SACRAMENTO — For Tiffany Roland and her partner Delroy Diamond, their small room where their family lives is a sanctuary.
“I’m thankful for this place because they gave us a roof over our heads so we’re not sleeping outside, so we can stockpile money to find a place,” Roland said.
They live at the Next Move family shelter in South Sacramento. Next Move works to get homeless families back into safe and supportive housing.
“After a year and a half, after I was panhandling every day out there for my kids, my husband and I — we couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “I was getting exhausted.”
Diamond says this all began when their rent increased.
“They raised the rent a couple times on us. It got really high,” he said. “We were surviving off of our welfare, which wasn’t enough. I wasn’t able to find work. I was laid off.”
Rachel Wickland, the executive director of Next Move, says what happened to Roland and Diamond isn’t unusual. With the cost of rent rising fast in Sacramento, many low-income families struggle to keep up.
“The number of affordable units is not increasing, so it’s very difficult for an individual to find an apartment unassisted or unsupported on their own,” Wickland said.
Wickland says Next Move is working to change that. Their facility offers temporary shelter to about 500 people a day. Next Move has about five properties for families ready to move into supported housing outside the shelter.
The Next Move team also works to identify landlords willing to rent to families in need of a second chance.
“Oftentimes, the families that we’re working with, they had a house. They had a home, they had a stable place to live, they had a family that they could support,” Wickland said.
Families like Roland and Diamond.
