Up the breezeway stairs, over the spilled, spewed remnants of someone else’s bad decisions and a skinny guy sitting cross-legged on the balcony who doesn’t open his eyes as you pass, is the motel room the Sheppard family is grateful to have on this bitterly cold mid-January day.

The space inside is warm, chartreuse-walled and just big enough for a dresser, TV, wall-mounted clothes rack and two double beds. The swaddled lump under the covers is 8-year-old Malik, home sick from school and sleeping it off while his dad tries to figure out how to keep a roof over their heads for a few more days.

“This week is going to be kind of a struggle,” said 36-year-old Christopher Sheppard, casting his gaze around the room – over his son, the suitcases they never fully unpack, the meager minifridge where milk sometimes curdles overnight.

His wife, Angela, just started a new job but won’t receive her first paycheck for another two weeks. When she gets home from work this afternoon, Chris will disconnect his son’s Xbox – the only thing they still have that’s worth any money – and walk it over to EZPawn on Fillmore. Again.

Tomorrow before dawn, he will ride a city bus to donate plasma at a center about six miles away, which he does twice a week, earning $110.

“That really helps with food, until we can get food stamps again. When you have zero coming in you appreciate all of it,” Chris said, his voice sounding weary but not defeated.

Christopher Sheppard is going blind, the details blurring and colors fading, but the big picture of what life has become since the family was evicted from their Colorado Springs apartment last summer remains achingly clear.

Now, with an eviction on their record, in a city where people with perfect rental histories and credit scores compete for a dearth of affordable units – and with the Sheppards paying double what they’d owe in rent to live, night-to-night and week-to-week, in motels – clawing out of the financial hole is only the first of the herculean hurdles ahead.

“The evidence is in and the evidence is clear: Eviction is not just a condition of poverty, it is a cause of poverty,” said Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond, testifying before Congress last year in support of legislation that would address the affordable housing crisis.

Eviction filings dropped sharply during the pandemic after a federal eviction moratorium began in September 2020, then was extended into August 2021. Now that such protections have expired, and emergency rental assistance is much tougher to get, the numbers are again rising, back to pre-pandemic levels and, in some cases, beyond.

According to a Forcible Entry and Detainer database maintained by the Colorado Judicial Branch, in El Paso and Teller Counties’ 4th Judicial District eviction filings for the first two months of 2023 were 2,067, the highest ever reported for that time frame.

Such counts don’t include tenants who voluntarily left before official eviction proceedings had begun, pointed out Zach Neumann, executive director of the Denver-based Community Economic Defense Project, a nonprofit which serves clients statewide.

“Eviction filings are a trailing indicator of displacement, and for every eviction filing you see there are people who opted to self-evict when they received a notice or demand,” he said.

Statewide, not including Denver, eviction filings for the first two months of 2023 were up by more than 32% compared to the same time period in 2022, FED filings showed.

“I do know that in Denver evictions for early 2023 are officially now higher than pre-pandemic and are twice what they were a year ago,” said Melissa Mejía, head of state and local policy at CEDP.

Mejía said that in Denver, advocates have noted a direct correlation between rising evictions and the rising homeless population. The 2023 “Point In Time” census count showed a 12% rise in that demographic there since 2019. The top two reasons respondents listed for homelessness, in Denver and statewide, were not being able to afford rent or having been evicted.

The recent homeless count in Colorado Springs, by contrast, showed the population remained more-or-less steady over previous years, with the number of “unhoused” homeless residents dropping sharply since 2018.

Some point to that news as evidence local programs addressing homelessness are working. Others say the survey’s parameters weren’t broad enough to reflect what’s really happening on the ground.

“Motels, over the last couple years, have become a much more common tool that gets utilized for trying to find temporary housing or emergency housing,” Mejía said. “I think one of the biggest challenges for us in this work, for all of these trends that we see in eviction filings, we know … that is only a fraction of the people who are losing their housing.”

