Three years ago, Patricia Caldwell was laid off from her job on the production floor of a carseat factory in Highland Park, Michigan, and decamped to her mother’s house in Detroit, teenage kids in tow. But the tight quarters quickly became untenable. With her income slowed to a trickle, Caldwell says, “I had to work from ground zero.” The family became homeless.
Those spirals of job loss and homelessness are a common refrain at Coalition on Temporary Shelter (COTS), a hub for women and children in Detroit, where Caldwell and her kids spent five months. Although the city has tens of thousands of vacant properties, it’s still hard for many families to find safe and affordable homes, says Delphia Simmons, a Detroit Revitalization Fellow at COTS.
[For more of this story, written by Jessica Leigh Hester, go to http://www.citylab.com/work/20...homelessness/513149/]
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