Thoughts On Home and Homelessness

Those of you who’ve been following this blog for a long time know that my husband and I became homeless, in a manner of speaking, in mid-February. I say “in a manner of speaking” because we weren’t evicted but displaced by a fire. So, thanks to insurance, we’ve had a place to stay.

After countless complications, permits and inspections, we’re finally going home. Which has got me thinking again about what it means to not have a home–no place to live that you feel is your own, a center you can come back to for as long as you want.

The definition here captures what I’ve learned first-hand. Being homeless means having no rock-bottom sense of safety and stability. And this is a basic human need.

A new brief by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network reminds us of the many lasting effects homelessness has on children. It leads off with the profound destabilizing experience of becoming homeless–the impact of “loss of community, routines, possessions, privacy, and security.”

The report goes on to detail the additional trauma children and their parents can suffer due to shelter living, the stresses of needing to reestablish a home and problems that could have precipitated their homelessness, e.g., acute poverty, parental illness.

Many studies indicate that these have serious, lifelong impacts on children. But another recent report suggests that residential instability itself plays a role, whether children spend time in a shelter or just moving from one temporary housing situation to another. The effects are greatest on very young children.

I wonder whether this doesn’t have something to do with the fact that frequent moves are more destabilizing for them. A young child, after all, doesn’t really understand what’s happening or have an adult grasp of the temporary or the future. It’s just one sudden loss after another. Consider too that the losses can include caregivers and parental attention–even loss of parents themselves.

All of which makes me doubly aware of how fortunate I’ve been–and how skewed our national priorities are when we’ve got a $3 trillion budget and well over 500,000 homeless families.

Middle Class Families At the Edge of the Cliff

Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine profiles a multi-generation black family to trace “the fall of the black middle class.” Their ladder up the economic scale was the auto industry, and it’s been pulled out from under them.

This is a story that’s being replicated throughout the Detroit area. But a new report from Demos tells us that it’s only the latest chapter in a longer, broader downslide for black and Latino middle-class families.

The downslide here isn’t in employment rates. It’s in economic security–a combination of factors that enable families to remain financially stable and recover from setbacks. These factors include education, housing costs, health insurance, household budget and assets.

Even before the recession, black and Latino middle-class families were less likely than others to be economically secure. And more of them were sliding toward potential poverty. Between 2000 and 2006, the percentage of black families that were economically secure fell from 26% to 16%. For Latino families, the drop was from 23% to 12%.

Demos singles out three principal factors in the declining stability of black and Latino middle-class families–loss of health insurance, rising housing costs and declining assets.

Yet the story here isn’t only about certain minority groups. For middle-class families overall, the percentage that were economically secure dropped from 29% to 24%. In other words, 76% of middle-class families were at the edge of a cliff when the recession set in.

Demos calls for policies that will strengthen the middle class as a whole–policies that address the housing and health care crises and help families build assets and reduce debt.

But we surely also need to strengthen the safety net. Because it’s quite clear that most middle-class families–not to mention poor families–don’t have the wherewithal to manage a job loss or any other further pressure on their resources.