Homeless counts don’t include individuals and families living in motel limbo, a situation that could change any day but that keeps them technically “housed,” thus disqualifying them for much public assistance geared towards helping people get back on their feet. Most federal, state and local rental assistance programs require tenants to have a lease.

With an eviction on his record, finding and leasing an apartment has proven effectively impossible, as Chris Sheppard has learned.

“No matter how horrible the (apartment complex) reviews are, everybody wants that clean background, and we don’t have it anymore,” he said.

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“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, ya’ll have done something, one of you guys must be on drugs or something or you’re lazy’ … but that’s not us, that’s not our story.”

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This is.

The Sheppards moved to Colorado from Atlanta in 2017 after Chris, a trained chef and experienced food and beverage manager, landed a job with Hilton Hotels in the Denver area.

The family came with big dreams, big plans, and the savings to start building a future.

“We had a car … $26,000 in my savings, good credit, investments,” he said. “I wanted to buy a house and retire here. That was our goal.”

By the following spring, Chris seemed well on his way to realizing those dreams.

“My Kitchen and Staff,” he crowed in a Facebook post that included a dozen photos from the hotel where he had a steady gig as breakfast chef. “Never thought I’d be head chef/kitchen manager.”

Former co-worker Ashley Brown met Chris soon after he moved to Colorado, at an event that brought together chefs and kitchen staff from around the region to man the host of human feeding stations catering to some 700,000 visitors at the National Western Stock Show in Denver.

Brown was then the sous chef at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. She remembers how impressed she was with Chris Sheppard’s work ethic, and his skill handling a hectic serving environment. Her boss at the zoo, executive chef Beau Green, saw it too, and hired Chris onto the team.

At the zoo, Chris helped out with catered events, but spent most of his time as a line-cook at the busy Grizzly Grill, where Brown was his manager.

“He was willing to help out anyone in any way. He was one that I could put on any station and he would know what he was doing,” said Brown, now the head chef at Four by Brother Luck.

Sometimes Brown would give Chris a ride home from work to the apartment he shared with his wife and young son. The way he spoke about his work, family and future made a powerful impression on her.

“They wanted to move here and just see somewhere different and just come up in this foodie world that was climbing so much at the time,” she said. “He had these dreams, and the way that he talked about it … it was just very inspiring.”

The oldest of seven siblings, Christopher realized early that he had not only a knack but a passion for cooking, and decided to make it his life’s work. That life gained new definition after he met and fell in love with Angela, who gave birth to their son, Malik, in 2014.

Colorado was a new frontier, with new options and a fresh start for the now-family of three.

At first, the Centennial State was good to them: Chris was making solid money; Angela, who has sickle cell anemia, could focus on her health and that of their son, who is immunocompromised.

“When I was doing housekeeping (in Georgia) I used to have to leave all the time because I’d be passing out, seeing red dots….being here, I haven’t seen the inside of a hospital and I’m trying not to, because having sickle cell if I go I’m in for a while,” said Angela, describing a flare up of the disease as “having the worst case of flu you can ever have, combined with pneumonia.”

Christopher was the healthy one, the breadwinner, and their rock.

“It just didn’t work out the way we wanted it to,” said Angela.

Chris started to notice problems with his vision about a year after he arrived in Colorado, in November 2018. He was 31, his sight had always been 20/20. He thought he’d dodged the hereditary ailment – macular degeneration – that stalked his family.

“My brother has been like that since birth, but I thought I was one of the brothers and sisters that got skipped over,” Chris said. “I just didn’t expect it to hit me so late in life.”

He was told he could have surgery, but the odds of it saving his vision were “slimmer than none,” he said.

“It was too much of a risk, and that’s what really hurt,” Chris said. “Cause I would have spent the money, I would have taken out the loan, whatever I had to do to get the surgery, just not to have to go through this.”

Brown could hear the heartbreak in Chris’s voice when he spoke about the diagnosis, she said.

