Virginia Janis and the10 children she cares for have bounced from a hotel, to a motel, to trailer homes in Rapid City and Kyle in the two weeks since an electrical fire damaged their north Rapid City rental home.

The crisis of Janis finding her large, extended family suddenly homeless during the first blizzard of the winter season underlines a larger, more intractable housing problem in Rapid City: overcrowded living conditions caused by the shortage of affordable and subsidized housing for low-income families here.

"It's horrible," Janis says of the stress of looking for another affordable rental home that will house her big brood.

The Red Cross paid for the family to spend three nights at a local motel immediately after the fire. The next week, Virginia scraped together the $250 she needed to rent two more rooms for a week at another Rapid City motel while she looked for a place to live and for some financial assistance to help her pay for it. Then she was forced to send three of her grandchildren to live with family in Kyle when she and seven other children including her grandson's girlfriend and their baby stayed with a friend of hers in a trailer house near the Rapid City Kmart.

So far, the cheapest thing she's found is a rental that would cost more than she can afford - $900 for deposit and first month's rent.

"Rapid City is really a hard place to live if you're poor and not trained for a high-paying job," she said.

All around her, from one temporary living situation to the next, the detritus of many people sharing close quarters - diapers, baby bottles, someone's leftover toast and the Homes for Rent newspaper ads - have littered the rooms.

Her days are spent calling charitable organizations, social services agencies and potential landlords - anybody who might provide a solution to her housing problems.

"Sometimes I get up at 5:30 in the morning and I can't wait until 8 o'clock so I can start calling around," she said. "Some days things look good and you think everything's going to be OK. Some days things go wrong and you're back to where you've started again

It's just a day-to-day process."

It's exhausting, she said, trying every avenue to find shelter for her family, worrying about whether her grandsons are falling behind in school and if she's overstaying her welcome at her friend's.

"When I get that house I'm going to find the furthest corner and make myself a bed and go to sleep," she said.

Janis's large family is not the only one in Rapid City for which finding adequate housing is a day-to-day emergency.

"Overcrowding is much more common than I think people would like to think it is," Doug Wells, director of Pennington County Housing and Redevelopment Commission, said. Families that squeeze 10, 15 or more people into a single family dwelling are not uncommon. "Unfortunately, overcrowding is common when people are forced into these living situations by financial conditions."

Crowded living conditions are nothing new to the Janis clan.

Before a Nov. 7 fire left them all homeless, the family shared a small, dilapidated, two-bedroom home at 910 Blaine Ave. The Janis household spans four generations and includes the girlfriend and the 8-month old son of Virginia's 16-year-old grandson, Carlos. Before the fire, it also contained three big dogs - one of them a pit bull mixed breed - and a fluctuating assortment of family and friends.

Virginia, 53, is the primary custodian of three teenage grandsons whose father, Dustin Janis, has been in and out of prison on various crimes and parole violations since 2006. She also recently began caring for five younger grandchildren - including 2-year-old twin girls - who range in age from 1 year to 6 years. Their mother, Satin, 28, is 7 months pregnant with her sixth baby, and was scheduled to undergo thyroid surgery Tuesday in Sioux Falls for Graves' disease, Janis said.

Carlos discovered the fire at about 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, a day after the first blizzard of the season hit Rapid City, and got everyone safely out of the house. The fire department extinguished a fire smoldering in the ceiling, but not before it damaged the ceiling trusses of one bedroom and made the home uninhabitable until repairs are made. The family lost most of their clothes, furniture and household possessions to smoke damage.

The official cause of the fire remains undetermined, but it was probably electrical in nature and related to the space heaters that were being used in conjunction with improper overcurrent protection, according to Capt. Mark Kirchgesler of the Rapid City Fire Department. The home was being heated by space heaters after its utilities - both natural gas and water - had been turned off due to non-payment at that address.

Virginia initially hoped to move to another home owned by Sam Marras, the landlord of her Blaine Avenue rental house. But Marras said he's not willing to rent to the Janises again, for several reasons. "No, I wouldn't rent to them again. I did everything I could to help the family, but they wrecked the house. They were in there with no water or no gas, because they didn't pay their bills. And I had no idea there were that many people living there. They had all kinds of people staying at the house that didn't belong there. I want to shed myself of the whole outfit."

