When the five-day eviction notice arrived, 34-year-old Myetta Hawkins was terrified that she and her three children could be forced out of their home.

"I'm about to fail my kids, we can be homeless,” said Hawkins, a New Orleans resident. "Like I was at rock bottom of my life. What is there else, what can I do? I tries, I tries."

All she can find are short-term jobs through temporary staffing agencies. She has been a cashier, a cook, handled shipping, even construction in the last three months, and it is always a struggle finding enough money to pay the bills.

"I didn't know if I was going to be able to pay my kids’ school budget,” she said, “knowing that I have to pay my light bill. It's hard, its very tough decisions that has to be made every month in my household."

Hope House saved her from eviction, using money from donations and grants to pay her rent for one month, literally giving Myetta new hope.

"It just gives you a sense, like, to want to go on, to want to keep fighting for what you're fighting for, to want to keep trying your best."

Nobody knows just how many of the so-called working poor there are in New Orleans, though experts at social service agencies believe there are more now than before Katrina. But one thing they do know, when the economy turns sour, those already living on the edge are the first to feel it, and it doesn't take much.

"An extra high Entergy bill can cause one to not be able to pay the rent, and then comes the eviction notice,” said Angela Patterson of Unity. “It is really a remarkably sad situation, when people who are out there every day working long hours and trying to take care of themselves and their families, cannot make it."

And this is where some of them end up living: a handful of homeless people taking shelter in the basement of a storm- damaged church that has been empty since Katrina, setting up housekeeping in empty rooms and tents in the cold brick building.

"It is extremely uncomfortable -- to the point where sometimes you can't feel your hands and feet," said a woman named Susan who is taking shelter in the church.

They have formed a small community, sharing meals and lives, and the hope that things will get better, that they will one day earn enough to afford apartments.

"This is where I've been at for the past nine months right now,” said a man named Harold, adding, “I work also.” He said everyone else in the church is working too, but that he and the others cannot afford a place to live right now.

"The rent has become so inflated that you can't,” said Susan. “What you can afford is some place where you'd be terrified to live. I mean, I mean, worse than where we are."

Case workers for Unity, the umbrella group for agencies trying to help the homeless, say when they check abandoned homes throughout the city, up to half the time they find evidence of people living in them in the most primitive conditions, people who they say often have jobs.

"We have people who stay in Lakeview that are in abandoned houses, we have people in Gentilly, New Orleans East, Upper 9th Ward, Lower 9th Ward, Bywater, Central City. Many of them are working,” said Mike Miller of Unity.

Non-profit agencies say they face an added problem in trying to help people who are working but about to become homeless, finding the funding needed.

"We're doing the best we can to serve as many people as we can, with as equitable, and it is a struggle for us,” said Margaret Cruz from Catholic Charities.

"The very, very desperately sad thing is that most of the monies have dried up,” said Patterson.

Peter Gus had an apartment this summer, and now has a bed at Ozanam Inn as his home. At age 40, with a bachelor's degree in computer science, Gus never dreamed he could become homeless, until his job disappeared after Hurricane Gustav, and when his funds dried up, he lost his apartment, and ended up on the streets.

"I had an apartment on Chartres and St. Peter. I was working at a local restaurant."

“I was holding a sign outside of Lowe's on Elysian Fields, just looking for work to support myself. I had never done that before.”

“Some of them treated me like garbage,” he said of how people treated him, “and that was a strange feeling,” saying that he told those that he treated him rude, “It could happen to anybody.”

And Peter found he was not the only one facing homelessness for the first time. "I met an awful lot of people who were just like me, who were living paycheck-to-paycheck, and then they lost that paycheck-to-paycheck."

But when a police officer directed him to Ozanam Inn, Peter's life began changing. Now he is in the Ozanam Inn Occupational Assistance Program, where they helped him find a job at a French Quarter hotel, and he is saving for a place of his own.

"They care about each and every man that walks through these doors, and they offer them an opportunity at a better life. Yes, it’s a pull yourself up by your own bootstraps opportunity, but it’s an opportunity none the less."

But for every case like Peter's, social workers worry how many other will need to be rescued before the current economic turmoil ends.