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FOR MANY, HOUSING IS A HEARTACHE
WHEN POVERTY HITS HOME, IT CAN TRAP GENERATION
Orlando Sentinel
SERIES: THE POOR CHILDREN
4th in a series of 6
Willie Davis' 1-year-old nephew is oblivious to the filth around him.
He crawled on a recent morning across the soiled vinyl kitchen floor and over the even dirtier spots where the vinyl was missing and cement showed through. Precious paused and grinned a contagious smile, then gazed wide-eyed at a rickety table piled high with grimy dishes and bits of week-old food.
"I really don't like it here, but I don't have anywhere else to go," said Davis, leaning into the bathroom to spit some Red Man chewing tobacco into the toilet.
The 90-year-old lives in a small duplex at McNamee Street and Faulkner Avenue in Leesburg, where he often cares for as many as five of his relatives' children during the day. He and his wife, who works at a dry cleaner, used to rent a nearby house, but it was so dilapidated the city tore it down.
Now they pay $250 a month for the place they call home, where a mound of empty soda cans litters the yard, the front door is blackened by fingerprints and dirt, and the tiny rooms are piled high with mounds of clothes and their other belongings. The carpet in the living room is matted with grime, and the cabinets are falling apart.
Although most of the children who eat and play in the Davis home are too young to understand, experts say inadequate housing -- whether rundown, crowded, messy or lacking necessities such as heat -- can pose serious, long-lasting physical and emotional problems for children.
Hardly anyone seems to care.
In Lake County, no one even tracks the number of substandard homes, and little government money goes toward fixing up or tearing down shacks. However, those familiar with the county's shabbiest dwellings say hundreds of children live in them -- and consider their conditions "normal."
Toilets don't flush, moldy mattresses reek from leaky roofs, and broken windows are taped with plastic. It's as though a segment of society is living in a private Depression the rest of the county doesn't share.
"In Lake County, the numbers of occupied substandard housing are just incredible," said Glenna Osborne, director of the Children's Home Society for Lake and Sumter counties. "They are all over the place."
Lake County's children often share their slums with drug- or alcohol-addicted relatives who don't want to move and don't care about the condition of their homes. Others, however, are struggling to break the chain of poverty.
Few neighborhoods in Lake County are immune -- even the best areas sometimes conceal abysmal housing behind ranches and schools, near banks and offices, and off narrow dirt roads and sprawling highways. Take the Davis home, for example. It sits one block off U.S. Highway 441 in Leesburg.
Though Lady Lake is best known for the prosperous retirement community The Villages, it also is the site of dilapidated trailers that are tucked away up a hill, along Skyline Drive. Even more invisible are the pockets of poor housing in north Lake County back on sand roads in the Ocala National Forest.
"They're out in the forest in a rundown, single-wide trailer with sewage flowing out behind the trailer," Osborne said.
The conditions range from old and worn to dangerous and seemingly unlivable.
"Poverty is one thing," Osborne said. "Poverty with hazardous conditions is a state of mind -- and the children are victims."
While definitions of substandard housing vary, most social service groups are talking about more than peeling paint and leaky roofs.
"We're talking about the ceiling falling in and dangerously broken windows," Osborne said. "The toilet backs up, and you're accustomed to using a bucket, or you have a hose running from a neighbor's house to get water."
Many of the homes lack complete kitchens, heat or electricity.
Dave Montez, a former investigator for the state Department of Children & Families, has walked through homes where he could see the ground below because leaks had rotted away the floors and where there were bathrooms with electrical wires dangling dangerously close to running water.
Children often played nearby.
"I've seen children playing near piles of broken glass, and vermin -- all kinds of vermin," said Montez, who now works for the Children's Home Society.
The people living in those conditions, particularly children, become tragically accustomed to it, he said.
One day Montez was talking with two children as they made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at their Mount Dora home. Cockroaches scurried across the jar lids and bread. The children nonchalantly flicked them away.
"You can get used to anything," Montez said.
Even though children adapt, the physical and emotional impact is tremendous, experts say. Babies cannot learn to crawl and walk properly in homes where the floors are unsafe. Older children's grades often suffer because they become anti-social and depressed.
"When kids have a poor housing situation they're often made fun of at school," Osborne said.
Some homes are dark as soon as the sun goes down.
"If there is no electricity in the house and it's dark, they can't do their homework," Osborne said.
The impact can last for years and can perpetuate the problem.
"You remember this from your childhood," Osborne said. "You may know that other people live differently, but it will be very difficult to implement a different standard of living."
Andrew Webb of Mount Dora doesn't want his friends to come over and play.
