Hey, new to this group *waves*

I am situated in Vancouver Canada and work strictly as a freelance web designer. It's feast or famine and I just left a famine (like 4 months!) to feast time. I got married in 2004 and at that time I didn't have much work, then we moved into a new place with higher rent etc and it was a tough time but we got through it, thankfully he had enough money with his job so we could squeak by.

What I do is contact all previous clients and ask if they need any work, or if they know anyone who is looking for a site. Maybe a site that you did awhile ago that could use a face lift offer to update the look for a good price.
I frequent Craigslist to look for work however most of it is not great pay. I also put an ad in Craigslist for web services and got 3 inquires from that so that can work.
If you created a site recently for a specific industry for example an event planner, you could go through the phone book and look up other event planners who have bad sites or don't have one at all and tell them you just did a site in their industry and would they be interested.

Recently I contacted a web/graphic designer friend of a friend and asked him if he can send me overflow and that worked, got a site right away for that. Also contacting other web design firms to send overflow.

Hope that helps, I live in a different place so economy here is better, however this is the type of industry that you can work from anywhere so you don't have to be limited to just your city...good luck in your job hunt :-)