What is it like being homeless in Rhode Island? One family's story.

Sitting in the lobby of the SureStay Plus in Smithfield, Roxanne Yergeau explains how being homeless, moving from motel to motel with her husband and adult son and their cat and dog, is a new experience.

For 17 years, she and husband Jim Yergeau owned their own home in Middletown, before the bank foreclosed on the house.

Her son, Ryan Yergeau, walks up to a chair and pulls down the black bandanna he uses as a mask and sits down. He lives with a rare skin condition, prurigo nodularis, that affects his face. He knows his appearance is shocking: There are bright red holes where his nose should be.

He wears the mask both to avoid stares and to offer his exposed nasal cavities some degree of protection. Sniffling and dabbing at his face, he apologizes. His nerves are exposed, and he finds it hard to breathe through his nose, which leads to dizziness.

The Yergeau family is part of a broader trend in Rhode Island, made exponentially worse by the post-pandemic world of high rents, inflation, delayed medical care and increased housing demand.

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The family paid their mortgage on time every month until 2018. They began falling behind on mortgage payments after Jim could no longer work as a mechanic. Rheumatoid arthritis began to affect his fingers, causing pain so bad that he could barely move them, let alone twist wrenches or turn screwdrivers for his job. At the same time, Ryan noticed nodules on his arm and face that would soon get worse.

The bank then moved to foreclose, and after months of contesting it, they took a payout in a deal to move out. Roxanne combined that money, about $4,000, with an inheritance from her late parents and paid a year in advance for an apartment for their family in 2018.

Working odd jobs for cash, she tried to make it work. And then, in March 2020, the entire world shut down.

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"We didn't have any income," she said. "Jim wasn't on disability. We just had my disability check."

The apartment complex was a day away from forcing them out of their apartment in March 2020 when the first lockdown was announced, giving them 3½ more months in the apartment.

Pandemic intensifies a housing crisis

The number of homeless people in Rhode Island — which includes families and individuals, with some people living on the street or moving from motel to motel — is higher than it has been in recent memory, say people who work with that population.

Homeless advocate Eric Hirsch, a sociology professor at Providence College, said rents have gone way up, pushing people out and leaving them nowhere to go.

"Right now we have more than 500 people living outside, and that's 10 times what we normally have this time of year," he said.

The social distancing required by the pandemic reduced shelter capacities. People lost their jobs, and government programs to stem the tide of evictions and foreclosures have all ended, pushing more and more people onto the streets.

"I've never seen it like this," said Lindsay Cutler, the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness' community programs and special projects lead. "I sit in meetings and providers talk about what's going on, and it's unprecedented. It was bad before the pandemic, but the rates we're seeing, and the rates of people newly homeless entering the system?"

One partner who runs a soup kitchen told Cutler that normally, he would see the same faces for most meals, but now he is seeing new faces every day.

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Homelessness compounds a medical crisis

Ryan's skin condition kept getting progressively worse. His dermatologist told him that stress, from the foreclosure, then the eviction, then being homeless, was probably a major aggravating factor.

His condition spreads every time he gets a small cut, and one day, while shaving, he nicked himself near his nose.

"I remember thinking, 'I hope this doesn't bother my nose,'" he said. "But it did, and because you're breathing all the time through your nose, even when breathing through your mouth, the sensation was unbearable, and it continued to get worse and worse and worse and worse."

His nose began to deteriorate, slowly at first, but then the deterioration accelerated in October 2021. Getting to the doctor has been difficult because of his homelessness, but the doctors he did see told him that his best bet is probably an academic dermatologist.

'It's infinitely more expensive to be homeless'

After the Yergeaus were evicted from their apartment in 2020 because they couldn't afford it, Newport County Community Mental Health, a nonprofit organization, paid for four months of motels during the winter. After that, the family was on their own.

The Yergeau family isn't alone in finding the cost of being homeless to be much higher than when they were paying a mortgage.

"It's infinitely more expensive to be homeless," Cutler said. "The cheapest hotel is maybe $100 a night. That's hard, since it's $3,000 a month."

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After being foreclosed on in 2018, the family had to put their furniture and belongings into three storage units, at a cost of $600 per month.

"No one chooses this lifestyle," Roxanne said.

Basic necessities that many take for granted, and which reduce living costs, aren't available for those who are coasting from motel to motel. Without a kitchen, people rely on prepared food, which drives up costs at the same time inflation has spiked grocery prices.

Government regulations present the Yergeaus, and others like them who are living in motels, with a choice: Live on the streets in the hopes of getting help, or continue to deplete what little money is left in the motel shuffle.

The state has one system intended to keep people from skipping the line, and to prioritize need, called the Coordinated Entry System, said Crossroads Rhode Island Executive Director Karen Santilli. Santilli's group runs housing complexes and works to find people housing.

