New to needing help

Families live in cars in the parking lot of Port Charlotte's 24-hour Wal-Mart, pretending to be customers to use the bathroom. Fathers camp in the woods behind the local soup kitchen and meet their wives and children for dinner.

A family of five in North Port squat in their foreclosed-upon house without electricity or water.

A pregnant woman and her husband, a former construction worker, spend nights under the Peace River bridge.

If the dominant image of the housing boom in Southwest Florida was a home in paradise, an emerging picture of its decline is of residents, out of work and forced from their homes, struggling to find shelter.

Many are homeless children and young people without job experience or education -- those unskilled workers who tend to be most vulnerable to downshifts in the economy. So many families are coming to a local soup kitchen that Rebecca Foote, director of the Charlotte County Homeless Coalition, placed a newspaper ad for her most needed donation: high chairs.

"We're seeing people who don't fit the profile of the typical homeless person," said Foote, in the office of the Genesis Center soup kitchen, where the number of meals served per night has doubled in the past year.

The only homeless shelter between Venice and Fort Myers is set to open Dec. 19. Its 52 beds will be exceeded by the number of people who need them.

Rayme Nuckles, president of Florida Coalition for the Homeless, predicts an increase of 10 percent to 20 percent in the number of homeless over the last year, approaching 70,000 throughout the state.

James Lippincott has lived in Charlotte County for 32 years and had a job at a scrap parts shop until he was laid off in December. Now he sleeps on the floor of a house in foreclosure in North Port. He watched the former resident lock up and figured out how to break in.

He leaves in the mornings before 7 to avoid being seen by neighbors.

"They kept promising my job back when things turned back around but it never came back," Lippincott said.

He lives alone in secret. Others band together.

A community of tents

In Port Charlotte, miles past the technicolor Ferris wheel and the Wal-Mart, down two back roads and then a third, a thicket gives way to a narrow opening.

Robert pushed aside the palms and Spanish moss hanging in the path. He is husky -- he said he grew up on a farm in Ohio -- so he has to stoop. After about 100 yards, the path ends in a clearing.

Five tents appear. A teen-age boy darts behind one of them and then comes out again, shouting, "You scared the s--- out of me, man. I thought you were the cops."

At 27, Robert is the oldest. He pitched the first camp in July after he lost his job. There is nowhere else to go, he said, and no work.

"I've put in applications at Sam's Club, Kmart, Wal-Mart, Chick-fil-A, Walgreens, Books a Million," Robert said, sitting on an empty cooler outside his tent Thursday.

"I've put in at Circuit City. I've walked up and down 41 putting applications in. It's gotten to the point where everywhere I go they've already got my application."

Charlotte County's unemployment rate is nearly 10 percent, more than a 3 percent increase in the last year.

Robert asked that his last name not be used because he does not want to be arrested for trespassing.

A mirror hangs by a nail on a palm tree. The young men shave there when they have razors, which they have not had for several days. Overturned buckets serve as chairs in the camp, and are also used to tote water from a nearby canal to wash clothes. They rarely have soap.

At night they build a fire and, if anyone has liquor, they drink. Batteries and flashlights are a luxury. In the dark, Robert holds up a plastic camp lantern and laughs. It takes 12 C batteries.

In the morning they look for jobs and money to buy cigarettes and food for the day, Robert said. Usually they panhandle at grocery stores, looking for people carrying only one or two bags. Those are the people more likely to know what it is like to be hungry, Robert said, or to have a free hand to reach into a pocket for change.

They clean up in gas station bathrooms. The last time he took a shower was four weeks ago, when he visited his sister's house.

"She won't come visit me here," he said. "I tell her I'm doing the best I can. She says, 'You should be doing better for yourself. You should make something of yourself.'"

Inside his tent, a donation from a church, is a cot, a can of Pringles, another empty cooler.

Leaning against a tree is a broom to sweep out the tents. A pepper plant keeps the mosquitoes away.

"We try to pull ourselves together and find we keep getting knocked down," Robert said.

He holds his fingers about 2 inches apart.

"When I turned in my application at Taco Bell, they put it in a pile about that thick and said they're not hiring."

A long bus ride to shelter

Charlotte County plans to open the area's first shelter next month. But because the shelter was paid for with county tax dollars, residents of neighboring needy communities like North Port will not be allowed. They will have to continue asking social services for bus passes up to Sarasota's Salvation Army. Last month there were only three requests.

If more were willing to make the trek, they might be disappointed. The shelter reaches its 200-person capacity nearly every night of the week.

"If they need shelter there, they need to build a shelter and accept responsibility for people in their area," said Bryan Pope, general manager for the Sarasota Salvation Army. "If they don't everybody in the world will come to one place and we will quickly go under."

Charlotte has the sixth-highest rate of job loss and 10th-highest foreclosure rate in the state. Further south, in Lee County, is the state's single highest rate of home loss and the eighth-highest rate of job loss.

Just a few years ago, North Port, to the north, offered homes on credit to families unable to afford Sarasota or Fort Myers. Now the market is flooded -- one North Port neighborhood has the state's third highest concentration of homes with mortgages underwater -- and the construction industry that once boomed has disappeared.

Tom Pierce, the director of the state's office on homelessness, predicts the problem will worsen in the state's hardest hit communities. He expects the first increase in homelessness when the census is taken in January since the 2004-05 hurricane seasons.

"There's no question," Pierce said. "Right now we're just waiting to see how high it goes."

Requests for food stamps are up 20 percent over last year, and there is a lengthening backlog of families looking for help paying overdue rent -- one of the best indicators a family may soon become homeless.

Between July and October, Pierce's office received requests from 11,000 families for help paying overdue rent, and there was only enough money to aid 4,000.

Shirley Sullivan, one of two employees in North Port's social services department, says she has enough emergency money to help about 10 residents a month pay overdue utility bills. Last month, on the day before the money became available, her office received 125 requests for help.

"We didn't even answer the phone," Sullivan said.

From server to recipient

Kathy Johnson, 40, of Port Charlotte said she and her 4-year-old daughter are on the brink. Her eviction notice takes effect Monday.

Two weeks ago she started coming to dinner at the Port Charlotte soup kitchen, a place where she once volunteered with her older daughter's Girl Scout troop.

"Utterly humiliated, that's what I felt like," she said. "I'm the sort of person who would rather donate a million dollars than take 10."

A career waitress without a high school degree, Johnson married young. "I kind of bungled my way through life," she said. A few months ago she left her job at Punta Gorda's IHOP for a position as a receptionist. She wanted health insurance -- it would be her first time -- and she was looking forward to repairing her teeth, which are beginning to turn brown.

But a dead car battery and an emergency trip to the hospital amounted to too many missed days during the probationary period at the new job, and she lost it.

For the past month she has been walking to restaurants around Port Charlotte looking for work. Her green eyes are circled with charcoal shadow, cosmetics donated from a charity to help her look professional at job interviews.

The child support she receives from her ex-husband has dwindled because he lost a job in construction and is now traveling to Venice for a lower-paying job washing dishes.

"He dropped off some milk and a bag of frozen french fries," Johnson said.

On Thursday, she had $50 left and still no lead on a new place to live.

"I don't want to have to take her into the woods," Johnson said while Emily picked cattails from a bush in front of the soup kitchen. "That's what I've heard people are doing. I've never even been camping. I don't have a tent."