Published 12/8/2023
Story by Stephanie Nakhleh
Photographs by Minesh Bacrania
This is the second in a series of articles on homelessness and housing insecurity in Los Alamos County. The first is on the Los Alamos County Social Services Department. This article covers the county’s two major nonprofits dedicated to helping people facing housing and food insecurity.
If you or someone you know would like to share your experience with housing struggles in Los Alamos, please contact the Boomtown editors here. We respect requests for anonymity.
The range of people facing housing insecurity in Los Alamos County can stretch from those who need a little extra money to cover an unusually high utilities bill to those who are facing years of chronic, unsheltered homelessness. While there are a number of nonprofits in town that offer assistance in small ways, two local nonprofit agencies provide the largest share of aid: LA Cares and Self Help, Inc. (Note: Boomtown did reach out to a number of area churches who offer similar help but did not hear back by deadline.)
“Homeless Services of Los Alamos” becomes LA Cares
LA Cares, mostly known for helping Los Alamosians facing food insecurity, didn’t start with a focus on food. It started with a focus on shelter. The organization was first named “Homelessness Services of Los Alamos” after the founder personally experienced housing insecurity. That founder, Michelle Salles, was “working at the hospital as an administrator when she fell and was unable to work for a while,” said current LA Cares president Lyn Haval, who told the nonprofit’s origin story at the League of Women Voters’ Lunch with a Leader program on Nov. 16. (Video of the presentation is available here.)
In the mid-90s, Salles was living in apartments near the hospital that were demolished to make way for a parking lot, Haval explained. Unable to work because of her injury, and unhoused from the demolition, Salles moved in with a friend.
“She thought there must be other people in the same boat, so she started doing research, and found out that there were programs in Santa Fe County. And she thought, well … I might have to go to Santa Fe, but what about Los Alamos? There must be other people close to breaking, like one paycheck away … from being homeless.”
Salles then started Homeless Services of Los Alamos for people like her: those facing housing insecurity, Haval told the audience. “To get it started, they had a variety show to raise money, and they raised about $700 with that variety show: that’s what got LA Cares started.” A few years later, the organization changed to its current name, registered as an official 501(c)(3) organization, and became what it is known for today.
“When we have more, we give more”
LA Cares now is “a food pantry serving Los Alamos County,” said Haval in an interview with Boomtown. “Our clients have to live within White Rock or Los Alamos. If people need our services and don’t live here, we refer them out.” The organization has a food distribution once a month, where people can register ahead of time. (To register, call 505-661-8015 or email lacaresnm@gmail.com.)
The upside of having an all-volunteer, all-donation group is that “about 96% of donations go directly back to the client, which is pretty darned good,” Haval said. The downside is that funding isn’t stable: it rises and falls with the generosity of money and time the community provides. It also means that instead of having more regular distributions, or a permanent food depot that county residents can turn to at any time, the food bank is restricted to just once a month.
“We’re totally dependent on donations, we don’t have any grants or anything. We go to the mailbox, see what checks have been sent in, and we spend what we get,” Haval said. “When we have more, we give more.”
Not just food
While LA Cares is primarily a food bank, they also help with rent and utilities. “In 2022, we helped 68 families [with utilities] and we’ve already helped 69 families this year [as of October],” said Haval. In that same time period of 2023, LA Cares has given $38,000 to those families to pay their utilities and distributed $34,000 in rent assistance, she said.
LA Cares works with Los Alamos County’s Department of Public Utilities and other entities to help struggling families pay utility bills, which are a major source of stress for housing-insecure people. The DPU has a utilities assistance program and the State of New Mexico also has a Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). Along with Self-Help, Inc. (see below), these organizations coordinate to keep the lights and heat on for many people in the county, which helps other unavoidable monthly bills — like rent and food — remain manageable.
The rent and utility assistance from LA Cares goes directly to either the county or the landlord, Haval said. (Unlike other agencies, LA Cares does have a once-per-12-month limit per family.) In just the past year, LA Cares has seen a dramatic uptick in need in the county. “Last year we served over 200 families [in total], and we have served over 200 families each quarter this year so far,” Haval said. “I would say five or six or seven years ago, we were serving 90 families a month, but then it was down into the 50s the last couple of years, and now we’re back up to 90, just for the food.”
“They moved where they can at least survive”
While some reasons for housing and food insecurity are national and affect low-income earners everywhere, other factors are purely local, such as the housing pressure caused by the recent hiring at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A flood of new hires with relatively high salaries is seeking housing in a market that hasn’t produced much supply in decades. “It made the rents increase everywhere,” said Haval of the increased housing demand. “Some of our clients had to move away because [for example] their apartment got renovated, and they couldn’t afford it anymore, so they moved down to the Española Valley, where they can at least survive.”
Although some clients have been displaced to other counties, still more are coming to LA Cares seeking help. “Every month we have new or returning clients,” Haval said. “And we keep track of that. Looking at the last three quarters: in the first quarter we had 23 new people, in the second we had 25, and then in the last quarter we had 38 new households — individuals or families. Either brand new or returning after a gap of service.”