Government funds can be used to put people who are on the streets in motels, but those who are living in motels need to find themselves on the street before federal funds can be used to house them, she said.

Crossroads Rhode Island works with the Coordinated Entry System and raises private money to try to bridge the gap, but the need for shelter and the number of people experiencing homelessness have increased well beyond levels in recent memory, she said.

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Ryan said his family calls the Coordinated Entry System once a month and is on multiple waiting lists for help with housing, but hasn't received any help so far.

"A lot of times, it seems fruitless," he said.

Many barriers to finding an apartment

In the motel room, Ryan's dog, Rhino, barks at strangers and Ryan apologizes. His father's cat, Grady, 12, a grey shorthair, sleeps curled on a pillow at the top of the bed.

Ryan was helping a friend move eight years ago when he saw Rhino, a 12-year-old pitbull-boxer mix, chained to a tree. The rambunctious dog, later diagnosed with separation anxiety, had gone through owner after owner, and the woman who owned him planned to get rid of him, so he asked if he could take him. He and Rhino quickly bonded.

Normally, he'd give Rhino a Prozac to calm him before contact with new people, but among the many challenges Ryan is dealing with since becoming homeless, he now can't afford the prescription.

Having a cat is enough of an obstacle when seeking housing, but add in a 85-pound dog, and the number of landlords and property management companies willing to rent to the Yergeau family drops to nil.

Having an animal is not the only barrier put up by landlords in a hot rental market. One of the biggest is the requirement that prospective renters prove they have income double, triple or even quadruple the cost of rent.

For a $1,500 apartment, a rent the Yergeaus could afford, that would mean proving $4,500 in monthly income. With their income of just $3,000 a month, that's too big a barrier, especially when combined with security deposits equal to a month's rent.

Santilli said her group is trying to fill in the gap. Crossroads RI raises private funds to pay for the first month's rent and security deposits to get people into apartments they can afford, eliminating one of the very real barriers to finding housing.

Living with cancer

Roxanne had been feeling pain in her chest for a while before she went to her doctor, who referred her to an oncologist. Things looked bad, from the referral to the oncologist, to the radiologist who said if it were him, he would go see a doctor immediately, to the moment when five doctors walked in to give her the biopsy results: breast cancer.

With surgery out of the question, as the tumor is on the wall of her chest, she started chemotherapy, which she undergoes three weeks a month.

"I should have gone to the hospital earlier," she said. The delayed diagnosis allowed the cancer to spread.

Roxanne said getting her chronic pain checked out was a low priority because she was focused on making sure the family continued to survive and wasn't sleeping on the streets.

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Ryan said he knows his mom is struggling, especially the weeks she is on chemotherapy.

"It's not your problem, Ryan," she said in the motel lobby.

"I know," he said.

Even in the smallest state in the nation, getting to the doctor can be expensive. When they were at the SureStay in Smithfield, that meant $40 worth of gas for each trip to the doctor. Roxanne, as she struggles with her mortality, does know one thing for sure.

"I don't want to die in a car, and I don't want to die in a motel," she said.

Getting a little help from new friends

Constance Stowers, a real estate agent whose listings dried up as mortgage rates increased, was driving down Wake Robin Road in Lincoln on Oct. 12. Near the entrance to the Stop & Shop, she spotted Ryan holding a sign on the side of the road, his face bent toward the ground. She drove right past him. Then she drove back.

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Stowers gave him the $20 she had on her and started asking about his life, what was going on. Stowers, who is active on Facebook to promote her real estate business, asked if she could livesteam their conversation. After researching him and the family that day, she set up a fundraising page to pay for the family's hotel stays.

Short-term rentals are expensive, and the money Stowers raised through GoFundMe went fast. With most rooms ranging from $110 to $130 a night, more than $3,000 was gone in a single month. So far, she has raised $5,397, most of which has gone to hotel stays.

Stowers said a friend of the Yergeau family saw the GoFundMe page and reached out with a contact, who got them a 30-day stay at a Newport hotel for $50 a night, $1,500 for the month of November. But come Dec. 1, they'll need a new place to live.

"It's a little nerve-racking," Stowers said.

Stowers said she is trying to get a trailer ready for them to live in, but it doesn't have a water connection and it's hard to heat in the winter.

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The family has thought about moving across the state line to Fall River, Massachusetts, where rents are a little bit lower, but that would mean changing health insurance, which is not worth the risk for Roxanne as she battles cancer.

Stowers said she found an apartment that met all the family's requirements, with an affordable price and permission to have pets, but it was on the fourth floor.

"There's no way we're getting someone with cancer up four flights of stairs," she said.

Reach reporter Wheeler Cowperthwaite at wcowperthwaite@providencejournal.com or follow him on Twitter @WheelerReporter.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Homeless, sick and desperate: RI family's story and good Samaritan help