“He was going to a lot of doctor’s appointments, and he didn’t know how fast the progress was going to go, if he was really going to lose his eyesight or if there was anything that would help,” she said.

Chris made the difficult decision to apply for disability, giving up his job and his career in January 2020, before fading vision led to an accident. Angela found part-time work, cleaning houses. That, plus the family’s savings, and the $6,000 they got for the car, carried them for a while.

Rent for their two bedroom, one bath apartment in southeast Colorado Springs was $1,276.

“It was a great apartment, washer and dryer, full kitchen, balcony, and the neighbors were great,” Chris said.

The Sheppards had just signed a new lease. With little money coming in, though, living expenses had depleted the couples’ savings by summer 2022.

They applied and were approved for emergency rental assistance, Chris said, but the money wouldn’t arrive until late July, weeks after rent was due. 

According to their lease, at that point they would have owed back rent, plus a late fee, plus rent for the following month. They also would have to reimburse the landlord for the cost of initiating the eviction process, Chris said.

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“We didn’t have the money, so we chose to leave before the sheriff kicked us out,” Chris said.

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They sold what they could, gave away everything else, and moved into the best extended stay motel they could afford. The Sheppards were sent packing in October, after the motel sold and the new owner decided to convert the units into apartments.

Living in a motel in Colorado Springs isn’t what it once was, and it was never easy.

As property values skyrocketed in recent years, a number of complexes that once filled the gap by catering to low-income, long-term tenants have been razed or rebranded. New municipal rules also require guests at locations not permitted for extended stays to vacate the premises every 21 or 28 days, and stay gone for up to a week, before they’re allowed to return.

“I get it. They’re trying to keep people from living in these situations long term, but what other option do we have?” said Chris.

The Sheppards were just a week into their 28-day window at Motel 6 on that mid-January day. But it’s hard to push a deadline like that from your mind, said Chris.

“It is what it is … but I think things are going to get better,” he said.

He’s still hopeful he will find a sympathetic landlord, someone willing to hear his story and give them a break, let them prove themselves.

He hopes he can save up enough money to pay off the ever-growing tab to the collection agency that bought his post-eviction debt from his former landlord.

“When we left, we owed about $3,000. Last time the collection agency called, that was at $6,000, and it keeps growing,” Chris said. 

A bill being considered by Colorado lawmakers, House Bill 23-1171, would require that landlords have a justifiable reason for eviction or non-renewal of a tenant’s lease. State law currently includes no such protections; a landlord can evict a tenant without cause.

Nonpayment will remain a just cause for eviction, but the proposed legislation could lead to extended grace periods for tenants who are late paying their rent, Mejía said. 

“We’re hoping that even in those cases, with this bill … it should allow for a little more opportunity for the family to pay back that rent and address some of those timelines,” she said.

For the Sheppards, that breathless timeline, living one step from homelessness, has entered a detente. Angela’s paychecks are arriving steadily. She loves her job, sewing K9 gear at a Ray Allen Manufacturing, and is hopeful what began as a temp gig will turn permanent.

In early February, Chris was preparing to move to the WoodSpring Suites up the street, where they won’t have to worry about finding somewhere else to live for a week every 28 days.

It’s more expensive, $525 a week, but the washer and dryer work. There’s a stove top, where Chris can cook healthy meals for his son again, and a studio-sized fridge big enough to hold groceries and the cake they will buy to celebrate Malik’s upcoming ninth birthday. 

Chris loaded himself up with as many bags and rolling suitcases as he could carry, told Malik he would be right back, and set out on the short walk north up Chestnut Street to the new hotel.

Past dumpsters overflowing with abandoned furniture, past the empty parking lot of the Super 8 Motel that, Chris said, is nevertheless probably booked up solid.

“They may let you stay for longer than 28 days, and they’re only $350 a week,” he said.

And into the lobby of their new home.

“And are you here on business or vacation?” asked the cheerful twenty-something behind the check-in desk.

The question hung in the air, for a long moment.

“Neither,” Chris finally said, as if anybody was really listening.