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BOB POTTER: Faced with new concerns about inflation and the federal budget, the Labor Department reported this morning that wholesale prices rose one full percentage point in January, their steepest rise in more than three years. The figure came in well above advance estimates on Wall Street and touched off new concerns about the inflation outlook. Speculation quickly intensified about whether and when the Federal Reserve might tighten credit further in its effort to curb inflation. Prices of long-term government bonds fell about $10 for each $1,000 in face value today.

As of 11:30 Central Time, the Dow Industrials stand at 2,307.14. That's down almost 16 points from yesterday's close. The Transportation Average is down 6.47%, and the Utility Index down 0.83.

The time coming up on 12 o'clock. You're tuned to Minnesota Public Radio. This is a member-supported broadcast service. You're tuned to KSJN 1330 Minneapolis-St. Paul. Cloudy skies, 20 degrees in the Twin Cities. The wind chill 6 below, a southerly wind at 16. Live coverage of Public Affairs events and proceedings on Minnesota Public Radio is made possible by the Public Affairs Fund, including Ceramic Industrial Coatings of Osseo.

Today, we present a documentary produced by our Mainstreet Radio team about homeless people in rural Minnesota. It runs about 20 to 25 minutes. And after it's over, there'll be an opportunity for you to put some questions to a studio guest.

Dave Schultz is a consultant on the homeless to the state commissioner of Human Services. We had hope that Pat Neer, who works with the homeless in south-western Minnesota, would be here. But due to unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances, she will not be joining us today.

So as you listen to the documentary, and if any questions come to mind, jot them down. And be prepared to give us a call a little bit later on. No one knows for sure just how many homeless people there are in Minnesota's small towns and countryside. Experts even disagree on how to define homelessness.

But it is clear that there are people in rural Minnesota who cannot afford to put roofs over their heads. And advocates for the poor say rural homelessness is a growing problem. Mainstreet Radio's John Biewen reports.

SPEAKER 1: Come on.

KEN ARMSTRONG: We had cats in the car with us, too.

VANESSA ARMSTRONG: Oh, yeah.

KEN ARMSTRONG: Two cats in there with us, yeah.

VANESSA ARMSTRONG: We had them. Oh, we just--

KEN ARMSTRONG: [CHUCKLES] It was pretty interesting.

VANESSA ARMSTRONG: We're cats.

JOHN BIEWEN: The Armstrong family doesn't fit the stereotype of the homeless. Vanessa and Ken Armstrong are in their early 20s, able bodied, drug free, high school educated. Their 1 and 1/2-year-old baby, Ken junior, looks healthy and happy. Ken and Vanessa say the child has been well-cared for, even when the three of them were homeless for several months last fall.

VANESSA ARMSTRONG: He even had a good time camping because--

KEN ARMSTRONG: He liked it. He thought it was a big vacation.

VANESSA ARMSTRONG: Yeah. And we built campfires, and he just thought that was so neat.

JOHN BIEWEN: The Armstrongs slept outside, sometimes in a tent, sometimes in their car while they were looking for work in an affordable apartment in Rochester. After a while, they gave up and came to Mankato, where they spent two months in a transitional living center, housing for homeless and low-income people. Ken says the experience has changed his ideas about homelessness.

KEN ARMSTRONG: You think of a lot of the homeless people as being born homeless or something, and a lot of these people have worked steady, good-paying jobs for 20 or 30 years before they became homeless people. And you know, they have been responsible in the past, and whatever happened to them, you know?

JOHN BIEWEN: The Armstrongs say what happened to them is that they just fell through the cracks. They had been making a decent living working in Ken's parents' business in Northern Minnesota. But they left over a family disagreement and came to southern Minnesota to look for other work, finding it wasn't as easy as they'd expected. Ken says Rochester had only low-paying jobs, minimum wage or slightly above. And he says he and Vanessa couldn't find an apartment that they could afford at those wages.

KEN ARMSTRONG: There was jobs that I know if I would have went around and applied to all those jobs, something would have come up. But where would I have them call me at or anything like that? I had no home or anything like that. Stay at campgrounds and things.

JOHN BIEWEN: The Armstrongs aren't alone in having been homeless in small-town Minnesota.

