In the District's outer suburbs to the south, the story is often the same. Wednesday night in Woodbridge, Gayle Sanders and others filled out surveys for homeless people who arrived from shelters, transitional housing and woodland campsites for the evening meal at Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a storefront church on Jefferson Davis Highway.
Rose Powers, a pastor at the church, used to bring food to the District to feed the homeless. Then people started coming out of the woods and knocking on the church door for food, so she began to minister here.
Arthur Mayne lives in a 10-by-10-foot toolshed, donated to him by a church, in a wooded area of Frederick. Last week's homeless count marked the fifth annual effort to take a "snapshot" of the region's homeless population.
(Photos Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)
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"We take a second offering every week for the poor," she said.
The area, once a rural outpost, has grown increasingly costly. People used to come to these outlying counties for inexpensive places to live. Now apartments cost $900 a month, Sanders said.
"For the service workers who work at Potomac Mills for $7 or $7.50 an hour . . . do the math. It's impossible."
It is also hard to find an apartment on disability payments of less than $600 a month. That is why Sanders included Frank Saffa, a tall, quiet musician disabled by a degenerative joint disease, in her count.
He grew up in Alexandria but came farther out into the suburbs in search of a place he could afford. For a while, he lived in the woods. As in Frederick, there are whole communities living in campsites around Vineyard Fellowship.
A couple of times, Saffa woke up to learn that one of his neighbors had died of exposure.
This year, he has a coveted $300-a-month room in a transitional housing program. Yet he can't stop thinking of the people he left behind. He misses them sometimes, living out there, the missing.
"It's a parallel universe," he said quietly, leaning on his cane.
