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DORCHESTER

Like shadows, they escape the homeless count

By Christine MacDonald, Globe Correspondent, 2/2/2003

hen Diane Benedict broke off her engagement a year ago, she not only left her fiance but had to leave their Boston apartment as well. Finding a place to live with her infant daughter was daunting.

Six months shy of earning an associate's degree and with her grandparents at odds over who would baby-sit her daughter, Benedict said she had few job options and found apartment rents sky high. She ended up moving back to her mother's Roxbury apartment, where six people shared one bathroom. Even with a Section 8 subsidized housing voucher, finding a landlord willing to accept a tenant on public assistance took her nearly a year.

But she is luckier than many caught in the affordable housing crisis. Last week, she moved into a Dorchester apartment, leaving the ranks of what housing advocates call ''the shadow homeless.'' While rents on luxury apartments and even some more moderately priced units have begun to fall, housing activists say many Boston residents are seeing little respite. While the high end of the rental market has been slack, and landlords haveeven started offering incentives to tenants at the low end it is nowhere near a buyer's market, advocates say. Instead, they see people moving in with relatives or pooling resources with others to make the rent.

The arrangements keep families off the streets and out of homeless shelters. But the overcrowding tends to heighten tensions where the ''shadow homeless'' live, especially at this time of year, with people inside more.

''There are apartments available, but the prices are too high for the people that I work with,'' said Gloria Rosario, a housing advocate with City Life/Vida Urbana in Jamaica Plain. ''It's so hard for lower-income people to get a roof over their heads.'' Rosario said she has seen an increase in clients since December applying for public housing and rental subsidies programs because their salaries have not kept pace with rent increases.Davida Andelman, a Dorchester housing activist who works at the Bowdoin Street Health Center, says the doubling- and tripling-up in apartments can be seen on the streets outside in the enormous increase over the past decade of cars parked overnight.''The idea that rents are stabilizing is a crock,'' said Andelman. ''It may be happening in the Back Bay. Not in Dorchester.'' Berline Rosseau, a social worker at the Codman Square Health Center, sees similar overcrowding in her neighborhood.

''Often you have a couple of families living in a two-bedroom apartment,'' Rosseau said. ''Kids sleeping in the same room with parents. . . . It's a bad situation. There is just no [affordable] housing out there.''

Ava Chan at the Allston Brighton Community Development Corp. sees people earning ''about $30,000 a year and are struggling to find one- and two-bedroom apartments for themselves and their children.''

This story ran on page 6 of the Boston Globe's City Weekly section on 2/2/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.