KAREN: Like, we'll stay in a motel for a week or two weeks if we got enough money. And then, when we don't have any more money, we go sleep in our car. And we just stay in our car until we can go to the Salvation Army and get a voucher.

JOHN BIEWEN: Karen is 13 years old. She attends junior high school in Mankato. She and her mother spent last summer living in a tent next to a pond in North Mankato. Workers at the Transitional Living Center where Karen and her mother were staying recently say Karen's mother can't provide for the girl but won't let her stay with a foster family. Karen says she's been homeless for most of her life.

KAREN: And it just used to make me feel jealous over the things that other little girls had, and I never had. But now, I guess, I've learned to live with that. Or else, I'm still trying to live with it. But it's hard. And you just take what you get and make the most of it, I guess. And that's what I'm trying to do.

JOHN BIEWEN: Karen is exceptionally bright and poised for her age. She says she wants to be a lawyer or a journalist, but she doesn't attend school consistently. And the people trying to help her say she'll have a tough time breaking out of the cycle her troubled family is in. They say odds are Karen will spend much of her life in poverty.

Experts say all kinds of rural people can find themselves with no place to live, farm families who've lost their land, women who've left their abusive husbands, families of migrant workers between field jobs. Then there's a certain number of transients moving across the countryside, some of them mentally ill or chemically dependent. One sure thing-- according to Sue Watlov Phillips, chair of the Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless, is that there are people without homes in rural Minnesota. And she says their numbers are increasing.

SUE WATLOV PHILLIPS: The numbers have gone up by 146% statewide. But what we're seeing is more and more people that are needing to be sheltered or in transitional housing facilities in greater Minnesota.

JOHN BIEWEN: Watlov Phillips says, in 1985, about 25% of the people in Minnesota's shelters for the homeless were outside the Twin Cities metro area. But their proportion is now over a third. On any given night, the outstate shelters house about a thousand people. That doesn't prove that the number of rural homeless has gone up that much.

A number of new shelters have been built outstate in the last few years. The higher numbers being sheltered may just reflect that greater capacity. But the fact is, the new beds for the small-town homeless are being filled. And Watlov Phillips says the reason is simple-- the weak rural economy.

SUE WATLOV PHILLIPS: If you look at what's happening on the farm situation, we lost 650,000 farms between 1980 and 1986 in the nation. We're losing a farm every four minutes in the nation right now. So what that meant in 1987 is 240,000 people left the farm in an attempt to find other housing and other types of employment.

JOHN BIEWEN: And of course, many more small-town people have lost their business or service jobs because of the declining farm population. But not everyone agrees that many of those people are ending up homeless. Duane Benson is the Independent Republican Minority Leader in the Minnesota Senate, and he farms near the small southeastern Minnesota town of Lanesboro.

DUANE BENSON: If there is a homeless problem. It's not readily visible in my mind. And if it's there, then I don't know where it's at. And when you say outstate Minnesota, then you might be talking about a different problem. You might be talking about the Rochester's and Willmar's and Winona's. But I think those small towns pretty much do a good job of taking care of their own.

JOHN BIEWEN: Most of the visible homeless in outstate Minnesota are in larger towns. But homeless advocates say, that's only because that's where the help is. There are now 40 shelters and transitional housing facilities outside the Twin Cities, including shelters for battered women and runaway youth.

Almost all of those shelters are in the regional centers, the towns of 10,000 or more. The Welcome Inn in Mankato, which housed the Armstrongs last fall, is one of 10 Transitional Living Centers created outstate in the last five years. The Welcome Inn's co-director, Keith Luebke, says the Mankato center has housed almost 1,500 people since it opened in 1985.

KEITH LUEBKE: I would say that we've done a remarkable job of responding to those problems in the state of Minnesota, but I think that we have a long ways to go. And certainly, that's true of all other states as well.

JOHN BIEWEN: Advocates for the poor say that those in shelters and transitional housing are not the only homeless people in outstate Minnesota. They say there are a lot more invisible homeless persons in the tiniest of towns and on rural farmland as well.

LAURIE KOLBECK: If you talk to people about homeless, they don't believe it happens here ever, that there is ever a case of people being homeless.