One of Haval’s concerns is that while new people are reaching out to LA Cares, “there are still many people out there we’re not reaching who could use what we can give them. That is part of the whole social-service-community’s goal: to find more people,” she said. “Is there a stigma attached? Are they embarrassed? If we could help make their lives easier, we would love to do that.”
“Struggling on one end, living in luxury on the other”
Another theme that comes up often in discussions about local needs is how vulnerable some of the senior-citizen population is in Los Alamos. “A lot are elderly,” agreed Haval. “I was just this morning at a meeting with the older-adult network, trying to coordinate and talking about this actual subject: Who are they, and why are they? We have lots of seniors on Social Security, family households of one or two, that are stuck.” These people don’t always have enough reliable income to cover rent, she said. LA Cares does deliver to clients who can’t make it to the food distribution, perhaps because they don’t have cars, can’t afford gas for their cars, or are ill or disabled. “We do what we can to help anybody that needs it.”
The disparity between the haves and the have-nots in Los Alamos is stark, said Haval, but bridgeable. “Los Alamos is the richest county in the state and close to the top of the country, but it’s like every other place. It has people who are struggling on one end and people who are living in luxury on the other end,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s because we’re so small and compact, that the lower-income people are kind of invisible. We need to help spotlight their need … and connect them to groups and organizations that can help them.”
Self Help
Another such organization is Self Help, Inc., which provides emergency financial assistance and other resources to residents of Los Alamos, northern Santa Fe, Rio Arriba, and Taos counties. The Los-Alamos based nonprofit is funded through grants and private and public contributions; the name refers to the agency’s mission of helping clients become economically self-sufficient.
“We’ve been around over 50 years, and I’d say our main focus right now is helping people retain basic needs, so usually that's housing via rent or utility payments,” said Megan Fox, program manager for Self Help. “We are also unique in that we can be a little bit flexible sometimes with needs. Everyone's evaluated individually so if someone is, say, homeless, we may have some other options we could help them with, since they don't need rent or utilities at that moment. Lots of places are stricter in what they can and cannot help with.”
New hire: a housing stability coordinator
Self Help is quite a small agency, with mostly part-time employees — half of whom are new, said director Diane Smogor. “I'm the executive director, Megan is our part-time program manager, and we have another person who started on basically the last day of July, Priscilla, who is our housing stability coordinator,” Smogor said, adding that Self Help also recently hired “a very part-time bookkeeper” which is why the four-person staff still only equates to two full-time equivalents.
Priscilla Garcia’s position is “a completely 100 percent grant-funded program through the New Mexico Community Trust and its emergency rental-assistance program,” Smogor said, adding that as a grant-dependent position, its continuation is subject to renewal.
Smogor said in an email that since most of Self Help’s efforts are aimed at helping people retain their housing, Garcia’s work supports that and mirrors Fox’s position. Most of her work has involved identifying clients who may be eligible for state funding and then walking them through the application process. To date, Garcia has helped clients submit about a dozen applications for Housing Stability Rental Assistance (HRSA) funding through the state and has secured $20,900 for rent and utilities, Smogor said.
More housing, please
While hiring an employee dedicated to keeping people housed is a big help, a fundamental problem is there is simply not enough housing to go around, acknowledged Fox. The town needs to build more housing, and the usual excuses won’t do anymore.
“Honestly, I've always struggled when people say we're out of space for housing, because there's so much underdeveloped space and underutilized space,” she said. “I don't understand why we're not building more dense housing units. … I mean, so many people are trying so hard. They have full time jobs in town, they don't make a ton of money, and they can just barely make it. And then when one of those bumps comes, they’re thrown off course. If you don't have a way to overcome that, you're on this never-ending catch-up cycle. You're in that debt to your landlord, or you take out some kind of loan, and then you're in debt to a loan, or you lose your housing. So, I support [building] housing.”
“Living without utilities for months”
While most clients that Self Help assists are not unhoused, the agency does serve some of that population. “The common homeless people we talk to are usually male, under 45, often they have some issues on the side preventing them from having long-term employment,” said Fox. “There are always other things contributing. It’s not as simple as ‘if we can just get them into a place, they’ll be stable’; there’s six other issues that need to be sorted out, it’s very complex.” Self Help can connect clients to job training, help them replace crucial identification documents, and assist with fees, she said. “We’ve had people come in with no ID, no birth certificate, and they really want to work, but the process to get papers is six weeks if all goes well. That’s a huge hurdle. Then you can start looking for legitimate work, and then of course you can look for housing.”
Unsheltered clients are in the minority, said Smogor. “More common are clients who are experiencing some kind of instability with regard to housing or utilities, because they got a divorce or they separated from a partner, or they got sick,” she said. “They don’t get benefits at work; they don’t get paid sick leave. So, they lost work, they suddenly lost income, a child is sick, they’re struggling with childcare. Housing is a huge issue, but the cost of childcare continues to be a burden: access to adequate affordable childcare for families is a real problem. … The experience of immediate homelessness, or chronic homelessness, those are few and far between compared to the majority of our clients that we help throughout the year.” Childcare is such a cost burden that some clients in their service area “have been living without utilities for months in order to get by,” she said.
