DeBorah Montague, 67, laid in bed with a crochet project sprawled across her lap. Interlocking lavender and plum-hued stitches were already forming a classic granny square.
“When winter time comes, I’ll have a blanket,” Montague said in August.
She has no idea where she’ll be living by then.
The lease to her Norfolk apartment ended without the option to renew in April. Her advocates at the Legal Aid Society of Southeastern Virginia requested the landlord grant Montague an extension until July. That deadline also passed.
Montague stayed put. She is bed-bound and can’t breathe without an oxygen machine running constantly. She can’t walk and has difficulty remembering things. She relies on a personal care assistant for day-to-day help with medical needs, grocery shopping, cooking and keeping her apartment clean.
She hoped that as long as she kept paying her rent, she’d be able to stay. But the landlord filed for an eviction. The hearing is Oct. 9.
“I don’t have any place to go,” she said.
Across Hampton Roads, people experiencing homelessness and housing instability describe similar experiences of trying to access resources that aren’t meaningfully available — regardless of employment, age, disability or family status.
Thaler McCormick, CEO of ForKids, the nonprofit that runs the regional Housing Crisis Hotline, said the system has never been perfect.
“But there was about a decade when it worked better,” she said, noting that decade was roughly from 2008 until 2018.
Over time, more people needed services. And federal, state and local requirements grew. People seeking assistance needed to clear increasingly high benchmarks to qualify for aid, and the organizations providing help needed to follow strict standards to keep their funding. These requirements were meant to reduce fraud and prioritize people who need help the most, but they also led to bottlenecks.
“The system ended up with far too much bureaucracy and not enough funding to be able to implement those processes consistently,” McCormick said.
The system was already collapsing under its own weight. Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened.
“All of the coordination that happened across service providers really fractured during the pandemic, and it's never completely recovered,” McCormick said.
A hollowed-out system, funding cuts, rising costs, stagnant wages and a general lack of affordable housing make more people at risk of homelessness and homelessness harder to escape.
Strained systems
Darlisha Moore, 44, is a certified nursing assistant and works full-time at an assisted living facility in Hampton Roads. She makes around $3,000 a month. Still, she can’t afford a place for her and her 13-year-old daughter to live.
“I never thought in a million years in my hometown, in the state that I grew up in, that I'd be homeless and sleeping in a car,” Moore said.
She’s tried getting help. But shelters are either full, or could take her but not her daughter. Every call she’s made in the past eight months to 211, the Regional Housing Crisis Hotline and nonprofits has led to the same dead end.
“We have nowhere to go,” Moore said.
Andrew Stephens, 60, sat in the same library just a few seats down from Moore. He didn’t know Moore, but overhearing her story reminded him of his own: He’s been homeless since June and has spent the summer sleeping in his car.
“It's terrible because you get hot at night,” he said. “You can't run the AC because the AC takes down the gas. You got your window cracked open, but you don't know if nobody [sic] gonna rob you.”
Stephens lived in the same Norfolk apartment for 30 years. He was a truck driver for 20 years.
He was diagnosed with diabetes. Swollen feet make it hard to walk and a cataract took a toll on his eyesight. He didn’t feel safe driving anymore.
Then, his landlord sold the building and the new owner doubled the rent, pricing Stephens out of his home. He can’t find a new one.
Stephens tried going to shelters. Most are first come, first served. When he did manage to secure a place, he said the poor air quality aggravated his health issues.
“You're supposed to keep your head above water, but every day you feel like you're drowning,” he said.
In Hampton Roads, churches, nonprofits and local governments provide housing resources, including housing assistance, shelters and, to a lesser extent, affordable units.
The process to access most of these resources is set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is the biggest source of funding for housing programs in Virginia.
HUD funds public housing authorities and housing vouchers, formerly known as Section 8. Its money also flows to local programs through what’s called the Continuum of Care. It’s a system that hinges on the federal, state and local governments, organizations and nonprofits working together seamlessly to fill gaps.
An influx of funding during the pandemic kept people housed, but that money dried up by 2022.
“Rents started to spike during the same period, so we both lost funding, and housing became much less affordable,” McCormick said.
Less than 1% of the state’s budget goes to housing aid. Virginia has increased funding to housing programs, but not enough to close the gap left by federal cuts to housing and public assistance programs, said Laura Dobbs, director of policy at Housing Opportunities Made Equal.
Shifting needs
Michael Myers, 37, and Adrian Turner, 37, both lost their jobs in June, and it didn’t take long before they were underwater. For months, they chased lifelines.
“We didn't know what to do next,” Myers said. “We tried to look for other work, and nothing was coming up quick enough, and the rent was coming quick.”
They drove for Uber for a while and started a business selling vintage clothing and collectors’ items. A local church offered $50 dollars. None of it made a dent.