JOHN BIEWEN: Laurie Kolbeck says she's been homeless herself, along with her children. She's now a women's advocate at the Southwest Women's Shelter in Marshall, which houses battered women who have nowhere else to go. Kolbeck says she never slept on the streets and has never seen anyone spend a night in the area without shelter. But she says, after she left her abusive husband and the farm they lived on seven years ago, she and her two children spent time moving between shelters and the homes of relatives. And for a while, they stayed with some friends.

LAURIE KOLBECK: They had three children in a two-bedroom apartment. All of the children slept in one bedroom. I slept downstairs in the couch, and my friends had another bedroom. We've done a lot of that through the years, you know, because of not being able to afford housing and all the other expenses that go along with that.

JOHN BIEWEN: In doubling up with friends or family, Kolbeck and her kids were like many rural homeless people. That is, if you call someone who's living with friends or relatives homeless. Not everyone accepts that. Definitions of homelessness vary widely. State Senator Duane Benson says, people doubling up are not homeless. On the contrary, he says, it's because rural people are willing to take each other in that there isn't a homelessness problem in rural areas.

DUANE BENSON: And maybe we take care of the problem, and maybe it's uncomfortable for both the host and the person being hosted. But by the same token, it speaks highly of the people that they do take care of their problem.

JOHN BIEWEN: Pat Neer coordinates programs for the poor with the Marshall-based Western Community Action program. She says it's true that very few rural people actually end up living on the streets.

PAT NEER: And that's partly a function of the fact that we don't have the facilities to support street living. We don't have a lot of dumpsters. We don't have shelters. We don't have even a whole lot of bridges to sleep under. We don't have hot air vents. I mean, the things that people can find to help them barely survive in the cities don't even exist out here.

JOHN BIEWEN: But Neer says, nevertheless, there is a homelessness problem in rural areas. She says, in small towns throughout rural America, there are unemployed and underemployed people who can't afford housing of their own and have no control of their economic lives. And Neer estimates that 3/4 of them are women and children.

Deborah is in her 30s. She's living with her parents in Worthington. She says her husband was beating her, so she left. Now she's attending college on a student loan, hoping to get qualified for a good job. In the meantime, she says, she's stuck at her parents' house because she can't get enough government assistance to afford a place of her own. She says she should be getting more help. She considers herself homeless.

DEBORAH: You know, I'm not giving my folks any money for staying there. And I don't feel right about eating their food. I fell between the cracks. And I tell you, it's not a comfortable place to be.

JOHN BIEWEN: Besides the fact that they rarely end up on the streets, another thing separating rural poor people from their big city counterparts, according to those who work with them, is that relatively few of the rural poor are mentally ill or chemically dependent. Some experts say that most urban street people are mentally ill, alcoholic, or drug addicted. But Neer of Western Community Action estimates that no more than a fourth of the rural homeless are.

She says most rural people who do have such problems end up in larger cities, where more social service agencies are set up to help them. The same apparently goes for many of the rural poor. Watlov Phillips of the Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless says, a good number of displaced farm families and other rural people are ending up in Twin Cities shelters. She says, the metro shelters recently have created a rural resettlement program to help those people adjust to city life.

SUE WATLOV PHILLIPS: We've had some young children in the program that have come from farms. And what they talk to their mom and dad about is, when can we go home again? When can we go back to the farm?

JOHN BIEWEN: Watlov Phillips says, rural poor people go to the city thinking they'll find good jobs there. But often, they can't get work. Or more likely, they can't find affordable housing. Watlov Phillips says, unless a rural economy is created that can support more people, the countryside will continue to produce homeless people. And most of them, she says, will ultimately end up spending time on the streets and in the shelters of big cities.

SUE WATLOV PHILLIPS: To me, it just makes a great deal more sense for us to put energy into assisting people to stay in their own community, as opposed to having people move to major metro areas to find services.

JOHN BIEWEN: There is more help now than there used to be for the small-town homeless. The network of Transitional Living Centers, which provides shelter, and also try to help homeless people regain economic control of their lives, has earned Minnesota national recognition as a leader in fighting the problem. The outstate transitional housing allows rural homeless people to get help, if not in their home towns, at least nearby.

