Low pay and high housing costs often conspire to drive families onto the street.

An individual must have a full-time job paying $11.96 per hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment in the Provo-Orem area, which runs about $622 a month, according to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition in Washington, D.C. A minimum-wage earner would have to put in 95 hours a week to make rent on a two-bedroom unit.

"Wages haven't kept up with the increasing costs of rentals," Dutton said.

One result of the higher costs is the necessity for temporary lodging with family or friends.

A 2000 survey by the Utah County Housing Authority showed that 16 percent of county residents double up. American Fork had the highest rate at 27 percent, followed by Provo and Springville/Mapleton at 22 percent each.

Unlike other Wasatch Front cities, Provo and surrounding Utah Valley communities have no emergency homeless shelters.

"I don't get any shortage of questions about why we don't have a shelter in Utah County," said Brent Crane, executive director of the Food and Care Coalition of Provo. Community leaders opted, however, to use motels for emergency housing rather than underwrite a permanent facility.

Human services providers contract with a dozen motels and give vouchers to people who need a place to stay, whether they have drifted into town or been removed from their houses. Stays range from overnight to weeks.

The Larsens were grateful to Community Action and the LDS Church for putting them up in motels for a while. But it was no way to live, especially for their 2-year-old and a then-pregnant Mandi.

"We were living off ham and cheese sandwiches," Mandi Larsen said. Community Action provided food, but the Larsens had no way to cook.

Sometimes she and her daughter ate at the Food and Care Coalition, where many of Utah County's homeless gather for daily meals. Her husband went hungry instead, saying he saw eating there as "rock bottom."

Crane said the motel voucher system, which costs the coalition $110,00 a year or 25 percent of its cash budget, has flaws. Motels are sometimes full during the summer travel season. Agencies don't have as much oversight of their clients or opportunity to help them find a permanent home.

"We envision something a little better than that," said Anthony Antonelli, chairman of the coalition board.

Rather than a warehouse to cot and bunk people, the coalition wants to construct apartment-style transitional housing scattered around the valley. Stays would be partly conditional on the person's efforts toward self-sufficiency.

"It doesn't have to be the Hilton, of course, but there's no reason it can't be clean and safe," Antonelli said.