Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America

A mom struggles to keep a roof over her family’s head in this poignant saga. Hobbs (The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace) profiles “Evelyn,” a mother of five who moved her family from Lancaster, Calif., to Los Angeles in 2018 for the city’s well-regarded public schools, planning to use Section 8 housing vouchers to make rent and unaware of the program’s yearslong waitlist. Finding only a low-paying waitressing job and going through a final break with her abusive husband, Evelyn and her children end up in a series of ever more precarious housing situations—a motel, an unfinished garage for $100 a week, and then motels again through an emergency one-night motel voucher program (the unreliability of which leaves the family spending many nights in Evelyn’s SUV). They eventually find stable, long-term housing at a shelter, allowing Evelyn to save up and retrain as an accountant. However, after the family moves into a subsidized townhouse, an expensive setback—paying legal fees when one of her sons is arrested for shoplifting—leads to yet another eviction. In evocative vignettes, Hobbs paints Evelyn as an exemplary mother and worker navigating a bureaucracy seemingly designed to make her fail—for instance, she has trouble finding a second job because she has to be on the phone at exactly 5:01 p.m. every night to get a motel voucher. It’s an eye-opening look at how the housing crisis extends far beyond what’s visible on the streets. (Feb.)