After losing homes, families move into tents

By Jennifer Brooks
and Shelley Mays

It's a sweltering summer afternoon, and the children are hot and miserable in the tent that's been their home since they lost their house last month.

"You feel about as small as you can as a man, trying to take care of your family and watching your children have to go through something like this," said Troy Renault, 39, a homebuilder and father of five boys who lost his job, then his home, when the recession hit the construction industry.

Home these days is a cluster of tents covered by a blue tarp in a back corner of the Timberline Campground in Lebanon. Surrounding them are the tents, campers and recreational vehicles of other families in similar straits, living full time in campgrounds because they can no longer afford to live anywhere else.

No one knows how many people are living in campgrounds in Middle Tennessee. But visit any area campground and it's easy to pick out the permanent residents among the vacationers.

Look for the decks built on to campers with scrap lumber, and gardens planted next to campfire pits. Look for the air-conditioning units hooked up to tents. Look for the children boarding school buses at the front gates, and parents closing up the camper before they head off to work.

The space between a comfortable life, a nice home and a good job and living out of a campground is closer than most people could imagine. Lose a job, fall suddenly ill or end a marriage, and quickly the bills and mortgage payments start piling up high enough to bury an entire family.

"You get to a point where it's: Do you pay your house payment and not have lights and water and everyone sit with no clean clothes and dirty dishes and everything? Or do you keep the lights and water on and forgo the house payment for the time being?" Renault said. "And that's the way it went, until pretty much we wound up having to leave our home."

Things like this aren't supposed to happen to people like the Renaults, who work hard, go to church, take care of one another and look after their neighbors.

Renault was making a good living as an assistant project manager for Goodall Homes, which was building a pair of subdivisions in Lebanon. He and his wife, Tammy, and the boys — who range in age from teenagers to a 2-year-old — lived in a three-bedroom, 1,800-square-foot home in a subdivision he helped to build.

Then the construction boom went bust. The company laid him off. He started his own small business, Renault Construction, specializing in home renovations, home construction and deck building. But the market was glutted with other builders trying to do the same thing.

"It really hurts, but I know I'm not the only person out there that's going through this," he said.

'This really is a community'

Down the winding dirt road that curves toward the back of the campground is a vintage one-bedroom Airstream trailer that was home to six people for the better part of a year.

The Bowen family lost its home on Mother's Day 2008, when a storm sent a tree through the roof. It was the last stroke in a string of bad luck that left Larry and Laurie Bowen, their two daughters and two young grandsons with nowhere else to live.

The family had moved up from Florida that March when Larry's construction job was transferred north. A month later, the company laid him off, along with many of his co-workers. Laurie and her older daughter, Jennifer, had left steady jobs in Florida and still hadn't found work. Then the storm hit.

"This is our home now," said Laurie Bowen, looking around in resigned amusement at the interior of the cramped camper that her younger daughter, 15-year-old Christina, has dubbed the Silver Pill.

At first, the Bowens lived in an old canvas Boy Scout tent someone donated to them. Eventually, Larry and Jennifer found work and the family was able to buy the old Airstream.

Jennifer and her boys, 4-year-old Damiyan Clark and 3-year-old Glenn Clark, have moved out into a camper of their own down the lane. For months, the family was forced to share the Silver Pill — Jennifer and the boys in the tiny bedroom, Christina sleeping in a sailor-style bunk in the camper's only closet, and Laurie and Larry on a futon in the front living area.

On this day, the temperature outside was 89 degrees. The temperature inside the camper was 98. The air conditioner was broken, and Laurie was at a loss over where they would find the money to replace it. She has multiple sclerosis, and the heat tends to aggravate her illness.

Campground residents will tell you they aren't homeless. They have roofs over their heads — even if some of the roofs are canvas — and they pay rent just like everyone else. A month's stay at the campgrounds around Lebanon runs about $300.

"We're not going to get anywhere else we could live for that price, not with utilities included," said Laurie Bowen, who pays $325 a month for her berth at Timberline Campground.

