BOONVILLE, MO. — Irvin and Sharon Flaitz hit bottom around Labor Day. Money from their restaurant jobs could not cover their bill at a residential motel. Savings were gone. Returning to family was not an option. With their four children, they were homeless in this rural town in the middle of the nation.
Milton Wells had always accepted the stereotype: homeless people lived in cities, slept on grates and ranted maniacally to the gods. They were bums, he thought. Then he was laid off from his $5-an-hour factory job in Boonville. Without money or an apartment, the 34-year-old Army veteran drifted from friend to friend. A few nights he slept in a car. His perception changed.
``Now I understand,`` he said.
The Flaitz family and Wells both came to Harvest House, a shelter for the homeless in this town of 7,000 and a scarce resource in rural America. They are among an increasing number of people, including a dramatic number of women and children, who have become homeless in rural areas.
Their presence erodes the notion of idyllic, neighborly rural life, and the perception that homelessness is an urban problem.
``When thinking about rural America we envision a scenic countryside and simpler time,`` says Ohio State University professor Richard First, who has conducted a pioneering, federally funded examination of the rural homeless.
``To acknowledge that there is poverty and homelessness is to challenge our belief in the way people in small towns and rural areas live their lives.``
Though most agree a precise count of rural homeless is impossible, researchers say the numbers are rising in nearly every state. Estimates range from an ``extremely conservative`` 65,000 to perhaps as many as 450,000 nationwide.
The trouble with the numbers stems from the difficulty in defining who is homeless. If a family is living in a severely substandard house, without running water or electricity, is it effectively homeless? Does the term apply to someone staying with a relative because he cannot afford housing? Or to someone without a home for several nights a year, but not permanently?
Janet Fitchen, an Ithaca College anthropology professor who has studied the rural homeless in upstate New York for five years, speaks of the ``hidden homeless.``
``It`s very hard to find rural homelessness because we don`t know what we are looking for,`` Fitchen said. ``We think of people on heating grates and big shelters. There are no heating grates in rural America and only a few small shelters.``
And the face of the rural homeless is changing.
Surveys of Ohio`s rural homeless in 1984 and again in 1990 by First and other Ohio State University researchers found that women with young children now make up the majority. The study also found higher levels of education and lower levels of mental illness than before.
``It tells us that young people, particularly women without full-time employment, cannot afford housing in rural communities,`` First said. ``And unless they have family and friends to support them, they are just out there on the margin.``
The numbers of men and women are increasing in part because the decline of agriculture and the loss of small industry has created a restructuring of the rural economy. The translation: few well-paying jobs.
First said he believed his findings in Ohio likely are indicative of states from New York to the Great Plains.
At the shelter in Boonville, University of Missouri extension agent Art Schneider said, at least half the daily population is ``very young children-preschool age-who have a parent or parents who are willing to work but do not have a high skill level.``
According to research by the Washington, D.C.-based Housing Assistance Council, there are up to 6,300 rural homeless in Iowa, 14,000 in New Hampshire, and perhaps 6,100 in Kentucky. There are 1,020 a month in Colorado and 2,800 a year in Vermont. And First said he would put the number in Ohio
``conservatively`` at 14,000 a year.
States often track the numbers in different ways, making nationwide statistics nearly impossible. But whatever the figures, housing advocates insist there is a shortage of affordable housing in rural America that rivals big cities.
``We commonly refer to the Bronx as the epitome of poverty, but more than 200 rural counties have higher poverty rates,`` said Kris Zawisza, a research associate at the Housing Assistance Council.
Unlike metropolitan areas, few rural areas have a social service network to deal with problems of the homeless. And as the rural economy continues in a spiral of decline, helping a neighbor is no longer possible, putting a strain on limited public resources.
``Even low numbers of homeless families can overwhelm resources,`` said a report by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences.
Areas that have attracted major industry and other business have discovered an underside. Bringing jobs and people to a town can displace others or price them out of the housing market.