Room at the inn?

On their way to the campground southeast of San Jose, California, twenty-four-year-old Kathy Macdougall and her twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend spotted an abandoned house, half-hidden by a clump of hackberry trees. "Turn around!" Macdougall said impulsively. "Let's go back and look at it." Thistles and runaway weigela dogged the yard; a step was missing from the porch. The structure hadn't been inhabited for months, but the foundation was solid and the roof seemed to be in good shape.

"Maybe we could make a deal to fix it up and live in it?" Macdougall suggested. The couple cleaned the floors and walls, repaired the windows, fogged the roaches and fleas, and pruned trees. When the owner appeared, they arranged to live in the house and bring it up to code at their own expense instead of paying rent.

Squatters fill abandoned or condemned apartment buildings, warehouses, tool sheds, school buses, boiler rooms, rooftops, fishing boats, hotel rooms, garages, and barns throughout the nation. The vast majority are employed, young, out-of-the-mainstream immigrants, students, divorced single parents, welfare mothers, and seasonal workers.

In California, four out of five persons between the ages of 18 and 25 entering the work force do not earn enough to rent an individual house or an apartment, lobbyists for a low-income housing coalition told the California legislature. In most areas where work is available, the supply of affordable housing is tight. Millions of small, single-family residences have disappeared, victims of urban renewal, overly restrictive zoning regulations, and inflation.

Most members of this "shelter-poor" generation regard their housing dilemmas as temporary. They draw sharp distinctions between themselves and the hard-core homeless, who have no resources and no way to pull themselves out of their desperate situations.

A large number of these "homesteaders" both hold down jobs and go to college. Their fluid lifestyle forces them periodically to move into and out of their parents' homes. Twenty-four-year-old Bob Trojahn of Los Angeles moved back with his mother after he got out of the Air Force. "She treats me like a twelve-year-old," he told me. Accustomed to the freedom of doing as he pleased, Trojahn says he accepts this "reversion to dependency" as a temporary lifestyle change.

When a better deal than a $155-a-month basement room popped up, a Fresno State University student grabbed it. The better deal was a Volkswagen van that an acquaintance couldn't afford to get fixed. An extension cord to the van provided electricity; the student paid a friend $10 a month for shower privileges. When he wanted to study, he rolled up his bed and reinstalled the van's seats and fold-down table, but admits that he did most of his homework in university-area coffee houses.

Former university student Carol Mullins lived in her car for an entire semester. She scheduled morning gym classes so that she could use the showers, studied in the library, and ate at school cafeterias and neighborhood carry-out restaurants. "I could have been worse off," she sighs. "I've got more than a few girlfriends who've manipulated themselves into relationships, just to have a place to live."

The "first, last, and security deposit" requirement imposed by many landlords and management companies proves to be a stumbling block for many young workers and students, particularly those with poor or nonexistent credit histories. "I can come up with the $550 a month," another university student said, "but where am I going to get $1,400 to move into an apartment?"

California housing advocates won a suit some years back forbidding management companies from applying a "3x1" formula requiring prospective tenants to have monthly incomes equal to three times the unit's rent. But in 1991 the California Supreme Court reversed a lower court's ruling. Legal Services attorneys point out that the "3x1" formula discriminates against working welfare mothers who don't receive enough income to qualify for even the least expensive apartments.

Many management companies subscribe to services that provide them with the names of individuals who have been evicted or who have been involved in lawsuits with their landlords. They can refuse to rent to individuals whose names appear on the lists, even if the claims against those persons were dismissed.

A young Santa Cruz woman who was blackballed after her boyfriend "bailed out owing three months' rent" complains, "I can't make enough money to rent a place of my own, much less buy a place like my parents had. When I was growing up, I thought our house was a dump. It was one of those old fakey ranch-style places, with three little bedrooms and a lawn that always needed mowing. I used to have to fight with my sister for bathroom space. I know now it was the best place to live I'll ever have."

Robert Joe Stout, a former newspaper and magazine reporter and editor, has published two novels and a book of poems, They Still Play Baseball the Old Way.