JEANNA DUERSCHERL The Roanoke Times

Roberta Slaughter (right) helps her daughter, Leisha Slaughter, move back to her home in Covington after being laid off from a job in Florida. Leisha said she hopes to save money and move back to Florida in the fall.

JEANNA DUERSCHERL The Roanoke Times

Roberta Slaughter unloads part of her daughter's bed as Leisha Slaughter carries boxes to the house. Leisha had been living in Florida but was laid off a month ago from her retail job.

ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

Chasity Overstreet, 13, braids her 2-year-old cousin Kaniah Copeland's hair as her brother, Sherwin Overstreet, 12, reads a book.

ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

Danny Copeland dishes up a second helping for Karon Copeland while Kameron Copeland waits and Chasity Overstreet heads to the next room. The Copeland and Overstreet families share a house to save money. Copeland usually cooks dinner because his cousin works second shift.

Rather than sink deeper into debt and risk eviction from the duplex he shared with his three children, Danny Copeland merged his household with his cousin's -- along with their combined nine children. They moved into a large house in Southeast Roanoke, where the two cousins share rent, child care and dinner-making chores.

"Even though times are hard, I'm able to help her, and she's able to help me, which makes it a whole lot easier," Copeland said.

The scenario is increasingly common across the country and in Roanoke, where the rise in the number of families living in "doubled up" housing parallels the swell in job losses, foreclosures and living costs.

While housing advocates say such arrangements can be fraught with overcrowding and safety hazards, for many families it makes common sense that, rather than allow a relative to fall into serious debt or, worse, homelessness, the right thing to do is to take them in.

As protection against losing their homes, some renters and homeowners alike are also opening their homes to strangers by advertising rooms or shared-housing arrangements in the newspaper or on Web sites such as Craigslist.

There's no way to calculate how common the practice is, but a number of signs point to a trend in family housing crises: The Roanoke Rescue Mission is so overcrowded that every night some people have to sleep on the floor. City school buses pick up dozens of children at 10 different pay-by-the-week motels.

And right now there are 376 families on the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority's waiting list for subsidized housing -- a 54 percent increase over last year. "People are telling us, 'I'm staying with family, but I can't stay for long,' " said Terenia Fields, an intake coordinator for Total Action Against Poverty. "Some of them have 14, 15 people staying in one house."

According to a recent study by the National Coalition for the Homeless, 76 percent of displaced homeowners and renters move in with relatives and friends after losing their property via eviction or foreclosure.

"When that doesn't work out, that's when we see them," said Lee Clark, the Rescue Mission's development director.

But for Copeland, the sole guardian of his three preschool-age children, the shared living arrangement has been a godsend. He's caught up on his bills for the first time in years, and his children have a mother figure to look up to in his cousin.

Her older children plait his little girls' hair. When their mother works the second shift, Copeland attends her daughter's middle-school wrestling matches to cheer her on.

"For my mom's generation, it was more common to double up," said Copeland, who works for a pressure-washing business. "But our generation has always tried to take things on themselves.

"Well, nowadays you can't, and the bills are going up while your paychecks stay the same. It used to be you could get an extra part-time job when things got rough, but now they're just not out there."

'Stealth homeless'

By the end of March, Roanoke City Public Schools' homeless student program already had served 302 homeless students this school year, more than double the number in 2005. The program's goal is to maintain consistency by providing meals and transportation so that children can stay in their home schools -- even if they're living with relatives outside of their school zones or in a motel or shelter, all of which qualify as "homeless," according to federal guidelines for serving schoolchildren.

"I'd say we have an additional 50 to 100 children that we have no idea are homeless," said Malora Horn, the program coordinator. Families may be ashamed to admit their circumstances to schools, or afraid to get relatives kicked out of their homes for violating the terms of a lease.

"When you blend families together, it can be stressful for both of the families," Horn added. "We see family members starting not to get along, and that results in even more jumping around from place to place."

John McDowell calls them the "stealth homeless."

"They're out there, they're close to being homeless but they're not being counted," said McDowell, who directs the Roanoke Valley Interfaith Hospitality Network. The homeless population is larger and more diverse than people realize, he added.

In the Hispanic community, hit hard by sharper immigration enforcement as well as the downturn in construction work, many families are doubling and even tripling up, hoping to ride out the recession.

"I've gone to trailers where there have been 16 people living together," said Vivian Sanchez-Jones, a school liaison for Refugee and Immigration Services. "In our culture we take care of each other ... and it's better than going to the Rescue Mission."

Still, Sanchez-Jones worries that overcrowded living areas are not conducive to children doing homework. "I'm trying to work with the schools to get these children into after-school programs so they can do their homework before they leave."

Easing the budget

Jack Robbins and Monica Cornuet in no way consider themselves homeless -- and they'd like it to stay that way.

Like many other homeowners advertising rooms for rent on Craigslist, the couple decided recently to take in a boarder because they've got a spare bedroom and they could use the financial cushion. The money will also allow them to tackle home maintenance repairs they've been putting off because of the economy.

"I do construction, and you know how bad that is right now, so it's kind of pressing down on us," said Robbins. The childless couple has several pets, including an 18-inch bearded dragon they keep in a tank in their bedroom.

They're charging $350 for the spare room, which includes full use of the downstairs living space, utilities and satellite television. They believe they've found the perfect boarder, a single professional woman who's moving in at the end of the month.

"We're excited about having a new face around," Robbins said. "Since times have gotten tougher we haven't gotten the chance to go out as much or to hang out with friends, so it's like a win-win situation: We get to make a new friend and we get to go out again."

Likewise, Janel Howery looked at the opportunity to rent a room in Matt Mc- Knight's Raleigh Court home as a budget buffer. She could have rented a place by herself. But after moving to Roanoke from Tazewell County last year to look after her parents -- they live in separate nursing homes, in Salem and in Montvale -- it was harder to absorb the more expensive rents here, and she would have been constantly broke.

She pays $600 a month, and that includes full access to the upstairs of McKnight's home; they share the kitchen and laundry areas. She never imagined sharing quarters with a 34-year-old stranger and was nervous when she and McKnight first connected via Craigslist. "I was lucky he wasn't a serial killer or a pervert," she said.

McKnight, a General Electric engineer who's going through a divorce, said he felt the financial pinch almost immediately when his wife moved out in July. He and Howery don't eat meals together or hang out very often, but they dog-sit for each other when one has to travel out of town for work.

"I have no complaints; it's turned out all right," he said.

For Howery, the experience has been necessary but humbling. "It's tough at 48 to have three rooms, your stuff in storage and no ground to plant some flowers," she said.

Mandatory closeness

Leisha Slaughter was equally humbled as she packed up her apartment in Tampa, Fla., last week and headed back to her mother's house in Covington. The 24-year-old Roanoke native graduated from the University of Tampa four years ago, but in recession-battered Florida she never found a job commensurate with her degree in music.

She interned at Disney, then took a retail job at a Dillard's store in a high-end mall. A month ago, the store laid her off.

So, she called her mom, Roberta Slaughter, who said her door was always open. Leisha Slaughter's goal is to get work, save money for several months and move back to Florida in the fall.

"I swear, I think my son's not leaving either," Roberta Slaughter half-joked of her 22-year-old son, Jason Slaughter, a community college student. "And then he had the nerve to find a stray kitten.

"What I'm hoping is, they'll both find a job in Roanoke and get an apartment together there and take their pets with them."

In all seriousness, Roberta Slaughter said she was happy to help her children out. When she was a young adult, there were times she relied on her mother, too.

"You have to be a close family in this economy," she added. "You have no choice."