Somebody told her shelter waited behind the red door, so Pamela took her son's hand and headed across town. It had been a month since they last had a steady place to stay, and now, finally, she believed she had found an answer to her prayers.

The sign on the door said Family Housing Hub. On it, a family of faceless stick figures piled inside a big house. Somehow, they looked happy. They were home.

But the door was locked. The Family Housing Hub, Maricopa County's single entry point into family homeless services like shelters and housing programs, was closed for the weekend.

Pamela, a 26-year-old California native who asked to be identified only by her first name, spent that weekend on the light rail, shivering in October's first cool nights. She prayed with strangers and watched her 4-year-old son, Jordan, try to make blanket forts, unable to decide whether she should laugh or cry.

When Monday came, Pamela walked back across town. The red door was open. She filled out her paperwork and sat through the hourlong assessment, unwinding the family turmoil that left her homeless.

Pamela expected a place to sleep that night. It was an emergency shelter.

But the woman at the desk added Pamela's name to a growing waitlist. She gave her a phone number and told her to call back every day. Then Pamela and Jordan walked back out the door.

"I didn't know it was going to be a waiting list like this," Pamela said. "I thought it would be intake, boom."

Never enough resources

Maricopa County pledged to end family homelessness in 2015, but three years later, it's fallen further behind. Priorities have shifted away from homeless youth and families, forcing service providers to compete for funding and turning the county's catch-all Family Housing Hub into an oxymoron: There's now an 11-week waitlist for emergency shelter.

Today, the list contains over 200 families.

“So, tonight, there will be over 200 families that are either living on the street or living in unsafe living conditions, waiting for a shelter,” said Darlene Newsom, CEO of the non-profit UMOM New Day Centers, one of the county's largest homeless service providers and the Family Housing Hub's administrative leader. “Our waitlist continues to grow.”

The list is not new. There have never been enough resources, never been enough spaces to sleep. Families have been forced to wait since the beginning, ever since the county consolidated its family homelessness services into the Hub.

But the list has never been this long.

It's grown alongside a surge in homelessness. Fueled by stagnant wages and a crisis-level affordable housing shortage, the number of Arizonans experiencing homelessness rose by 10.3 percent this year, an annual report released last month by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development shows.

HUD drew that number partly from Maricopa County's one-night estimate of people without a stable place to sleep.

This year, the county's tally included 519 families and 1,100 children.

It's hard to know how accurate that number is. Family homelessness is among the most difficult types to count, because families rarely end up on the streets. Instead, they tend to stay with relatives or sleep in cars, where volunteers mistake them for travelers.

MORE: Families stuck between help, affordability

Crisis grows, but by how much?

One thing is clear: There are more homeless families than Maricopa County is capable of sheltering. So the Family Housing Hub, which the county’s shelters use as a single entry point into the system, keeps adding families to the list.

The county's Regional Plan to End Homelessness, published last year, reported that 2,145 homeless families with children were placed on some sort of waitlist between October and December 2017. That included waitlists for programs such as Rapid Re-Housing and Permanent Supportive Housing, and emergency shelter.

Over that same time, 1,416 families moved off a waitlist and into some sort of housing service.

“It’s terrible,” said Joan Serviss, executive director of the Arizona Housing Coalition, a collective of groups advocating to end homelessness. “We just don’t have shelter bed availability.”

When the Family Housing Hub opened in 2014, the county’s Continuum of Care — which oversees all government-funded homeless services — reported 421 emergency shelter units for households with children.

That number included churches, fire departments and anywhere else that offered shelter space.

In 2017, the county reported 261.

More money, shelter needed

That decline puts Maricopa County in line with a national shift toward cost-effective homeless services. Emergency shelters have fallen out of favor, seen as stopgaps that get families no closer to long-term housing. In an era with surging homelessness and stagnant funding, emergency shelters often aren’t the most productive use of money.

“There’s always shifting funding resources,” said Anne Scott, a Human Services Planner with the Maricopa Association of Governments. “We’re always trying to push people. Can we fund solutions as much as the front-end crisis response system?”

Nevertheless, some advocates see funding as the fastest way out. A 2017 analysis by former UMOM Chief Program Officer Mattie Lord estimated that an extra $4.4 million each year could end family homelessness in the county. Among other needs, she wrote, Maricopa County could solve the problem by building 17 more emergency shelter units.

Instead, the number of units shrank again.

Family homelessness advocates blame the decline partly on the country's competitive approach to funding services, and partly on shifting priorities decreed from the top. They blame HUD's decision to phase out transitional housing programs, which benefit families with children. And they blame the hidden nature of family homelessness, which rarely creates the kind of visible display that spurs action.

“When there aren’t enough resources to go around, everybody has to make strategic choices,” Lord said. “I think the choice over and over again has not been for family homelessness."

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The Family Housing Hub acts as what's called a “coordinated entry point” for families facing homelessness. Families used to have to call each individual shelter, day after day, checking to see whether a spot opened up. Each shelter operated its own waitlist. Some families joined them all.

Now there’s a single phone number and a single list. The Family Housing Hub interviews families and tries to assess their situation. The first goal is to send them somewhere else. If the family mentions a relative with a spare room or just can’t find an apartment that accepts past evictions, staff will divert them.

If not, they go onto the list, waiting to enter a gridlocked system.

“From there, everything else builds,” UMOM Chief Operating Officer Steven Stivers said.

The Hub is meant to be all-inclusive, but even its own providers say it ignores handfuls of homeless families. To get a spot, a family must show up in person. But the Hub operates on specific hours, in specific locations: Four days a week at UMOM, once or twice a week everywhere else.

It can't cover every part of the county or find every homeless family.

"If you're actually serving all of Maricopa County, that list would be a lot longer," Save the Family Chief Programs Officer Nicky Stevens said.

UMOM, the county’s largest service provider, plans to churn through the list over the next few years. It will use a $5 million grant from a foundation run by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to rearrange its east Phoenix shelter, opening up 26 more family rooms. Those extra units will allow the shelter to take in an extra 100 families a year.

Once the last family moves off the list, Stivers said, UMOM will reassess its shelter needs. Until then, they’ll have to wait.

Finally, the answer

Pamela waited as long as she could. She kept the Hub's phone number in a tattered three-ring binder and did her best to call every day, when she could find a working phone.

Most of the time, nobody picked up.

"It's just a whole bunch of numbers that all go to the same voicemail," Pamela said. "I didn't even get to talk to nobody."

For the next three months, she and Jordan stayed in spare bedrooms and a shelter that abruptly kicked her out. Pamela still doesn't understand why. They spent a few nights sleeping on a city bus, until the bus driver recognized them and gave them a place to stay. That, too, was temporary, and they were soon on their own again.

Still, no answers came from the Hub. Pamela convinced herself she had been removed from the list.

It felt, Pamela said, as if the devil was working against her.

Salvation came in Mesa. In early December, somebody told her to try Save the Family, one of the shelters that belongs to the Hub. Save the Family had no emergency shelter spots, either, but by pure luck, it had one unit of transitional housing left open.

So, Pamela and her son moved into transitional housing, a two-year program that wraps clients in essential services. Jordan is in school. Pamela is searching for a job, trying to move past the year she lost everything. They like it out in Mesa. It feels like home.

"I forgot about the Hub," Pamela said.

But her name is still on the list.

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