Myers and Turner said their case manager at the Virginia Beach Housing Resource Center stopped responding to their calls. The Regional Housing Crisis Hotline told them they didn’t qualify for assistance.
“Because of our location and because we don't meet the criteria of having kids, being a veteran, we don't qualify,” Myers said.
Days, weeks and months ticked by. The $1,500 Myers and Turner originally owed ballooned into $8,000 as fees piled on. That sum disqualified them from many assistance programs.
Their landlord wouldn’t accept a partial payment.
In other words, they were stuck.
The total number of people calling into the Regional Housing Crisis Hotline has decreased since the COVID-19 pandemic — from around 1,100 calls a day to around 600.
But what’s spiked since then is the number of calls from people, like Myers and Turner, who are housed but get behind on rent.
“This is the canary in the coal mine,” McCormick said. “As more stably housed people that are working are struggling to pay escalating rents, eventually, if we can't help those folks stay in their housing, that's going to start to have big impacts on the homeless system.”
When it comes to preventing eviction, the faster someone can pay the rent owed, the cheaper it is to keep them housed, McCormick said.
But on average, only 93 households receive rental assistance a month through hotline partners. More than 800 are left on waiting lists.
The demographics of homelessness have also changed. People 55 and older make up about a third of the homeless population in Hampton Roads.
“Just looking at the last 10 years, the homeless older adult population continues to grow across the region,” said Julie Dixon, the vice president of community planning and development at The Planning Council.
Cities are struggling to keep older adults like Montague and Stephens housed. And shelter infrastructure, like bunk beds, isn’t set up with seniors in mind, Dixon said.
McCormick estimated they have to tell around 85% of people who call into the hotline looking for help — including homelessness services, rental assistance and utility assistance — that there’s not an active resource available.
“A hotline is only as strong as the resources it can deploy,” she said. “We need more resources.”
For Dobbs, that short period during the pandemic proved what’s possible.
“In that moment there was a political will and recognizing the need and importance of housing, but as soon as that emergency went away, legislators stopped caring,” she said.
Service providers now are dealing with funding uncertainty, funding delays and shoestring budgets, she added, leaving people without assistance.
“At the end of the day, unfortunately, in our system nobody has a right to shelter,” said Melissa Bonfiglio, director of litigation at Legal Aid Society of Southeastern Virginia. “If you have no housing, if there's no place to go, you're just, you're homeless.”
Mending the net
A resource could be funding, authority from the state, land, coordination or the flexibility to use existing resources differently, said Del. Bonita Anthony (D-Norfolk).
But, short of simplifying federal rules, the main resource needed is funding, McCormick said.
“You've got to be able to fund the staffing to do these very detailed requirements, but then at the end of it, you want to make sure you've got the money to actually help people,” she said.
Anthony said the state could do more to help, but it’s up to localities to bring specific requests to lawmakers.
“The state issues out the authority,” Anthony said. “The state issues resources. The locality also generates their revenue as well, and the funding formulas, the tax infrastructure, in order to be able to distribute resources where they need.”
A dedicated funding stream for housing assistance in the region could make the local housing safety net stronger and reduce dependence on federal funding, McCormick said.
Communities in California and Kansas adopted a half-cent sales tax in 2024 to raise money for housing aid, homelessness prevention and affordable housing. The tax in Los Angeles, Calif., raises around $1 billion every year.
Voters in California, Michigan and Colorado approved raising property taxes to increase funding to homelessness services and affordable housing projects. In Missouri, voters in St. Louis approved a hotel tax that will go towards affordable housing projects.
But for something like that to work in Hampton Roads, it would need to be a regional effort, McCormick said.
“We have 17 cities and counties, and each of them has their own parameters for accessing service,” McCormick said. “Not one of them wants to be far out front on addressing homelessness, out of the fear of becoming a magnet for the poor and the homeless.”
Red tape
Montague is facing eviction not because she hasn’t paid rent but because she can’t find a new place. The wait for a nursing home bed is about a year. And because there’s no active abuse occurring, agencies like Adult Protective Services are limited in how they can intervene, Bonfiglio said.
Legal Aid will represent her at her upcoming eviction hearing, said Evan Carcerano, Montague’s attorney. But the region’s shortage of affordable or subsidized housing doesn’t leave many options, he noted.
Moore makes too much money to qualify for housing assistance, but not enough to afford housing.
Stephens filed for disability. His request was approved, but it will take another 100 days for him to get the award letter. And then he’ll have to find an available unit.
Myers and Turner got evicted Sept. 15. But their story turned out to be a hopeful one.
“We were able to find a private owner who had a house who was willing to take a chance on us,” Myers said.
Still, they were disappointed they weren’t able to find help to stay — and now have an eviction on their record.
“You shouldn't have to show how poor you are to deserve help,” Turner said.
Turner reached above the doorframe and pulled down a strip of red tape. He put it there the day they moved in for God’s protection.
For them at least, faith worked where the system failed.
