It is the number — 2,400 — that floors me, still.
It is the number of schoolkids in Jefferson County who are homeless. It was in the paper the other day. You say that isn’t a crime?
It should be.
The parking lot in front of 8755 W. 14th Ave. in Lakewood is jammed, as is the reception area.
“This is one of our quiet days,” whispers Mary Yendrek, the director of program services at the Jeffco Action Center.
It is often the last stop for folks on the long financial slide in Jefferson County, a place that averages close to 130 people a day walking in its doors in search of food, rent assistance, bus tokens, clothing or a nonjudgmental ear willing to listen.
Most of the people sitting in the myriad chairs in the reception area, I figure, are about 40 years old, with a few senior couples here and there. No one looks at you or at anyone else.
Joe Haines, the director of development, estimates 60 percent to 75 percent of the 40 or so in the room have come for an emergency box of food. It will feed them for five days.
He is the center’s numbers guy. Last year, he says, it served 25,000 people, 14,000 of whom came for the first time for services.
That is a 40 percent increase over 2008, he said. And yes, he had read about the 2,400 homeless schoolkids too. He figures he sees the bulk of those families every week.
Things are not likely to get better any time soon, he said. He can just tell, the same way he knew in July 2008 that the country was in for a good deal of misery.
The center gives away school supplies each year, Haines said. That July, the number of schoolkids wanting them rose 20 percent.
“We all knew then something really bad was coming,” he said.
Mag Strittmatter, the executive director, has just come out of a meeting and is sitting in her office when she launches into tales of the slow creep of lines of people waiting at the front doors every morning.
The lines are now at least 15 people deep most mornings, she said. This does not count the days the center offers utility-assistance money, when hundreds line up. People have slept in their cars overnight, hauled their young children to the doors at 3:30 a.m. to get the little bit of assistance the center sometimes offers.
I ask her about the 2,400 schoolkids.
“Did you look inside cars, knock on the doors of motels along Colfax Avenue?” she replies. “They live in places that kids have no place being.”
She once ran the numbers of people the center has served since 2007. It totaled about 60,000 people.
“Of that number,” Strittmatter said, “40 percent were under the age of 18.”
We live in the age of the nouveau poor, she says, once proud, working people who come to the center because they have nowhere else to go.
They are carpenters, roofers, computer technicians, mortgage bankers, people of all former working stripes with no place to work.
What can be done? I ask her.
“We first need to recalibrate our assumptions and judgments. If people try to understand the issue as it is, not how they want to see it, they would come to much different conclusions and do something about it.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
