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SPEAKER 1: [INAUDIBLE]

LEIF ENGER: 5 o'clock is a busy hour at the shelter run by the Northwoods Coalition for Battered Women. Supper, salad and fry bread, is almost ready. The kids are hungry and rambunctious and crowded. The big house is supposed to provide temporary shelter for nine people. Right now, there are 22.

SPEAKER 2: Thank you.

SPEAKER 3: Mom, what were you guys doing downstairs?

BEV WARREN: It's a double whammy when you're Indian and you're a woman.

LEIF ENGER: Bev Warren is co-director at the shelter. She says finding permanent homes for these abused mothers and children can be simple or difficult according to their race.

BEV WARREN: For the most part, I have seen white women come in with children and can be out of here in a week. They found a house. They've gotten help. They're gone. And I don't find it quite so easy for Indian women.

LEIF ENGER: Mary is 35 years old. She's a battered wife and a mother of six. She's been here almost two months now and says she has rent money, but she's running out of patience.

MARY: I've been checking the papers every day. When I see something in a paper that's big enough for my family, I call them and as soon as they find out I'm an Indian, then it just-- they don't want to rent to me. Sometimes, I feel like I want to change my last name because it seems like that's really against me, too.

LEIF ENGER: Housing for people like Mary has been a troublesome issue in Bemidji. In 1988, the city was offered a federal low income housing grant of $1.4 million. The city council refused the money, saying it needed to do a comprehensive housing study first.

The refusal sparked an uproar among local activists, who said Bemidji was ignoring its poor. Now, the city has reapplied for the money and plans to begin building 20 new low-income homes this summer. Mayor Doug Peterson.

DOUG PETERSON: Our number one priority, as it relates to the city council, is to upgrade our housing, to upgrade our neighborhoods. So I think the council is doing an outstanding job to address the real needs of the low-income people and to provide housing and safe surroundings and whatever they need.

LEIF ENGER: Besides the new homes, Peterson cites an ongoing city program that upgrades existing homes for people who can't afford to do it themselves. But cries of discrimination persist, particularly among Indians looking for homes to rent. Jean Moen is the owner of Property Professionals, which manages more than 50 rental units in town.

JEAN MOEN: The discrimination that is often talked about is, I believe, most often a lack of understanding what the rules are. I think that folks have a preconceived notion that you just walk in and find a place to rent and then you go rent it. And they don't realize that there are things that have to be taken care of first.

LEIF ENGER: Things like personal references, past rental history, and first and last month's rent. Moen says people on welfare, Indian and White, frequently come in expecting that his staff will track down their references for them. And when that doesn't happen, they leave disillusioned.

JEAN MOEN: We're a private business. We're not an educating business so that we aren't-- we just can't pay employees to call for directory assistance and look up phone numbers for people to find. I mean, they need to do those things on their own, and they get frustrated when they don't have those things done or when they expect us to do it, and we can't afford to spend that much time with everybody that walks in the door.

LEIF ENGER: Moen suggests that if more people kept track of their rental histories, fewer people would have trouble finding housing. Others say that even requiring extensive reference lists institutionalizes discrimination. That it keeps poor people in poor surroundings.

Mark Farabee, a former chair of the local Human Rights Commission, who now works for the rural Minnesota concentrated employment program, says some compromise needs to be reached. He says in a town where unemployment is twice the state average, helping people find a place to live would be sure to help in other ways, as well.

MARK: When you're looking just day-to-day for your food, shelter, clothing, housing, and you see people around you in middle class environment who have a surplus of that, it does start to impact on people's self esteem, their feelings of self-worth, their feelings of their ability to compete in a job market or in school.

SPEAKER 3: Is it almost time to eat?

SPEAKER 4: Yeah.

LEIF ENGER: In the noisy shove and squeeze of the Battered Women's shelter, Mary says she's getting tired of looking for a place to take her family. A job, some schooling, those are things to worry about down the line. Right now, she just wants to go live somewhere, but she says the people who can't find homes are always the ones who need them the most.

MARY: It makes me feel like I want to hate people, but I wasn't raised that way, and I'm not going to start beginning to feel prejudiced against people, either. I don't know. It makes me really feel like I want to give up.

I feel like I want to put my kids in foster homes, and I feel like I just want to leave.

SPEAKER 5: See you guys later.

SPEAKER 6: Bye.

SPEAKER 5: See you guys later.

LEIF ENGER: This is Leif Enger.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]