In Lancaster, a woman named Evelyn felt stuck in a dead-end existence.

But what really drove her to pack up and move to Los Angeles was the desperate desire to give her five young children a better education and a legitimate shot at success in America. She zeroed in on Monterey Park and its school district, which was beyond anything her hometown could offer.

But in Los Angeles, affordable housing was scarce to the point of nonexistent, and when her husband turned violent, Evelyn, who was pregnant at the time, was forced to flee their temporary motel housing with her children.

Jeff Hobbs’ gripping and deeply empathetic narrative nonfiction, “Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America,” follows Evelyn and the children as they sink into homelessness — often sleeping packed into their aging SUV — and then gradually resurface. The lifeboat that rescues them from perpetual crisis and provides safe shelter is a Pasadena-based organization called Door of Hope that provides housing but also mentoring, therapy and other crucial elements of support.

Hobbs occasionally pulls back to provide broader context about housing instability — its causes and the impact on those who suffer through it — in L.A. and America. But he only fully departs from Evelyn’s story for a section that tells us the story of Wendi Gaines, who went through a similar cycle a generation earlier before landing at Door of Hope and who ultimately remained there in a leadership role, becoming the beacon who guides a recalcitrant Evelyn through rocky times.

Hobbs previously has written a powerful narrative nonfiction book, “The Short and Tragic Life of Rob Peace,” as well as a book about Los Angeles high school students, “Show Them You’re Good,” and one about America’s juvenile halls, “Children of the State.”

So Hobbs, who spoke recently by video, was keenly aware of both “the racism and classism that undergirds the entire primary education system, public and private” and the challenges of being a child or the parent of school-age children “when you don’t know necessarily where you’re going to take shelter that night.” Evelyn’s story explores those issues in intimate and unflinching detail.

Hobbs also notes that the crisis facing families on the edge will grow much worse after the recent fires, even though those communities don’t have large homeless populations. “Two days after the fires you saw price gouging start in the rental market, and if you’re on the margin then a 10% hike is the difference between being able to afford rent or not,” he says.

Additionally, the Section 8 voucher waitlist for family apartments was already above 10,000 people in Los Angeles, and, he says, “You’ll see a lot of landlords get out of that market for the next year or two because there’ll now be a huge new market of renters.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why was Evelyn the right person for this story?

A: She was a little bit famous at Door of Hope because of what she had survived, which was a lot, and because she’s going to ask for a lot and she’s the most protective person of her kids you’ll ever meet. She survived immense challenges every step of that journey while keeping her kids in school 98% of the time.

When you talk to her, she only talks about her kids — their dance recitals and their sports games and how awesome they are — which is like any parent. In that kind of normalcy, there was something profound.

Because life was such a crisis every day, I’m not sure Evelyn fully understood the grind her kids went through. With her and the kids telling me their story, she saw the bigger picture and how her kids experienced some of these moments. But I like to think that the constancy of the love there that I hope is very evident in the book will send them all forward in relative health.

Q: Evelyn refuses to ask for help and hides her housing situation from the school system and the city bureaucracy. Were her concerns about her kids being taken away or losing their place in the school system valid, or did she not understand how to work the system? How much of that reluctance to ask for help is tied to her own family and trauma history?

A: There were resources in the city and in their local community and even in her family that she was not asking for because of all those issues — her fear of losing their school and her own internal sense of her shortcomings in providing for her kids, and that mess of day-to-day life.

It’s hard to blame her for being scared of the system. Once you’re in the Los Angeles bureau of children’s welfare, you can’t easily extricate from it, and they do have immense power over your lives. There’s a lot of shunting around poor people here in Los Angeles.

She doesn’t want our pity, but she was scared and she was desperate. And she saw that elementary school in Monterey Park as a salvation and kind of a symbol that she was doing all right, even though life had spiraled toward chaos and danger.

Q: How can cities like Los Angeles make change for families like Evelyn, or do these problems feel intractable?

A: We need to change the ethos on a national level of how we think about people like her.

The city services are overrun, but governments also lie about the numbers and solutions, which causes dissonance as far as what the collective responsibility is in our city and who should be worrying about these things to meet the needs of specific families, which can be immense.

At the local level, those needs are being met here mostly at the level of shelters like Door of Hope and other locally based organizations. But the waitlists get pretty long. I hope people understand that childhood success really hinges on whether or not you feel like you belong, and we should be making space in local communities for people to feel like they belong.

There are about 120 distinct residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and if every one of those just had one place for six families that were vetted, like Door of Hope, there would be almost no family homelessness. So I think if there’s a value to a story like Evelyn’s, if people could think about incorporating families like hers into their communities at a grassroots level rather than shunting them aside, it would create room for more organizations like The Door of Hope.

For families that don’t have stable shelter, it’s about money, but it’s mainly about time. There’s no time to be curious or to talk to your kids about what they’re curious about.

There’s no time to meditate and breathe. Having more organizations provide that kind of support could make a huge difference — you’re not just giving them a place to live, you’re giving them the support that they need to give them a chance to breathe and to think and to find a path.