Building A New Life But Welfare Recipients Hit Wall Trying To Improve Conditions

Joseph Coumbes and JoAnn Perrine left a Spokane homeless shelter five years ago and used their welfare checks to buy a mountainous homestead they call “New America.”

It looks more like old Appalachia, but it’s home.

“When we got here, this place wasn’t near what you see now,” Coumbes, 43, said of the couple’s two-room log cabin. “It was just a shell. The roof was caved in and we had trees in here bigger than the ones outside.”

There are still some weeds in the dirt floor of the converted barn - sprouting next to the barrel wood stove, whose stack juts through the plastic sheet that serves as a roof.

About the only amenities are a battery-powered television that gets four stations and a wooded back yard stocked with deer, bear and an occasional moose.

No one is sure how many people are living in similar circumstances, but Dave Jones, the Stevens County building director and fire marshal, said he sees more and more of them - sometimes after makeshift shelters burn.

When they come to his attention, he said he tries at least to get the occupants to improve the safety of their wood stoves. But he is reluctant to enforce regulations against living in structures that don’t meet building codes.

“Where are you going to move them to?” he asked. “Who’s going to put them out in the street with nothing at all?”

Although Perrine, 39, has no electricity and has to haul water, she bristles when state officials suggest the family of four needs to move to find work.

“My first child was born in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I ain’t giving up my home again. A job is no guarantee that you’re going to have a job the next day.”

Coumbes said he was foreman of a large family citrus farm in central Florida when he and Perrine met. Then, he said, wintertime freezes nearly bankrupted the company and put him on the street.

Not so, said William Floyd Jr., owner of Lake County Citrus Sales in Leesburg, Fla.: “Joe is just a wanderer. He had every opportunity to stay.”

Floyd said Coumbes was an equipment operator, not a foreman. Perrine was a local resident at the time, Floyd recalled.

She and Coumbes left Florida together and had their first child, Nora, just a few weeks before they and another homeless family acquired 20 acres near Ford, Wash.

They began living there in tents in the summer of 1991.

That homestead - also dubbed New America - was soon abandoned when the partnership broke up. Coumbes and Perrine established the “new New America” on their own at Onion Creek in September 1991.

Now Nora is 5 and has a brother, Jason, who is 3.

As important as home ownership is to Perrine and Coumbes, they are willing to risk it to establish a business. They hope to escape Stevens County’s chronically high unemployment and help other jobless people by opening a flea market in Colville.

But Coumbes and Perrine say no bank will take them seriously when they ask for a $25,000 loan backed by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

“Banks, loan companies, finance companies, you name it, we’ve been there,” he said.

Bankers’ qualms about lack of collateral don’t impress Coumbes.

He and Perrine say their 10-acre property is worth $35,000. However, public records show they acquired the land in March 1992 on a $6,000 contract that they paid off in August 1994. The Stevens County assessor still values the property at $6,000.

Coumbes blames his problems with banks and employers on prejudice against welfare recipients. He resents the common assertion that hamburger-flipping jobs are readily available and welfare recipients won’t take them.

Even if the jobs were available, Coumbes said, welfare recipients wouldn’t be hired because of stereotypes: “We’re drunks, we’re lazy, we’re drug addicts. … As soon as you sign your name on a welfare form, you give up your right to get a job.”

That’s the kind of attitude that Deanna Carnie tries to prevent as a family social worker for the Colville office of the state Department of Social and Health Services. People are likely to fail when they believe they can’t succeed, she said.

Colville welfare administrator Janet Thomas said 124 people got jobs in the past year that averaged 31 hours a week and $6.95 an hour. But department records show 2,645 people, representing 700 households, are on public assistance in Stevens County. In addition, 4,233 residents from 1,627 households - 11.2 percent of the county’s population - receive food stamps. The figures are much worse in Pend Oreille County and about the same in Spokane County.

Welfare payments and food stamps pumped $7.2 million into Stevens County last year. Businesses that benefit from the spending should be more sympathetic, Coumbes said.

“I want to do something and I’ll do it, whatever it takes to do it,” he said. “I want to get off public assistance.”

Coumbes and Perrine might at least be able to have a well dug on their property if it weren’t for a rule that prevents welfare recipients from having “cash resources” of more than $1,000. Perrine discovered they would lose their welfare payments if they sold enough timber to pay for a well.

“Every time we come up with a good idea, we hit another brick wall,” she said.

Now the couple may have another option. Although citrus grower Floyd didn’t consider Coumbes a model employee, he said he liked Coumbes and would hire him back because he has “mechanical talent.”

“Tell him to bring the Perrine woman, too,” Floyd said. “I could use her in the packing house during the season and perhaps in the groves.”

Floyd said he would start Coumbes at about $200 a week and increase his pay if he performed well. The job would be full time and year-round, he said.

Public agencies would pay to relocate the family, but the job - at least initially - wouldn’t pay substantially more than Coumbes and Perrine might receive here in public assistance and food stamps.

And they would have to leave New America.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo