracy, who has advocated for the homeless for years and in various ways - including through street outreach programs - it's difficult to limit her work to providing legal assistance, but legal advocates have to look at the "little picture," Berry said.

"You don't take a homeless person and say, 'Here's the answer to your legal problem, now go.' We start with the legal problem and address the barriers to them not getting the services they need," said Berry.

"We have to look at what legal tools we have and can use to address the worst, most destructive and dangerous effects of the problem of homelessness," he said.

Legal services advocates for the homeless agree that more programs, services and affordable housing are needed to help remedy the homeless problem, all of which require increased resources. As for their part of the puzzle, legal services organizations have not been able to provide adequate representation of the homeless because "there aren't nearly enough of us," said Berry.

"We need more advocates - LARC needs more people, we need more attorneys to take more cases, we need more Pro Bono attorneys," said Makocy Philbrick. And to get more advocates, these organizations need more funding, she said. "We haven't been able to provide the kind of assistance to these clients that they need because of the lack of resources," she said.

Berry agreed: "The resources are so limited, but the need is so great," he said.

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