A Black Lives Matter protest more accessible to those in the disabled community is being organized for next Friday in Portsmouth.
Two women, housed for months in area hotels at the government’s expense, are desperately looking for places to live now that the NH Emergency Rental Assistance funding is ending.
Nicole Eastman, 35, living at the Comfort Inn with three of her four teenage daughters for the past seven months, is having no luck finding an apartment. Neither is Roxanne Hunt, 58, who for 17 months has made her home at the Fairfield Inn in Hooksett.
As of October, there are 6,780 applicants waiting for affordable housing through the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority. The majority of them will wait 7-9 years for subsidized housing.
Many other families are newly housing insecure, after pandemic job-loss undermined their fragile ability to pay rent. While there is currently a federal moratorium on evictions, housing experts are concerned that come January — when that expires — there will be a wave of new families facing eviction and homelessness in the height of the New Hampshire winter.
Since September 9, Hartigan, 37, and his family have been living at The Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter. The family — along with the four others living in the shelter — have a private room to themselves. There are common areas for cooking and lounging, but during the pandemic they’ve been mostly empty, undermining the sense of community in the shelter, said Olga Cruz, the Director of Housing Services at the organization.
While homelessness can affect anyone, families with children are typically better protected than single individuals, said Karen Zook, director of UV Gear (formerly Silent Warriors), a Lebanon-based organization that provides resources and stop-gap services, like tents, to people who are unhoused.
“Under more normal circumstances, there are pretty good safeguards in place for families experiencing homelessness,” she said. “That population is well-served.”
For a highly contagious virus, a homeless shelter with dozens of beds, sometimes less than two feet apart, is extremely vulnerable.
While people who have housing can actively choose whether to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social distancing guidelines, those facing homelessness are living in “matchboxes,” as one advocate described it.
