Affluent Fairfax Shows Another Face: Poverty

As others settled in for the night, Fernando Pardo, 38, sat quietly at a table, a steel cane resting in his lap. He emigrated from Colombia at 16 and waited tables at Fair Oaks hotels. After a car crash left him with a broken hip, a brother put him up for a time but then moved to Phoenix.

The wife of another brother in Annandale doesn't want him around. He can't work, he said, because of the constant pain in his hip.

For the last two months, Pardo said, he has spent days at the Lamb Center and nights usually behind shopping centers, where dumpsters and service entrances provide cover.

"You have to hide somewhere," he said.

Shortly before 6 p.m., the call went out for dinner. There was a slight glitch: The gym would be off limits from 7 to 8 p.m., for K-6 basketball tryouts. Those who wanted to eat and crash early would have to sleep elsewhere.

After a brief blessing, church volunteers served plates of pot roast and potatoes with salad, pasta and cherry pie. Most ate quietly and quickly. Some kept hats and coats on. Sweatpants peeked from under some jeans. One man wore a three-piece suit.

Despite their apparent isolation, many have family nearby. Yet some estrangement, often triggered by disputes over money, drugs or alcohol, has set in. Others appear embarrassed or depressed by their circumstances and have severed ties by design. Andre Evans, 28, was a security guard until he suffered a head injury in a car crash and lost his apartment six months ago.

Evans said he lived in foster homes from age 6 until he enlisted in the Army in 1998. He considers a foster couple in Spotsylvania to be his true parents, but he hasn't told them he is homeless.

"I feel like I've failed them," he said quietly.

Depression is endemic among the group. A 2005 study of single adults identified 80 percent as seriously mentally ill, chronic substance abusers or both.

Yet many homeless people and their advocates bristle at the assumption that drugs or alcohol sparked their collapse. It's more often the other way around, they say: The pain of a life that imploded leads to substance abuse or psychiatric issues.

The church effort, called the hypothermia response program, was prompted by the deaths last winter of two homeless Fairfax men. Even in a relatively mild chill, sleeping outdoors is dangerous, and alcohol accelerates loss of body heat and increases the risk of potentially fatal hypothermia.