[MICROWAVE PINGING]

Stan Longworth takes a bowl of canned spaghetti from the microwave oven. He's making his lunch in the basement kitchen of the Welcome Inn, the transitional living center in the side wing of a church in downtown Mankato. Longworth, who is in his 50s, is one of about 25 people staying here this winter day. He's been here for two months.

STAN LONGWORTH: It's really the only place in town where a guy can, like, you know, if you haven't got any money and no place to stay. And if they have an opening, it's your only chance, really, in Mankato.

JOHN BIEWEN: Longworth, for one, is glad the Welcome Inn exists in South Central Minnesota. He grew up in rural Brown County, not far from Mankato. He's been homeless on and off for years and spent some time in a shelter for the homeless in Minneapolis. He says he didn't like it there.

STAN LONGWORTH: The only difference is they had a no drinking rule there, just as you do here. But a lot of guys chose to ignore that rule and get drunk. And this is where the friction came in. We had to kick them out for being drunk or doped up, and they couldn't understand that. But if you stay sober, you get along fine in these places.

JOHN BIEWEN: Some of the funding for Minnesota's shelters and transitional housing has come from the federal government's McKinney Act, an emergency homeless assistance bill that Congress passed in 1987. Advocates for the homeless say the federal money is helping, but they say, there are still big holes in the safety net for rural homeless people.

For one thing, they argue, the welfare system is too stingy. A single person on general assistance in Minnesota receives just over $200 a month. Some insist that's not enough for food, clothing, and shelter. Advocates also call for an increase in the minimum wage. Keith Luebke of Mankato's Welcome Inn.

KEITH LUEBKE: Now, a recent study indicated that 20% of the people who are homeless are working. If you look at housing costs here in Mankato, if you look at the cost of an average two-bedroom apartment, and if you look at the average cost of daycare, and then you take a woman with two children who has a minimum wage job, just the cost of her housing and just the cost of that daycare are going to exceed her income if she's working even above the minimum wage by $0.10 or $0.20. And she couldn't even begin to deal then with the costs of food, clothing, personal items.

JOHN BIEWEN: Luebke says, a higher minimum wage would allow many people who are now homeless to afford their own housing. Opponents of increasing the minimum wage say it would damage the economy and hurt the poor by causing more unemployment. But no matter what the condition of the economy and government policy, there always has been and perhaps always will be a certain number of people who can't provide for themselves, the hardcore, chronic homeless, many of whom are mentally ill or chemically dependent.

Aside from the few shelters in larger towns, rural areas offer these people almost no help. Pat Neer of Western Community Action says, part of the problem, ironically, is that same tight social web that moves rural people to take care of their own. She says, that tendency has a dark side.

PAT NEER: And the dark side is, what if there are homeless people in our community who are not our own? And what we have found as we've been starting to deal with homelessness is there seems to be a kind of a philosophy that transients don't belong and that if you're not from our area, that we'll help you get home, wherever home is. But don't plan on sticking around too long.

JOHN BIEWEN: Neer says a homeless hitchhiker or rail rider coming through a small town is likely to be picked up by the police. They may be offered a one-night motel voucher and a meal. Then the next day, they'll be given a ride to the county line and encouraged to move on. State Senator Benson suggests that's enough help for such people.

DUANE BENSON: In Britt, Iowa, which-- I don't live all that far away from Britt, Iowa, and they have the National Hobo Day every year. And we always have the interviews on TV. And they say, we do this because we like to do it. So I guess there's a fundamental question. If people make conscious decisions, is government at any level responsible for them once they've made that decision to choose a certain lifestyle?

JOHN BIEWEN: Advocates for the poor say very few people choose homelessness, and most of those who do are mentally ill or hooked on drugs or alcohol and unable to make rational choices. To help this kind of person, advocates say you have to reach out. Terebinth Farm near Holly in the Lake Country of West Central Minnesota is a unique place where a handful of chronically homeless men are getting shelter and healing.

CLARENCE SCHUENKE: Come on, Bessie. Come on, girl. Come on, girl. She's a good girl, ain't you, Bessie?

JOHN BIEWEN: Clarence Schuenke is a gentle, content-looking man with a full white beard down to the middle of his chest. Bessie, a large Holstein, lets him rub her matted winter coat. Schuenke's blue eyes are clear now, but they've seen harder times.

