A year living in a hotel with 3 kids. Inside Newark’s affordable housing crisis. – NJ.com

Shari Brown has no place to cook dinner.

The hot plates in her hotel room just don’t cut it, but that’s all she has on hand. A shared microwave on the third floor is the only alternative.

It’s been more than a year since the Newark resident had a consistent place to cook for her three kids. When it’s time to eat, Brown, 36, has few options: Prepared food from the supermarket, help from strangers who bring home-cooked meals, or if she has a few dollars to spare, takeout.

Sometimes she’s able to take the kids — Trinity, 10; Tristan, 9; and Tafira, 3 months — to her mother’s house and cook. But not often.

Brown has no permanent home, and that hotel room is the best she can do for now.

“When you’re out there looking for work and nothing is coming, you think, ‘Damn, what did I do to deserve this?’” she said. “I get tired of asking. Tired of trying.”

But the sardonic laugh that follows tells you there’s no chance she’s giving up.

Brown has been living at the Robert Treat Hotel near downtown since late 2019. She’s one of thousands of vulnerable people in Newark either displaced or homeless, unable to find affordable housing in a city with a critical shortage of it.

Mealtime often resembles the rest of Brown’s life: a daily scramble to secure her most basic needs. Wake up. Find something to eat for the family. Figure out how to pay for her room that night. Look for work or housing assistance. And find something else to eat.

The next day, she does it all over again.

“Once you’re in this cycle, it’s hard to get out,” Brown said. “Any parent that’s in my situation, the main thing they need is support.”

While millions of dollars have flowed into Newark during the coronavirus pandemic to help people pay for housing, most of the funding has been earmarked to keep residents in the homes they already have — not to help those looking for a place to live. Brown has been caught in that gap, and she’s far from the only one, according to the people who know the situation intimately.

“So many families are under threat. That’s the next generation that we’re putting on the streets,” said Maria Lopez-Nuñez, deputy director at Ironbound Community Corporation, one of the groups aiding people in Newark. “We’re in a crisis. We need to throw out all the lifejackets. People need a place to live. Families should not be in the street.”

Brown’s family could have been on the streets if it wasn’t for the hotel.

Before moving into the Robert Treat, she was renting an apartment on Princeton Street in East Orange. Her landlord sold the building, and the new owners raised the rent, she said. When she couldn’t afford the increase, she got evicted.

Essex County — and Newark especially — had a critical shortage of affordable housing well before the pandemic, caused by rising rents, luxury developments and dereliction of public housing. But COVID-19 has cranked up the heat, bringing the affordable housing crisis to a boiling point.

A study released earlier this year by Rutgers University’s Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity found Newark needs at least 16,000 more affordable units to meet the demand. The primary problem is the average Newark renter cannot afford the average Newark rent.

The Rutgers study found that 40,000 Newark households have a combined income below $30,000. The typical Newark renter can afford to pay $763 a month in rent without being significantly burdened, but the median rent in the city is $1,093, the study found.

Less than one-quarter of all two- and three-bedroom units in Newark cost less than $750 per month, Rutgers found.

“Newark has had an affordability problem for a long time, which is a statement that will always be true for working class to poor cities,” said David Troutt, one of the researchers involved with the Rutgers study. “It’s not always recognized, but any place where people are living paycheck to paycheck, they’re at high risk of displacement.

“They’re often in over their head should they miss their paycheck. The problem goes back many decades in Newark.”

Shari Brown is among the new faces of this old problem.

Brown oscillates between optimism and such-is-life pragmatism.

But occasionally, the precarity of her situation weighs on her.

The few times she admitted how demoralizing it is, she shifted the conversation to explain how she wants to start an organization to aid others in a similar position.

“I like people. I like to help people,” Brown said. “What’s important is trying to help people in life.”

Brown’s family arrived in Essex County in the 1970s from Georgetown, Guyana. Shari was among the first in her family born in the United States.

Brown — dressed casually in jeans and a black leather jacket and her hair tied up in a white and blue silk wrap — recalled a free-spirited, yet financially strained childhood in the Oranges. She played clarinet and ran track at Orange High School, but sought more stability after graduation and moved to Florida to go to fashion school.

Brown moved back to New Jersey in 2009, settling in Newark after a few years in Tampa and Miami. She didn’t finish fashion school, but still freelances from time to time.

“I do sewing on the side,” she said. “If somebody needs a dress, I’ll make them a dress. I really enjoy making dresses.”

The money she was making from child care dried up during the pandemic. But she gets by through a combination of welfare, support from a cousin and odd jobs.