His buddies don't live in cramped houses with flimsy tin roofs that shake in the wind. They don't have to sleep in the same bed as their father. And they're not embarrassed about the place they eat and do homework.
Andrew's father doesn't blame his 15-year-old son. Randy Webb doesn't want his buddies to come over, either.
"It ain't exactly a lap of luxury," he said of the ramshackle Mount Dora cottage that is hidden at the end of a dirt path behind a large home with a screened pool.
But the single father of three who does electrical work wants to get his kids out of the house where they pay $400 a month. Webb wants to move Andrew, 14-year-old Jackie and 11-year-old Abbie into a house that has sturdy walls, a roof that doesn't leak and a kitchen with enough space for a refrigerator. Theirs is outside on a porch because the kitchen is too small.
So the divorced father has applied for a house from Habitat for Humanity of Lake County, which requires those who want homes to put in 400 hours of work as a down payment. For more than a year, Webb has been working through the night so he can put in his Habitat hours.
"It hasn't been easy," Webb said recently. "I worked 15 hours yesterday, eight last night and I haven't been to sleep yet.
"But I can make the time."
Something about Webb makes him different from hundreds of other parents who have given up on improving their housing situation and whose kids will never romp on clean carpet or sleep in beds with sheets -- he is determined to shed poverty.
"The kids want something better than this, and the waiting has been hard, but I just take it day by day," Webb said.
Sometimes children are moved from slum to slum several times a year, never establishing roots.
More than a third of Lake County students moved at least once during the school year in 1998-1999, according to the Florida Department of Education. At Rimes Elementary School in Leesburg -- where 88 percent of the children come from impoverished families -- 52 percent of the students moved at least once during the school year.
"We have families that struggle to get out of it, but we have families that are multigenerational in poverty and don't know how to get out of it," Osborne said.
Tackling substandard housing from the supply side -- forcing landlords to clean up -- is a long, complicated process riddled with backlogs of code violation complaints. New construction is booming, and inspectors in many of the county's municipalities are struggling just to keep up with the houses being built. But some cities -- Mount Dora, Eustis and Leesburg in particular -- have found a formula. They are using a 1969 law that lets them use tax money from blighted areas to revitalize the area.
Leesburg officials hope to eliminate substandard housing within the next 10 years. In 1997, commissioners created a Department of Housing to get housing grant dollars.
Eustis has established a 15-year history of fighting substandard housing. This fall, it earmarked more dilapidated homes for demolition inside its 940-acre target area.
But a significant countywide catalyst could come in January, when housing agencies, city managers and builders of low-income houses and apartments meet for the first time ever for a daylong conference on how to improve dwellings for the poor.
Demian Roberts, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Lake County, said the group's first mission likely will be to create a grid of the county that pinpoints every substandard house, apartment and trailer.
"Our goal will be to wipe out the county's substandard housing by 2010," he said.
Dawn Welch didn't have to wait that long for help from Habitat.
Eight years ago, Welch married and began moving from trailer to trailer in east Lake County. Throughout the years, her two sons, Dylan, now 5, and 8-year-old Allen moved with her. She knew it was bad for her children, but Welch, divorced at age 21, was like many mothers: She didn't know what else to do when she ran out of money.
Last year, while the family was living in a rundown trailer in Sorrento, the state took her boys away.
But she was offered a deal: If she finished her work hours with Habitat, she could have her children back when she moved into her new house.
A year-and-a-half after first filing an application, Welch finished her Habitat hours. She worked at Habitat's thrift store during her two-week vacation from the Mount Dora Wal-Mart, where she stocks goods, to help speed the process.
"I have no tolerance for people who aren't motivated enough to do better for their kids," Welch said.
Last month, she called her boys and asked them to come visit. That day, she surprised them by moving them into their new three-bedroom house. Welch pays $273 a month and will own the home in 20 years.
Allen says his room is so big he can do "loop the loops" with his yo-yo. As he and his brother wrestled around on plush green carpet, they agreed that the best part of the new house is that they don't have to share a room.
But their mother knows there's more to their house than the ceiling fans, sparkling gray-blue kitchen tile and a fenced-in back yard where Rocky, their new mutt, likes to dig holes.
It means stability for her sons, and when they're older, they'll remember good times on Laurel Lane in Eustis. She hopes memories of repeated moves from scrappy trailers will fade.
For the first time in her life, Welch had room for a Christmas tree in her home this year.
"We always had a tiny one and had to put it on a stand and make it look bigger," she said.
Although they don't have much furniture, the 7-foot-tall Christmas tree given to her by co-workers at Wal-Mart filled the living room. There weren't many Christmas gifts under the tree, but Welch said she is as happy as she's ever been.