CLARENCE SCHUENKE: Riding the rails, in prison, and alcoholic, and all that. You ain't got no life. You even got a shelter where to sleep. At the time, I was-- most of the nights, I was sleeping underneath the viaduct on the interstate. And that's no lie. They'll run you out from there, too. And then, if it's raining, you're soaking wet, your bed roll is soaking wet. And then you're in misery.

JOHN BIEWEN: A year and a half ago, Schuenke was kicked off a train outside of Moorhead. After spending a couple nights at the Dorothy Day House, a Moorhead shelter, he heard about a brand-new program for the chronically homeless. The next day, Clarence moved out to Terebinth Farm, a piece of rolling farmland near Hawley, 30 miles east of Fargo-Moorhead.

He and six other men are living there now, working on rebuilding their lives. The program's director, Barb Martens, says most of the men were brought up on farms. And she says, that makes a farm the best place for them to try and start over.

BARB MARTENS: I think for somebody that's been on the street for 20 or 30 years, they start out as a child. They really do. The emotions that we all felt growing up they never had. You need to relearn that you're a valuable human being, and you're worth something. And it is almost like starting from childhood again. And I think there's a certain element to getting back to the land, to getting back to your roots that makes it easier to start over again.

[GEESE HONKING]

JOHN BIEWEN: The men keep busy with a variety of projects, doing farm work, building things. Next to the barn, some geese move around on the hard-packed snow. On really cold days, they can go inside the wooden shelter that Dwaine Vise built for them. The 55-year-old Vise knows what it's like to be cold and have no place to get warm. For years, he rode the rails, drinking during the day, looking for a place to lie down at night.

DWAINE VISE: I mean, I get my head together. When I was drinking, I wasn't thinking. And now it gives me time out here to think. And it's good, clean air. And you get away from them bars and stuff.

JOHN BIEWEN: Vise, like most of the men at Terebinth, is a recovering alcoholic. No drinking and no drugs. That's all that's asked of the men who want to live here. If they stick to those rules, they can stay the rest of their lives. Several of the current residents say they'll do just that. Dwaine Vise, for his part, sees Terebinth as a temporary stop.

DWAINE VISE: I mean, as soon as I-- probably this spring, about March, I plan on leaving. I'm going back to what I used to do. That's cement work. I cement finisher. And I'm going to get back to work. And then me and my brother want to get some land of our own. Yeah, I still got-- I still got some time. There's a lot of things I ain't did yet you don't want to do. I ain't going to just sit and, like, something, like, I'm waiting to die or something. Nothing like that.

JOHN BIEWEN: Terebinth Farm may be the only program in the country in which chronically homeless people can get shelter and help in a truly rural setting. The farm is funded by private donations, and the residents also get general assistance from the government. Terebinth Farm can house only about seven men at a time. Advocates for the homeless say there are thousands of others not getting help.

[CHATTER]

It's easier to help people like Ken and Vanessa Armstrong, people who just fall on hard luck and find themselves homeless temporarily. Mankato's Welcome Inn and the local community Action Program have helped the Armstrongs get a sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment in downtown Mankato. Vanessa is working part-time at a fast-food restaurant. Ken is still looking for a job that will pay more than their welfare check, and also cover the cost of daycare.

KEN ARMSTRONG: I'd like us to both be working and get off assistance as soon as possible.

VANESSA ARMSTRONG: Yeah.

KEN ARMSTRONG: I know we can build our way back up to doing real well again.

JOHN BIEWEN: Those who work with rural homeless people say more than ever is being done to help them get back on their feet. But there are many more, they say, who don't get help. Western Community Action's Pat Neer says, more needs to be done.

PAT NEER: If we won't allow dogs and cats to live out on the street, will we allow people to be without homes? Is there a certain level beyond which we will not allow anyone to drop?

JOHN BIEWEN: Pat Neer of the Western Community Action Program in Marshall. I'm John Biewen.

[SOFT MUSIC]

SPEAKER 2: This report is a production of MPR's Mainstreet Radio team. It was written and produced by John Biewen with assistance from Rachel Ribbe. Editorial assistance by Sarah Meyer and Kate Moos. The technical director was Jeff Walker. Mainstreet Radio reports are made possible by a major grant from the Blandin Foundation.

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