Within Wood County’s seemingly manageable 5.1 percent unemployment rate hides a larger problem for both the city of Bowling Green, and residents countywide.

Four of the surrounding nine counties — Wood, Ottawa, Henry and Putnam — have no homeless shelters.

With the city’s unemployment rate at 6 percent, and having traditionally been higher than Wood County as a whole, Bowling Green’s lack of shelter for the homeless serves as but a microcosm of the widespread denial of rural homelessness in northwest Ohio.

“We don’t want to see it,” said Cecily Rohrs, director of Archbold, Ohio’s Friendship House, which houses families who’ve been evicted from their homes in Archbold.

“The rural homeless sleep in the parking lots of stores,” Rohrs said, “and during the day they walk the halls of local places.”

Though Ohio’s state unemployment rate showed improvement between 2003 and 2004, these numbers may not tell the whole story because of a downgrade in wages and hours that Ohioans have taken after being released from the manufacturing industry.

Rohrs sees the lower unemployment percentage as misleading.

“Because people could no longer get [manufacturing] jobs worthy of their education at $14-$18 per hour, they’ve settled for something at $7-$8 per hour,” Rohrs said. “So they may not be unemployed, but statistics don’t show what’s behind closed doors. Americans want to go to work and will, but they aren’t making enough to support themselves.”

In the third quarter of 2004 — between July and September — 50 percent of the 48 mass layoffs in Ohio came from manufacturing work, resulting in the loss of 3,500 workers who made more than $20 per hour, according to Ohio Job and Family Services. First and second quarter mass layoff statistics from 2004 showed an increase in job loss of 15 and 28 percent respectively from the previous year.

Because the state does not keep statistics for the number of homeless people, conclusions must instead be deduced from Ohio’s poverty level statistics. This is where people walk the fine line of a paycheck or two between the comforts of home and the panic of displacement.

More than 12 percent of Ohioans lived in poverty in 2003, up from 11.9 percent the year before and 11 percent in 2001. Poverty statistics from 2004 have not been finalized yet.

As the number of Ohioans living in poverty and on the brink of homelessness increases, the potential impact that accompanies losing one’s home, job and lifestyle can only be compounded when the nearest bunk to sleep in lies a county or two away.

Serving Wood, Seneca, Ottawa and Sandusky counties, WSOS Community Action Commission assists northwest Ohioans with housing troubles who either are homeless, or are on the verge of it.

In January 2004, WSOS received 251 requests for housing from people in Wood County alone. Twenty-eight of those people were actually homeless, the other 228 were on the brink, according to WSOS Housing Specialist Jennifer Elliott.

Because the parents of rural homeless families are looking for employment in their area, having to relocate to a shelter in the city may make the job hunt that much harder, Elliott said.

“Also, many of them [families] do not feel that it will be safe or a good environment for them to be in,” Elliott said. “Many homeless will then bounce from family member to family member.”

For families in Wood County who are displaced, the negative impact can be hardest on children, who may have to leave their friends and school district in order to move into a temporary shelter in a neighboring county. While a child’s original school district is supposed to make arrangements to continue busing the child to school, it takes time and is may not be set up immediately.

Groups in Bowling Green like The Link, located at 1022 N. Prospect Ave., work to help local homeless who come looking for a place to stay. However, that help is usually in the form of a bus ticket or car ride to the nearest housing shelter in Toledo roughly 20 miles away, said Link Coordinator Julie Moebius.

Bowling Green’s Salvation Army Social Services has tried to do their part as well, supervising two apartments that are meant to serve homeless for the entire county. Funded by 12 to 15 agencies that have pooled their monies together, this still can only meet the needs of a few families in Wood County, and only for a few days time.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has an assistance program set up to provide needy families with Section 8 housing choice vouchers. However, applicants have found that both the vouchers and the reliability of this program are paper-thin.

After applying for a Section 8 voucher, families normally wait up to a year and a half before receiving one, according to Bob Barr, director of Salvation Army Social Services. With the voucher in hand, a family can still be denied housing by a landlord who chooses not to accept the voucher.

Landlords traditionally have denied vouchers because they require extra effort in being reimbursed from the government, according to Cathleen Greer of the Bowling Green Housing Agency.

“Some landlords won’t accept it because they don’t want their units inspected either,” Greer added.

In May 2000 when two families in Archbold — located 44 miles west of Bowling Green — lost their homes, Rohrs acted on her belief that children should not have to be displaced from their schools by creating the Friendship House.

By housing up to two families at a time who have been evicted from their homes, The Friendship House in Archbold is able to keep parents near job opportunities within the community and allow children to stay at their local school with friends.

For Rohrs, maintaining a family’s ties to a town is an imperative step toward helping them rebound from eviction and unemployment.

“To be not only homeless, but displaced into an entirely other community must be a horrible feeling,” Rohrs said. “I feel that each school — or at least neighboring communities — should have someplace that people can go to where their lives will remain normal.”

The Friendship House in Archbold is not supported by any taxes, government or commercial funding. Instead, all money that supports the house is raised through donations or secondary fundraising by local community groups like the Boy Scouts.

“In our town they raise money from the kind-hearted people of the community,” Rohrs said.

Regardless of the individual triumphs of shelters like the Friendship House, Moebius thinks the truth of rural homelessness must ultimately be seen by members of small town communities like Bowling Green before it will receive the same sense of urgency that urban homelessness can attract.

“I think that part of the problem in Wood County is that they [homeless] aren’t as visible as people on the streets in Lucas County,” Moebius said.

Barr knows that the homeless are out there, and that sometimes the comfortable living space that is cherished in a rural community also keeps those that are needy out of plain sight.

“I have a hard time convincing people that we have homeless, and lots of them,” Barr said. “They come out of the woodwork often after they’ve been homeless for months … they are like ghosts.”