Since she moved into the hotel they’ve called home for a year and a half — a nice, if empty, Best Western-branded establishment across Park Place from the New Jersey Performing Arts Center — she’s seen the pandemic devastate her city. She’s also gotten pregnant, contracted COVID-19 and given birth to her second daughter.

Rooms at the hotel go for just over $100 a night online, but Brown gets a special rate since she’s on an extended stay. (She declined to disclose exactly how much she pays, not wanting to upset hotel management.) She also takes advantage of the hotel’s rewards program to collect free nights.

Still, it’s much more expensive to book a hotel stay for a month than it is to pay rent. But Brown said the hotel offers one massive financial benefit over an apartment: She only has to pay one day at a time. No first-month rent payment up front. No security deposit.

Brown has fallen behind on her hotel room more than once during her stay. The Ironbound Community Corporation helped her settle one large outstanding bill, but her tab is climbing again.

“Had I been at a different hotel, I’d have been out on the street,” Brown said in a basement computer room at the hotel in April.

Keeping an eye on her older children and not having anyone to watch her newborn has hindered the job search. Her last job on the books was working in the bakery at ShopRite in Livingston, but she quit because she didn’t have anyone to watch the kids.

The situation only grew worse when Brown contracted COVID-19 while 34 weeks pregnant. Both Brown and Trinity lost their sense of smell and fought body aches while riding out their bouts with the virus.

“It was very stressful and overwhelming not to be able to take care of my kids like I would have wanted,” she said, adding that she’s thankful Tristan never showed symptoms.

Throughout her hotel stay, Brown has been trying to find a more permanent place to live — so far without success.

“Low-income housing is not available in Newark,” she said. “I’m stuck. You’re questioning your moves. You’re questioning everything you’ve ever done.”

But Brown, when asked to expand on that, said she doesn’t really have any massive regrets. Many people living on the edge of solvency are just one bad break or unexpected bill from disaster. Often, it’s not a catastrophic life choice that puts them there, Troutt said, but rather one or two missed paychecks.

“I’ve been through every situation you can think of,” Brown said, acknowledging a bit of a wild streak in her early 20s in Florida, when she began exotic dancing to pay the bills. “But I never got hooked on drugs. I always kept being a good person.”

Newark officials aren’t blind to these problems, but they’re currently facing two simultaneous housing crises — the affordability crisis and a looming eviction crisis that could make the lack of affordable units even more acute. Both are exacerbated by the unprecedented health catastrophe that is COVID-19.

The city appears to have prioritized keeping people in the homes they already have. Mayor Ras Baraka announced in January that the city would be receiving $8.4 million in rental assistance. That’s on top of millions directed to Newark in 2020 to help residents pay back rent and utility bills.

An eviction moratorium imposed last year by Gov. Phil Murphy has kept tens of thousands of people in their homes, but it could expire in the coming months. Essex County court has more than 14,000 pending evictions, most of which are thought to be for Newark residents.

Baraka has warned of a “tsunami” of evictions should the moratorium end without further help for tenants.

Either way, it’s fair to assume that many people will be kicked out their homes this year in Newark, putting them in a similar position as Brown. It will only raise the competition for an already limited number of affordable units.

The city has been exploring various avenues to address the affordability problem. In March, Baraka announced a 16-story, 66-unit affordable housing development on the corner of Halsey Street and Central Avenue. Earlier that month, Newark launched what it claims to be New Jersey’s first land bank, which puts blighted and foreclosed properties up for sale to be redeveloped into housing or retail.

On Monday, Newark also launched a guaranteed income pilot program, aimed at providing regular payments to some people in low-income communities. Similar programs have been implemented in cities across the U.S., and New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang has called for universal basic income.

Lopez-Nuñez said that while these programs are necessary pieces of Newark’s plan to address its affordable housing problem, “they take too long” to be the only solutions.

“People need to be housed,” she said.

Brown said the support she’s received since she moved into the hotel has not come from these city programs.

“The help I have received was not from Newark, not from Essex County,” she said. “The help came from the community — mutual aids, hotel staff, strangers.”

She said that experience has made her want to help others, “once I get back on my feet.”

For now, Brown is looking for work at Amazon, Whole Foods and even back in the bakery at ShopRite, even though she knows how long it will take her to save up first-month’s rent and a security deposit on the $10.50 an hour she was getting paid.

“You still have to find a way out of nowhere,” she said.

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Payton Guion may be reached at pguion@njadvancemedia.com.