Marras owns about a dozen rental homes in north Rapid City. He rented the Blaine Avenue home to Conan Janis, Virginia's son, about a year ago, for $450 per month, plus utilities.

"It's just an old house, but it was comfortable for my mom and dad. They lived there for a lot of years," Marras said. He lives across the alley from the rental house, where his parents lived until their deaths at age 104 and 101.

In lieu of rent money, Dustin and Conan sometimes worked as roofers and handymen for Marras on other projects. "I never saw a nickel of rent money the whole time they lived there. Conan tries like hell - he's a hard worker and a nice guy who can't say no to anybody - but he can't support them all. Nobody can support that many people," Marras said.

Janis is now trying to convince other landlords that she would be a good tenant. She said some don't trust her because she is Native American.

In a meeting with one, "I said, 'I'm not from Rapid. I'm not like the other Natives around here.' I said, 'All I need is a break. I need to rent a house. After I get on my feet things are going to look up.' I said, 'If you trust me with this house you won't regret it.'"

Her best housing options now are to get on a long waiting list for subsidized housing through Pennington County, or to return to the reservation and live with her son Conan and his own family in their mobile home, while hoping for another rental house to come through.

"We just don't have anything to give her," Wells, of PCHRC, said.

There are currently about 900 families on a waiting list for Section 8 housing in Pennington County, and nothing about Janis' overcrowded housing situation would move her to the top of that waiting list.

Pennington County currently has 1,234 privately-owned rental units that qualify for up to $6 million annually in federal Section 8 housing funds. That subsidized housing program helps people with rental assistance based on their income, but the waiting list to get into one of those units can be up to 18 months.

The housing commission also owns 650 of its own units, which range from 1-bedroom apartments to 4-bedroom family homes. The waiting list for those units has about 320 names on it and an estimated wait of 6 to 8 months to get in. Typically, occupancy is limited to a maximum of eight people in the largest homes, but exceptions are sometimes made for families with many young children, Wells said.

The waiting list for subsidized housing here has remained fairly constant in recent years, but Wells expects to see it grow as economic conditions worsen. Not every person listed on the current waiting lists will still need a home by the time their name gets to the top of the list, but Pennington County could easily use another 700 or so subsidized housing units, Wells estimates.

Virginia Janis moved to Rapid City from Scottsbluff, Neb., about three years ago to be closer to her four grown children and 19 grandchildren, but she didn't expect to be changing diapers fulltime or getting kids to school at this stage in her life.

Still, she's happy to shoulder the burden. Both her father and her only brother died within the last three years, and their loss makes her even more determined to keep her family intact.

"No, I wouldn't change it for nothing in the world," Virginia said when asked how she copes with the stress of so many children and so few resources. "We're a really tight family. Everybody says that about us."

She hopes to leave for Sioux Falls soon to be with her ill daughter. She's taking Satin's five children with her, so they can be near their mother. But the older boys are doing well in school here, and she hates to see them disrupted by a move. Carlos, a student at Central High School, has a part-time job he likes at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center. Dustin is doing well at Lincoln Academy, an alternative school, and Kooleo is a student at North Middle School. They've been out of school during all the recent moves, and Janis said Friday their schools have been eager to get them back in class and caught up on their work.

Because of that, their grandmother hopes they can stay in Rapid City, where their uncle, Conan, will care for them while his own family remains in Kyle on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Whatever happens, she's determined to keep her grandchildren with her, and out of the state Department of Social Services' foster care system.

"We're not about to put them in a bunch of different foster homes," she said. "I'm not rich. I can't afford to give each one of these kids their own bedroom, but these kids are happy, they're clean, they go to school."

Meanwhile, Virginia waits to hear if the Oglala Sioux Tribe's housing department can offer any assistance that would help her stay in Rapid City.

"I ran into dead ends all over. If all else fails, I'm just going to have to pack everybody up and head back to Kyle," she said. "At this point, I'm depending on the kindness of others."

How to help:

Donations of clothing, diapers, household furnishings and furniture for the Janis family can be dropped off at 5 Marquette St. in Star Village at Gloria Mesteth's residence. For more information, contact Mesteth at 545-4068.

For information or other donations call Sharon Martinez at 454-8069.