the Oasis

A family of five tells their story of loss, gain, loss, and gain in their quest to find an indoor home.

By Scott Morgan, Managing Editor
April 21, 2026

In the middle of the night, in the middle of the summer 

The windows are down. Inside their Chevy Tahoe, Jason and Suzanne Thurman and their three children are trying to stay cool. And trying to sleep.

It isn’t working.

A set of headlights finds them from across the parking lot. Police. Jason watches an officer roll up to the Tahoe.

“ He wasn’t there because we were there,” Jason says. “They’d received a call about something that was happening nearby.” 

The policeman gets out and walks to their window. Talks with Jason. Finds out why he and his family are sleeping in an SUV. 

He leaves. And then comes back.

“No more than five minutes,” Jason says, ‘he came back. He said, ‘I think I might have something that could help you guys out.’”

‘This is a family we knew’

Your image of someone experiencing homelessness probably isn’t a family of five from Chattanooga, Tenn. 

Especially not when the parents work and their home is provided for by their employer.

And yet, here they were. Sweating in a parking lot in Greenville last July and dreaming of a kitchen in which to bake cookies.

 ”We moved to South Carolina and we had some things going for us,” Jason says. “We were connected to the things we moved to South Carolina for and just kind of got the rug pulled out from under us.”

What the Thurmans had going for them was work with a high-end builder who was developing houses in Greenville. The company provided their housing and paid them good salaries – Jason on the project management side, Suzanne on the operations side.

“This wasn’t a family that we had no affiliation with,” Jason says. “This is a family that we knew. They knew us. We were going to church together. It wasn’t a fly-by-night thing.”

The Thurmans had already fallen on hard times when this job (and the home) had come through. 

“ We were actually living in our vehicle at that time,” Jason says. “When they brought us on board, they came along to help us. That is what they told us at the time. And then they turned around and basically put us right back where we were at.”

***

“I think I might have something that could help you guys out ….”

Jason doesn’t jump to believe the police officer. The officer wants some information. Says the family is under no obligation to tell him anything.

For the past several months, the Thurmans haven’t had much reason to trust anyone.

“ Everybody’s not tried to help us,” Jason says. “People that said they wanted to help us during this time were actually out to try to make things worse for us.”

***

In 2025, a report by the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness estimated that roughly a third of individuals experiencing homelessness are members of a family that includes at least one child.

“Previous homelessness or foster care stays,” the report states,  “contributed to current family homelessness, especially among mothers. This factor played a role even more for those who had been homeless more than three times or for more than a year.”

When no one came to help

The Thurmans find a lot of their strength and unity through prayer. They are Christians who believe that doing the right thing is simply the right thing to do. 

That same kind of charity wasn’t always given them in return.

“ We searched for solution avenues,” Jason says. “We talked to other organizations, got turned down. We were told at one point by one organization, ‘Well, you have a roof over your head.’”

Meaning the roof of their SUV. The Thurmans were considered (effectively) sheltered, so they didn’t qualify for the kinds of services that fully unsheltered people can tap into. 

This isn’t as uncommon as you might think. A tangle of federal policies, shelter space availability, and local laws – not to mention the sheer lack of available family shelter space – often put families in this kind of position. 

HUD defines “vehicle residency” as a form of unsheltered homelessness, but shelters, which often operate in triage, might consider living in a vehicle to be shelter enough. 

But even if the Thurmans, technically, had a roof over their heads, they had no running water. No plumbing. Certainly no kitchen for baking cookies.They had become part of a problem hiding in plain sight.

Unhoused families living in their vehicles could be overlooked in yearly point-in-time, or PIT, counts – meaning that whatever number you read from a PIT count is likely significantly lower than the total number of people in a community who are considered unhoused.

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, South Carolina, at 8 persons per 10,000 residents, had the third-lowest rate of homelessness in the United States (behind Mississippi and Puerto Rico) in 2023. That’s the latest complete set of data NEHS cites in its 2025 report.

South Carolina reported 6,315 beds available for people experiencing homelessness in 2024, according to data compiled by Urban Institute. In 2024, PIT counts statewide identified 4,539 South Carolinians experiencing homelessness. 

But PIT counts are constrained by narrow definitions and the fact that they take place one one or two nights in January. 

