- Caught in the Cold: Wyoming’s strong economy pushes rise in homelessness, By Benjamin Storrow, March 31, 2013, Casper Star-Tribune: “Robert Larsen spent three years crisscrossing the country looking for work. He cleaned oil from Florida beaches after the BP oil spill. He found work in the booming oil fields of North Dakota until a disagreement with his boss cost him his job. He chased leads in Colorado , New Jersey, Nevada and Utah. When he read there were jobs in Wyoming, he strapped his helmet to his backpack, cobbled together the little money he had left, and he and his fiancée hitched a ride to the Cowboy State. In early March, Larsen sat at a picnic table in a South Cheyenne park on a cold but sunny day. Lured by the promise of work, he had not been in Wyoming a week but was already acquainted with the wind. Since arriving in Wyoming, he has lived at the COMEA House, a Cheyenne homeless shelter…”
- Caught in the Cold: Wyoming struggles to develop plan to address homelessness, By Benjamin Storrow, April 1, 2013, Casper Star-Tribune: “Cathie Hughes is a woman with seemingly limitless energy. But she sounded dejected when she answered the phone in early March. Hughes, CEO of Southwestern Wyoming Recovery Access Programs, learned the previous night that funding for her organization’s emergency homeless shelter would be cut because of a technicality, threatening the closure of the only shelter in Lincoln, Sweetwater, Sublette and Uinta counties. The SW WRAP shelter was small, sleeping six people in its men’s facility and four in its women’s/families’ facility. Nonetheless, its closure would mark the disappearance of the only safety net for the homeless in southwestern Wyoming…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty