‘I live for them, nothing more’

from the San Luis Obispo Tribune

Sarah Arnquist
On a recent rainy afternoon, a dozen or so children jumped off a school bus in San Simeon and scurried toward their homes in a nearby motel.

Normally at 4 p. m., Erminia is still at work cleaning hotel rooms when her son, 10, and daughter, 7, get home from school. But on this day during the slow tourism season, she met them at the door.

While the children began their homework, Erminia made chilies rellenos for dinner on a two-burner camp stove. The smell of charred green peppers filled the cramped motel room—the family’s home for a year. Before that, they shared a house in Cambria with two other families.

Nestled next to million-dollar homes in the bucolic hills of Cambria and amid the strip of motels in San Simeon live some of San Luis Obispo County’s poorest residents.

Most are Hispanic. Many are recent immigrants. Some are documented. Some aren’t. Erminia, whose last name is not given, is one of the latter.

Those living here provide the backbone for the tourism industry

THE EDGE OF POVERTY A TRIBUNE EXCLUSIVE REPORT

on the North Coast, cleaning motel rooms and washing dishes in restaurants. But despite working multiple jobs and putting in long hours, many cannot afford apartment rentals, which go for nearly $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom.

So instead, they triple up in homes or crowd into motel rooms. It is common here for a family of five to occupy a single bedroom or garage turned into a makeshift room, said Maria Mendoza, who works with Healthy Start, a school-based program to help disadvantaged families.

Motels don’t require first and last month rent plus deposit. Motels also are furnished, and the monthly rate of $720 is feasible even for Erminia, who takes home $1,200 to $2,000 a month, depending on the season, or about $19,000 a year to support her children.

The 2008 federal annual poverty rate is $17,600 for a family of three.

At 5 feet tall, Erminia is barely larger than a child, but deep lines in her face reveal the disproportionate share of hardships she has faced in her 27 years. Her jaw is set resolutely in her conviction that the monotony and burdens she endures are worth the oppor tunities she can give her children.

“Vivo por ellos, nada más,” Erminia said — in English, “I live for them, nothing more.”

Two queen beds, a small couch and a television occupy three-quarters of the family’s room. The opposite corner has a full-size refrigerator, table, microwave, blender and camp stove. Cooking pots are piled to the ceiling on the fridge.

Erminia washes dishes in the bathroom sink. There is little room for books or a computer, even if the family had money to buy them. Nor is there an area to play indoors. The hallway is dark and littered with garbage and an old mattress.

“At first it was really depressing,” Erminia said in Spanish about living in the motel. “Now, I just accept it.”

No escape

At the Cambria Grammar School, Erminia’s children have many friends living in similar situations.

Nearly half of the 850 students in the Coast Unified School District live in poverty — more than any other district in the county. Educators define poverty by the number of students who qualify for free or reduced-cost meals at school. That number increased by 55 percent over the last seven years.

School officials see the effects of poverty firsthand and are not surprised to hear about children living in motels and shared houses. They seek out these children who often need extra help to succeed.

“We might see the biggest contrast in terms of wealth versus poverty in Cambria,” said John Elfers, the county Office of Education’s coordinator for homeless and foster youth services.

This income gap may be widest in Cambria, but it is a growing problem throughout the county for immigrant and native-born families alike, according to social services providers, who are seeing increased demand for their services.

Middle-class status is an increasingly fragile existence. An unexpected medical problem or a lost job can easily push a family into poverty, they say.

For families already at the bottom, the ladder to escape is increasingly out of reach or nonexistent, said Bill Watkins, a senior economist at UCSB who has studied San Luis Obispo County’s economy for years.

The disappearance of that ladder out of poverty worries Watkins most.

“When there’s not a path of upward mobility, that’s when people lose hope, and the crime rates increase,” he said.