That said, PIT is still the best tool we have for taking any real measure of homelessness in a snapshot. McKinney-Vento data, which track student homelessness and poverty rates can give us further insight, but few definitives – only supposition that real homeless numbers are much higher than we think.

In 2023, according to data from the South Carolina Department of Education, 56% of Greenville County’s 78,000 public school students were considered to be PiP, or pupils in poverty. 

These numbers still don’t specifically count vehicle residency (for which there are no true sources of data) and do not reflect homeschooled students like the Thurman children, who were learning school lessons at one Greenville’s public libraries when a call to help the family came through.

***

It’s one thing to face homelessness on your own. Or as a couple, the way Jason and Suzanne have.

But how do parents navigate these kinds of conversations with their children? How does one look a child in the eye and explain why there is no home to go to?

“Just be honest with them,” Suzanne says. “We were honest about what happened. We tried not to throw anybody under the bus, but also just be honest and say, you know, we don’t know what’s gonna happen for this season. We don’t know how long. We’re gonna move back in the car.”

The Thurmans had “systems in place from before that we know work well for our family,” she says. Getting through the next hurdle, then, was always a matter of adjusting, tweaking, readapting the system. 

“We’re gonna go ahead and try to use those again and tweak what doesn’t work and just we’ve got this,” she says. “God doesn’t fail, he will never leave us, and we can move forward.”

Jason nods heavily while Suzanne talks. He says, too, that the way to get children through the kinds of trials that homelessness brings is by “not denying reality. Not letting circumstances begin to define everything that’s reality to you. Just keeping the things that you know to be true in front of you.”

He says that if you’re leading properly as parents, as partners, strength flows from the top down. 

“If you’re leading yourself, it flows down to your kids as well,” Jason says. If you panic, they will panic. And solutions, he says, come through strength, not chaos.

When someone was there to help

It’s a few days after the Thurmans met with a Greenville police officer at their vehicle window, and they are going about the business of homeschooling their children at one of the libraries in the city.

The phone rings. A lady named Mary Kay introduces herself.

***

Mary Kay is Mary Kay Campbell, a clinical supervisor at Greenville Together. And Greenville Together is collection of local officials, landlords, nonprofit organizations, and people with lived experience who address homelessness and housing instability in Greenville County.

The initiative began last year. By year’s end, according to Greenville Together Director Cody Carver, it had housed 154 individuals.

Five of them, the Thurmans.

***

As they answer the call in the library, Jason and Suzanne have to weigh whether the offer they’re being given is a real one. Remember, even people close to the family, and who gave them work and a place to live, have turned on them.

But something about Mary Kay makes Jason think this time might be different.

“We got off the phone and talked about it and decided, you know what? We need to try to keep taking steps forward,” he says.  

***

One of the most glaring failures in housing services is the inability to provide holistic support – often referred to as wrap-around services – for those experiencing homelessness. Unless services are provided to support everything from rent to substance use counseling to utilities to life skills, and for a couple years at least, people who come through shelters often end up back inside them before long.

Greenville Together is developing and fine-tuning the permanent supportive housing pipeline, which zeroes in on these factors. At the end of its first calendar year, the program succeeded in getting at least 154 people housed. Real efficacy, of course, will not be known for another year or two.

But for the Thurmans, where they are now is home. Jason is still struggling to find steady work. Suzanne has found a job at a nearby restaurant.

But their main roof is no longer the one covering their SUV.

“Home is an  apartment,” Suzanne says. “It’s a three bedroom, two bath. It has a living room, kitchen. It’s on the second floor. It’s just right for now. It’s so just right for now.”

She says Greenville together helped the family to find furniture and “a couple pots and pans and things so that we could get started cooking in the kitchen.”

She made cookies for the kids on the first night they moved in, as she had promised.

Now housed for several months, the Thurmans have had time to reflect on qualities like resilience and compassion. Living in their SUV, Suzanne says, has taught her the value of seeing people as complex and whole.

And that leadership that Jason and Suzanne had provided for the children, that need to hang onto compassion, has flowed from the top down.

“They’re the  kindest, most caring kids,” Suzanne says. “They see problems, but they don’t see problems. They see people, they notice things and they say, ‘Mom, what about this person? It seems like they need help.’ And they will literally give their last whatever it is to help that person.”

Did you ever stop to think about how much mental gruntwork it takes to deal with homelessness?