STOCKTON — For the first time in her life, Coleen Sykes-Ray doesn’t have a home address.

On Tuesday, when she served as a witness at her best friend’s wedding, she was asked to fill out her name and address, but she just stood there staring at the pink form.

“What do I put here?” she thought.

It was a sobering reminder that she and her family are now homeless. After five years of renting a humble three-bedroom duplex in north Stockton, Sykes-Ray, her husband, Stacey Ray, and their two children were priced out of their home and had to move out on Saturday.

For now, the couple and their 17-year-old son Bryant, who is autistic, are staying at a hotel off of West March Lane that was paid for by the CalWORKs Homeless Assistance program. Their daughter, Jordan, 16, stays with friends in order to meet the three-person limit for the room.

Bryant doesn’t understand what is going on, Sykes-Ray said. He wants to know where his house, his room and his sister are. Sykes-Ray told her son they were on vacation to make the transition easier, but having his routine disrupted has been difficult. And Jordan isn’t doing well either. The teenager worries about her family’s well-being.

Sykes-Ray was already intimately familiar with Stockton’s growing homelessness issue, and she can’t help but point out the irony of the situation.

In 2016, she started Bags of Hope, a nonprofit organization that provides free menstrual hygiene kits to women and girls who are homeless. And earlier this year, she was part of the group of volunteers who participated in January’s biennial Point-in-Time count of the unsheltered homeless population in the city.

Sykes-Ray recalls hearing people talk about how they could not afford rents in Stockton or how they were sleeping in their cars after their monthly rent payments jumped.

“There’s so many stories like mine,” she said, sitting on a bed inside the small hotel room, as her son lay beside her. “What are we going to do? I can’t find anything here. I’m upset because there’s people like me who are being pushed out.

“I’m not this lazy person. I’m a college graduate. I run a nonprofit. I work multiple jobs.”

Jon Mendelson, who chairs the board of the San Joaquin County Continuum of Care, told The Record recently that the cost of living in the state has outpaced people’s wages and their ability to stay in housing.

“Increasingly, the people on the streets are not just the chronically homeless,” he said. “They’re also families with children, people with jobs, people who want to work.”

According to Apartment List, which publishes monthly reports on rental trends, renters at all economic levels are spending more of their income on rent today than they did in 1980, but those payments are cutting deeper for people who are in the bottom of the national income distribution.

Sykes-Ray and her husband made a combined $20,000 last year and spent $17,000 on rent alone.

When the family moved in to their Plantation Place duplex, rent was $1,050. But in the past three years, the landlord has raised rent by about $100 every seven to eight months. In January, rent went up to $1,440.

“(The landlord) had a meeting with us and he said, ‘Let’s agree on a move out day because you guys can no longer afford this place,’ ” she said. “And it was so difficult, because just looking at the rent for other places — I couldn’t afford to stay and I couldn’t afford to move anywhere.”

Sykes-Ray was laid off in September and had since been working part time, while her husband, who has had a foot amputated, is on permanent disability and unable to work. The county’s Housing Authority helped the family obtain a Section 8 voucher, but she’s now trapped in a Catch-22 situation since their rental applications have been denied by landlords who don’t accept tenants on government assistance.

Part of the requirement of the Homeless Assistance program is that the Rays must submit a rental application at least once a day, but with the nonrefundable fees running about $70 each time the couple applies, they’re quickly finding roadblocks to finding a home.

Sykes-Ray and her family have the hotel room until Tuesday, when they have to find another place to go or come up with the money for another night’s stay.

“And if we don’t figure it out, I have no idea where we’re going,” she said, adding that friends and family have no room for a family of four. “Every day that goes by it’s a day that we are closer to be literally living in the street.”

She said she reached out to Mayor Michael Tubbs’ office for help, as well as other people and organizations, but the family is no closer to finding a place to live.

On Wednesday, Bryant turned away from the cartoons on TV to look at his mom: “Are we going to a big house?” he asked her.

“Yes, we are,” she told him with a smile. “Soon, I hope.”

To learn more about Bags of Hope or to contact Coleen Sykes-Ray, visit https://www.bagsofhopestockton.com/ or email coleenrenee@gmail.com.

Contact reporter Almendra Carpizo at (209) 546-8264 or acarpizo@recordnet.com. Follow her on Twitter @AlmendraCarpizo.