"I have my boys, and I have a house," she said. "That's enough."
WHEN POVERTY HITS HOME, IT CAN TRAP GENERATION
Orlando Sentinel
SERIES: THE POOR CHILDREN
4th in a series of 6
Willie Davis' 1-year-old nephew is oblivious to the filth around him.
He crawled on a recent morning across the soiled vinyl kitchen floor and over the even dirtier spots where the vinyl was missing and cement showed through. Precious paused and grinned a contagious smile, then gazed wide-eyed at a rickety table piled high with grimy dishes and bits of week-old food.
"I really don't like it here, but I don't have anywhere else to go," said Davis, leaning into the bathroom to spit some Red Man chewing tobacco into the toilet.
The 90-year-old lives in a small duplex at McNamee Street and Faulkner Avenue in Leesburg, where he often cares for as many as five of his relatives' children during the day. He and his wife, who works at a dry cleaner, used to rent a nearby house, but it was so dilapidated the city tore it down.
Now they pay $250 a month for the place they call home, where a mound of empty soda cans litters the yard, the front door is blackened by fingerprints and dirt, and the tiny rooms are piled high with mounds of clothes and their other belongings. The carpet in the living room is matted with grime, and the cabinets are falling apart.
Although most of the children who eat and play in the Davis home are too young to understand, experts say inadequate housing -- whether rundown, crowded, messy or lacking necessities such as heat -- can pose serious, long-lasting physical and emotional problems for children.
Hardly anyone seems to care.
In Lake County, no one even tracks the number of substandard homes, and little government money goes toward fixing up or tearing down shacks. However, those familiar with the county's shabbiest dwellings say hundreds of children live in them -- and consider their conditions "normal."
Toilets don't flush, moldy mattresses reek from leaky roofs, and broken windows are taped with plastic. It's as though a segment of society is living in a private Depression the rest of the county doesn't share.
"In Lake County, the numbers of occupied substandard housing are just incredible," said Glenna Osborne, director of the Children's Home Society for Lake and Sumter counties. "They are all over the place."
Lake County's children often share their slums with drug- or alcohol-addicted relatives who don't want to move and don't care about the condition of their homes. Others, however, are struggling to break the chain of poverty.
Few neighborhoods in Lake County are immune -- even the best areas sometimes conceal abysmal housing behind ranches and schools, near banks and offices, and off narrow dirt roads and sprawling highways. Take the Davis home, for example. It sits one block off U.S. Highway 441 in Leesburg.
Though Lady Lake is best known for the prosperous retirement community The Villages, it also is the site of dilapidated trailers that are tucked away up a hill, along Skyline Drive. Even more invisible are the pockets of poor housing in north Lake County back on sand roads in the Ocala National Forest.
"They're out in the forest in a rundown, single-wide trailer with sewage flowing out behind the trailer," Osborne said.
The conditions range from old and worn to dangerous and seemingly unlivable.
"Poverty is one thing," Osborne said. "Poverty with hazardous conditions is a state of mind -- and the children are victims."
While definitions of substandard housing vary, most social service groups are talking about more than peeling paint and leaky roofs.
"We're talking about the ceiling falling in and dangerously broken windows," Osborne said. "The toilet backs up, and you're accustomed to using a bucket, or you have a hose running from a neighbor's house to get water."
Many of the homes lack complete kitchens, heat or electricity.
Dave Montez, a former investigator for the state Department of Children & Families, has walked through homes where he could see the ground below because leaks had rotted away the floors and where there were bathrooms with electrical wires dangling dangerously close to running water.
Children often played nearby.
"I've seen children playing near piles of broken glass, and vermin -- all kinds of vermin," said Montez, who now works for the Children's Home Society.
The people living in those conditions, particularly children, become tragically accustomed to it, he said.
One day Montez was talking with two children as they made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at their Mount Dora home. Cockroaches scurried across the jar lids and bread. The children nonchalantly flicked them away.
"You can get used to anything," Montez said.
Even though children adapt, the physical and emotional impact is tremendous, experts say. Babies cannot learn to crawl and walk properly in homes where the floors are unsafe. Older children's grades often suffer because they become anti-social and depressed.
"When kids have a poor housing situation they're often made fun of at school," Osborne said.
Some homes are dark as soon as the sun goes down.
"If there is no electricity in the house and it's dark, they can't do their homework," Osborne said.
The impact can last for years and can perpetuate the problem.
"You remember this from your childhood," Osborne said. "You may know that other people live differently, but it will be very difficult to implement a different standard of living."
Andrew Webb of Mount Dora doesn't want his friends to come over and play.
His buddies don't live in cramped houses with flimsy tin roofs that shake in the wind. They don't have to sleep in the same bed as their father. And they're not embarrassed about the place they eat and do homework.
Andrew's father doesn't blame his 15-year-old son. Randy Webb doesn't want his buddies to come over, either.
"It ain't exactly a lap of luxury," he said of the ramshackle Mount Dora cottage that is hidden at the end of a dirt path behind a large home with a screened pool.
But the single father of three who does electrical work wants to get his kids out of the house where they pay $400 a month. Webb wants to move Andrew, 14-year-old Jackie and 11-year-old Abbie into a house that has sturdy walls, a roof that doesn't leak and a kitchen with enough space for a refrigerator. Theirs is outside on a porch because the kitchen is too small.
So the divorced father has applied for a house from Habitat for Humanity of Lake County, which requires those who want homes to put in 400 hours of work as a down payment. For more than a year, Webb has been working through the night so he can put in his Habitat hours.
"It hasn't been easy," Webb said recently. "I worked 15 hours yesterday, eight last night and I haven't been to sleep yet.
"But I can make the time."
Something about Webb makes him different from hundreds of other parents who have given up on improving their housing situation and whose kids will never romp on clean carpet or sleep in beds with sheets -- he is determined to shed poverty.
"The kids want something better than this, and the waiting has been hard, but I just take it day by day," Webb said.
Sometimes children are moved from slum to slum several times a year, never establishing roots.
More than a third of Lake County students moved at least once during the school year in 1998-1999, according to the Florida Department of Education. At Rimes Elementary School in Leesburg -- where 88 percent of the children come from impoverished families -- 52 percent of the students moved at least once during the school year.
"We have families that struggle to get out of it, but we have families that are multigenerational in poverty and don't know how to get out of it," Osborne said.
Tackling substandard housing from the supply side -- forcing landlords to clean up -- is a long, complicated process riddled with backlogs of code violation complaints. New construction is booming, and inspectors in many of the county's municipalities are struggling just to keep up with the houses being built. But some cities -- Mount Dora, Eustis and Leesburg in particular -- have found a formula. They are using a 1969 law that lets them use tax money from blighted areas to revitalize the area.
Leesburg officials hope to eliminate substandard housing within the next 10 years. In 1997, commissioners created a Department of Housing to get housing grant dollars.
Eustis has established a 15-year history of fighting substandard housing. This fall, it earmarked more dilapidated homes for demolition inside its 940-acre target area.
But a significant countywide catalyst could come in January, when housing agencies, city managers and builders of low-income houses and apartments meet for the first time ever for a daylong conference on how to improve dwellings for the poor.
Demian Roberts, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Lake County, said the group's first mission likely will be to create a grid of the county that pinpoints every substandard house, apartment and trailer.
"Our goal will be to wipe out the county's substandard housing by 2010," he said.
Dawn Welch didn't have to wait that long for help from Habitat.
Eight years ago, Welch married and began moving from trailer to trailer in east Lake County. Throughout the years, her two sons, Dylan, now 5, and 8-year-old Allen moved with her. She knew it was bad for her children, but Welch, divorced at age 21, was like many mothers: She didn't know what else to do when she ran out of money.
Last year, while the family was living in a rundown trailer in Sorrento, the state took her boys away.
But she was offered a deal: If she finished her work hours with Habitat, she could have her children back when she moved into her new house.
A year-and-a-half after first filing an application, Welch finished her Habitat hours. She worked at Habitat's thrift store during her two-week vacation from the Mount Dora Wal-Mart, where she stocks goods, to help speed the process.
"I have no tolerance for people who aren't motivated enough to do better for their kids," Welch said.
Last month, she called her boys and asked them to come visit. That day, she surprised them by moving them into their new three-bedroom house. Welch pays $273 a month and will own the home in 20 years.
Allen says his room is so big he can do "loop the loops" with his yo-yo. As he and his brother wrestled around on plush green carpet, they agreed that the best part of the new house is that they don't have to share a room.
But their mother knows there's more to their house than the ceiling fans, sparkling gray-blue kitchen tile and a fenced-in back yard where Rocky, their new mutt, likes to dig holes.
It means stability for her sons, and when they're older, they'll remember good times on Laurel Lane in Eustis. She hopes memories of repeated moves from scrappy trailers will fade.
For the first time in her life, Welch had room for a Christmas tree in her home this year.
"We always had a tiny one and had to put it on a stand and make it look bigger," she said.
Although they don't have much furniture, the 7-foot-tall Christmas tree given to her by co-workers at Wal-Mart filled the living room. There weren't many Christmas gifts under the tree, but Welch said she is as happy as she's ever been.
"I have my boys, and I have a house," she said. "That's enough."