For that price, you get communal shower and bathroom facilities, a well-maintained pool and a close-knit community of others who are in exactly the same situation.

"This really is a community," said Bowen, whose front yard is crowded with plants her husband brought home from his job at a garden store. She pots them and shares them with the neighbors. The rafters and windows of the Airstream are strung with drying herbs to sweeten the air.

"I can go for a walk at 1 a.m. here and not have to worry," said Bowen, who has been taking courses and hopes to start work as a preschool aide in the fall.

'I'm not homeless'

Relaxing by the pool next to her motorized scooter is Kathy Newton, a disabled Navy veteran undergoing daily chemotherapy treatments for her leukemia. She lives in a tent.

"It's really not bad," she said, stretching out a leg fitted with a temporary cast for her broken ankle. She also has limited mobility and congestive heart failure.

The tent, she figures, is wheelchair-accessible and she's comfortable enough on the air mattress. She sets trays of ice in front of fans to try to keep cool and spends a lot of time soaking in the pool. She'd like to fit her tent with an air conditioner, but she's behind in her payments on the storage locker and the owner won't let her in to retrieve the one she owns.

"I've got a roof over my head. I'm not homeless," she said. "I take it one day at a time. I sleep good, I watch my DVDs. You'd be surprised what you can live without."

Living at campgrounds is nothing new. The campground managers say they've always had some long-term residents. Not everyone who lives at the campgrounds is there because of the economy, and not everyone is there involuntarily.

But there seem to be a lot more people living this way than there used to be, and a lot more families. More than 260 students in Lebanon and Wilson County schools are homeless.

Campground parents who enroll their children in local schools are pained to see them classified as "transients" on the school rosters.

'Lord put us here for a reason'

Over and over again, you hear the same stories. People who had homes and jobs, now living in the tents and trailers they bought for relaxing family vacations.

Ron Hoover used to work as a bill collector.

"I would just end (collection) calls and shake my head at all these people living paycheck to paycheck," he said.

And then he became one of those people.

It started when his employer, MBNA bank, offered him a buyout, with a severance package that seemed too good to pass up. But he didn't expect to have such a hard time finding another job, or that his wife would lose her job and then fall ill.

The medical bills and mortgage payments started piling up. Hoover was registered at five temp agencies and still couldn't make ends meet. He took classes and got certified as a long-haul trucker, only to have his wages and hours cut back as the economy took a dive and gas prices started skyrocketing.

Eventually, the Hoovers lost their home and moved from Ohio to Tennessee to be closer to family.

Their son co-signed a loan for a large, comfortable trailer that's now their full-time home. It has air conditioning, a shower, comfortable furniture and even a tiny fake fireplace. Hoover, who can build almost anything, added a deck and recently built a picnic table out of scrap lumber he salvaged from a Dumpster at Lowe's.

"The way I see it, the good Lord put us here for a reason," Hoover said. "I figure, I married my wife, I didn't marry the house or the big yard."

He's been sidelined by gall bladder surgery that left him on disability for six weeks, but he is a man who likes to plan, and his goal is to be out of the campground within two years.

"As long as you have your health, your goals and the guidance of God, you have everything."

'Things could … be worse'

Faith and family help many campground families bear what could be unbearable.

"There are days when it's a struggle," Renault said. "Do I still have days when I feel like, 'What is going on and why is this happening?' Absolutely. I'm human."

Some people who hear about his situation judge him, he said, figuring he must have spent wildly and irresponsibly.

"We weren't living above our means," he said. "We didn't have anything fancy, we didn't own big-screen TVs, just the necessities. … I've had people say to me, 'You need to get your family into a home.' It's real easy to say these things when you're not walking in it."

He's hoping to move his family back into a proper house soon. In the meantime, he gets through his days by working, taking care of his family and trying to help out others in even worse straits. He volunteered to unclog the septic system in one neighbor's trailer. He gave a refrigerator to a neighbor who needed one.

"I try to look at the bright side of things and realize things could always be worse," he said. "You have to trust in what God's plan is and it's not always what your plan is. We're making our way through."