(Boomtown reached out to Los Alamos County’s DPU. Karen Kendall, deputy utility manager for finance and administration, said “there are currently no occupied residences in the county with the power turned off.”)
About half of Self-Help’s clients are in Rio Arriba County, said Smogor, and “for Los Alamos it's generally between like 15 and 20 percent of our total clients, just to give you an idea.” For context, the population of Rio Arriba County is twice that of Los Alamos County. A quarter of clients are single guardians and 10 percent are seniors, she said. “And we also have a lot of people who are disabled but may not be receiving disability; that's very common.”
Asked why someone who is disabled wouldn’t be receiving disability benefits, Smogor said it’s a difficult process to navigate. “The application to apply for disability could take years. They have to maybe reapply, reapply, reapply. So that's part of it,” she said. Clients who are overwhelmed “may need some hand-holding in order to apply for disability, or they may not qualify for a host of different reasons, but many people have to apply multiple times and the whole process may take years for someone to qualify.”
The Covid effect
As with LA Cares, Self Help saw things change for the worse after the pandemic: before 2020, people would encounter a bump in their lives and nonprofits like Self Help could offer them some stability until they sorted it out — which they generally did, Fox said. Now, there is no slack in the system. “Pre-Covid, our general ideal model was like, you've missed a week of work, you're going to be short on your paycheck, and then you're going to be short on rent, so you call us,” she said. “We help you, you're back to work, and your life is on track again.”
But the pandemic caused those bumps to turn into full-on earthquakes, she said. People fell seriously ill, caregivers died, companies shut down, people lost work, many of those living on the edge ended up falling off and spiraling down.
The government was able to delay but not prevent dire financial consequences for millions of people, including many in Los Alamos. “Disconnections generally weren't allowed on utilities, evictions were prevented, [but] people racked up huge sums of debts,” said Fox. “Thousands and thousands of dollars, like on a water bill. Then all those protections went away, and everyone's been trying to dig out from all that. It just seems post-Covid, generally everything is more complex. It all compounds, you know? It's like, being out of work for two years, and then now what do I do? Where do I go for work? You just have to restart all these lives.”
“People, particularly hourly-wage workers and lower-income workers, didn't have those savings,” said Smogor. “They didn't have the benefits that a lot of full-time higher-wage workers received during Covid. We know that across the nation, not just here in Los Alamos or across New Mexico, [wage workers] were the most vulnerable, they got hit the hardest by Covid. Digging out for them is much, much more difficult. So, I think that is a typical Self-Help client.”
Fox nodded agreement. “These are clients who don't have the option to work from home if they're sick or injured or something,” she said. “We've had a few long-term medical-leave type of issues lately, where they don't get paid anything, right? Like they don't have any access to any benefits while their ankle is shattered in six places. They've got six-plus weeks of not knowing where to earn money.”
“And utilities,” added Smogor. “After Covid we saw this sky-high inflation, record-breaking inflation. We saw utility prices jump up 300 percent in some cases. So, I think there are a lot of different factors that didn't help a lot of these already vulnerable families.”
In the past, utility disconnections and evictions were rare, now they are unfortunately very common among our callers.
Diane Smogor, Self Help
The financial stress is leading to increased evictions, Smogor added in a follow-up email. “In the past, utility disconnections and evictions were rare, now they are unfortunately very common among our callers. During Covid, evictions were essentially non-existent due to public health orders, etc. The combination of pandemic relief and child tax credits ending, along with record high inflation, really hit households hard.”
What Los Alamos can do to help
Both nonprofits report that their clients’ needs are increasing and emphasized that they do rely on the good will of Los Alamos residents to help. “There is definitely a gap,” said Haval, between the needs of people in the county and the resources available. Food donations help, but even better is a direct money contribution, because LA Cares can then buy the fresh food that clients need. Both agencies also need boots on the ground now more than ever. “Volunteer and contribute. Contribute time, contribute talent, and treasure,” said Smogor. “Because resources are critical, we can only do so much, and additional resources allow us to reach more people. The need is significant. We're never bored. We are never bored.”
You can contribute directly to LA Cares through PayPal and to Self Help through their online portal. LANL Employees are eligible to contribute to both organizations through payroll deduction, with up to 50% of their donation matched.
For more information on volunteer opportunities at LA Cares, email lacaresnm@gmail.com.
More resources:
Free lunch program for seniors via the Los Alamos Retired and Senior Organization
The State of New Mexico’s Low-income Home Energy Assistance Program
Los Alamos County’s Utility Assistance Program (note: DPU has made changes to this program to allow residents to more easily contribute to it through their monthly bills)
United Way’s 211 Help Line (this will connect callers to Self Help in several northern counties)
The Food Depot, Northern New Mexico’s food bank
Resource guide: landlord-tenant laws in New Mexico
More reading:
Millions of Americans are struggling to keep the lights on
Older Americans are struggling to pay the bills
New Mexico state utility law protects landlords
Locked out: New Mexico landlords filed more than 11,000 evictions during the pandemic
Eviction epidemic: Searchlight New Mexico’s list of articles on New Mexicans facing eviction