Jessica Tossey is in the living room of her condo, getting herself and young son Blakely ready for their mile-long walk to church, where he goes to preschool. Jessica puts on a bright orange sweatshirt, shoulders a backpack, grabs Blakely’s hand, and heads out the door. Her family doesn’t have a car, so to get anywhere, they bus, get rides or walk. Except there are very few sidewalks in this part of Des Moines. The only way to get to preschool is to walk the shoulder of Kent-Des Moines Road. Tossey uses her body to guard Blakely from traffic as best she can. “No matter how much you hold your kids’ hands or tell them to stay close, they still wander,” Tossey said. “There’s times that cars – I don’t know if they don’t see us or do it on purpose – but they’ve almost hit us.”

Her husband, Jason Tossey, works at a construction site on Capitol Hill. Her eldest son, Dakota, goes to a school about two miles from the condo, and daughter Cheyenne goes to a different school in the Highline School District. All the kids are involved in clubs at church or play sports. Without a car, Jessica Tossey has become a kind of transit logistics mastermind. Still, where they live now affords the family the most stability they’ve had in a long time. Jessica Tossey estimates her family has probably moved 25 times since spring of 2013. She thinks that’s a conservative guess. After the recession dried up construction work for Jason Tossey, the family became homeless. When they were looking for a place to live, Jessica Tossey tried getting help from the King County's Family Housing Connection.

She said it felt like she called the Family Housing Connection’s 211 number 5 million times. “They always said they had no help for us, or they’d give us numbers for places that said they had no more funding for the quarter or the year sometimes,” she said. So the family got creative. In early 2007, if you’d told Jessica Tossey she and her family would become homeless, she probably would have laughed. Her husband, Jason Tossey, had just joined the carpenters’ union and the couple used to joke about retiring at 65 with full benefits. They lived in a four-bedroom house on a half-acre in Pierce County and they had plans with the landlords to lease-to-own the house.

Then the recession hit. Construction work slowed down. Jason Tossey took side jobs, but he couldn’t afford to pay his union dues so he lost his membership. “We were starting to get pretty depressed at that point. We no longer had the security of being able to pay rent and put food on the table every month,” Jessica Tossey said. “We also lost the security of knowing our future was going to be fine.” They rented an apartment and then a townhouse. They tried starting their own business as deck and fence contractors, but the taxes were so expensive they had to shut it down. Jason Tossey left the state to train to become a cross-country semi-truck driver. And Jessica Tossey started selling nutritional shakes from a company called ViSalus to try to bring in extra income. Then one day in spring 2013, Jessica came home to find a notice on the door of the townhouse.

“As I started reading it more, I realized it was from a mortgage company and it was addressed to the landlords, and I realized it was notice for intent for foreclosure,” Jessica Tossey said. “It even had an auction date on there.” At that point, the couple had a third child, a baby boy named Blakely. But the landlords told the family they needed to leave the townhouse. “The kids and I still stayed in the townhouse for a few days, even though we weren’t supposed to, just to have a roof over our head,” Jessica Tossey said. After that, Jessica Tossey and the kids stayed with friends for a couple of weeks. Then they started staying in motels around SeaTac with weekly rates. In September, Jason Tossey quit his training and came home to help his wife. On the bus trip home, he got a call from a friend who said a carpenter was needed for a temp job starting that Monday morning.