Every day, Laurie Olsen dreads the question her terminally ill daughter needs to know.

"Mommy, are we going to have a place to stay tonight?"

With a constant change of housing and little or no food on the table, Laurie and her husband Brian have struggled to keep their daughter Mindy sheltered for more than eight years.

"We live day to day not knowing where we are going to end up," Olsen said. "It's like wondering one day if you are going to wake up without any place to go and your girl is going to be gone."

The Olsen family has asked that their real names not be used as they strive to get their life back in order. They want the community to see them as what they can become rather than homeless individuals striving to make ends meet.

Mindy suffers from ataxia-telangiectasia, an immunodeficiency disease that affects the nervous system, immune system and other body systems. It causes degeneration in the part of the brain that controls motor movements and speech. At an early age, a child's walking becomes wobbly and as a teen, handicapped-bound. By the early 20s, the condition becomes fatal. Mindy, now 16 years old, relies on her mother to carry her from place to place, without the assistance of a wheelchair.

The Olsen family is one of 2,000 chronic homeless cases that exist in Utah. According to Brent Crane, executive director of the Food and Care Coalition, about 500 of those cases live in Utah County.

As winter sets in, increasing numbers of individuals in Utah County will be confronted with the harsh reality of homelessness: bundled, shivering souls, looking for a warm place to go.

"The problem we face in Utah County is that we lack in a fluid response to the housing needs of our homeless friends," Crane said. "There is nothing that will allow these individuals to get back on their feet."

Transitional housing programs house people in one central building or cluster of buildings but provide supportive programs that require and enable individuals to give back to the community and get back on their feet.

Utah County currently does not have this kind of program in place. Instead, the county provides motel vouchering, which, according to Crane, is "seriously flawed." The system is expensive, sometimes requiring more than $50 per room per night. Clients are left unsupervised, leaving an unfair burden on motel providers and management and providing no time for the homeless to stabilize or resolve the underlying causes that lead them to homelessness, Crane said.

"Utah County has a $7.5 million animal shelter, and yet we don't have any housing continuum set in place for the homeless," he said.

The costs of motel vouchers are split between various community service providers including the Food and Care Coalition, Community Action Services, transient bishops of the LDS Church and Wasatch Mental Health. Together service providers spent nearly $1 million last year, providing, on average, five nights of shelter per homeless individual - which is not long enough for most homeless people to stabilize and improve their circumstances.

Utah County is in great need of transitional housing, according to a study done in 2001 by John Brereton, president of Affordable Housing Solutions, and James A. Wood, director of the Bureau of Economic and Business at the University of Utah.

The study found the rental market in Utah County to be severely distorted by the presence of BYU and UVSC with thousands of students living off-campus in more than 13,000 household units. This environment has created a serious shortage of affordable housing and a perilous shortage of transitional housing.

In an effort to address this problem, the Food and Care Coalition has started the building of a transitional housing facility. They have extended an invitation to service providers within the community to be involved and to use their resources in a community collaboration effort.

The Olsen family is one of many who could benefit from the service and building of this facility.

With medical bills for Mindy reaching more than $6,000 a month, the Olsen family has found the basic needs of food and shelter difficult to provide. Although the constant worry of what will come next is always a struggle, the hardest part is trying to get back on top of things once people have hit rock bottom.

Olsen said many people are quick to pass judgment and assume she is where she is because of bad choices she has made.

"There are very judgmental people out there," she said. "They don't know anything about me and yet they assume so much. I am here simply by being poor and by being a parent."

Olsen is a full-time caregiver who needs to be by her daughter's side at all times in order to attend to her medical needs.

"It is my daughter that gets me out of bed every day," she said. "If it weren't for her I would have committed suicide."

Olsen's husband has struggled to find a job in Utah County as he competes with more than 40,000 students from UVSC and BYU.

Many employers require a credit check. However, many homeless individuals do not have any credit and are therefore denied the job.

"Nobody gives you a break when you are poor," Olsen said. "If I could tell people one thing it would be don't be judgmental. If you can help someone in the community, do it. If you have extra food, donate. If you have extra time, serve."

Copyright Brigham Young University 6 Dec 2007