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If America’s founding principle is to guarantee personal rights and liberty, how do we countenance the fact that almost 8 percent of children in the U.S. suffer eviction by the age of 15, depriving them of the safety and security of their most basic need? When they lack a roof over their heads, it is nearly impossible for them to fully avail themselves of life, liberty, and happiness. Matthew Desmond, the author of Evicted, examines the cruelty of housing in America, and sheds light on the psychological consequences for a particular generation of children who have to confront endless evictions and constant relocation.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond
Desmond first dives into the early impacts of housing instability by examining children’s “natural” love of play and discovery. Children need a place to rest, recharge, and prepare to engage in new challenges. However, given the circumstances of many family households in urban Milwaukee, where Desmond focuses, a safe and stable environment is limited. In one of the stories that Desmond relays, Arleen, a mother of two children, 13-year-old Jori and five-year-old Jafaris, subsists on $628 per month of W-2 welfare and some food stamps. After paying rent and some other fixed expenses, the remainder can’t cover unforeseen things like funeral expenses or plumbing issues. Any available cash is more likely to be high-interest advances, which in turn causes financial instability the following month. Eviction is a constant threat. As Jori and Jafaris grow older, they become accustomed to seeing moving trucks in front of their houses; eventually, they grow numb to it. It erases their freedom to explore and squelches their hope for a stable home where they can rest and be free of the world’s chaos. To them, home becomes a soulless thing, merely a roof over their head.
Speedy evictions likewise deprive children of role models. When Desmond is interviewed by the local Milwaukee PBS, he characterizes the American eviction epidemic as one of “moms with kids.” Life lessons can’t be handed down, father to son, when the father isn’t there. Like his father before him, Jafaris has “learning disabilities and anger issues,” and he frequently finds himself misbehaving and in conflict with others in the school. When Arleen moved out of her friend Crystal’s apartment, Jafaris stole a pair of earrings from her. His theft is doubly egregious, since it’s against the only person who took Arleen and her children in after they were evicted. The combination of evictions and absent role models makes success incredibly difficult. Furthermore, children’s accessible role models, their mothers, are impacted by eviction as well. Reports demonstrate that mothers who are evicted are more vulnerable to depression, and suicides attributed to eviction doubled from 2005 to 2010. A mentally ill mother being the backbone in such households makes a fatherless family more helpless to nurture children’s mental development.
Children who lack stable housing and are also forced to move as a result often “float” around different neighborhoods, unable to attach themselves to a particular community. This rootlessness denies them a sense of belonging. A community where children are born, raised, and live with a bunch of other families who’ve done the same cultivates social connections, where children thrive and enjoy an attachment to the culture. In school, they feel school spirit; in sports, they can defend their mascot; and on the streets, they can brag to kids from other blocks about their unique rituals and the pride they take in them. But when households become mobile due to eviction, adults and children begin to withdraw from the rituals of community identity. As Desmond writes, “eviction can unravel the fabric of a community, helping to ensure that neighbors remain strangers and that their collective capacity to combat crime and promote civic engagement remains untapped.” Eviction happens so quickly that the neighbor you have today might be different in a couple of days. Why contribute to a place you barely know? A good example of a person who lives in such a lost community is Scott. He is evicted by landlords from a trailer park, spends a day finding available housing, and returns to find his door cracked open and furniture stolen. In that trailer park, no one cares about Scott; they only care about how much they can sell his furniture for. When children live in such an environment, full of crime and lacking compassion, they never experience that sense of belonging.
A modest proposal for tackling housing instability would be to alter when recipients receive their welfare distributions. Most family households combine their income with child support and spend the combined sum. Sometimes it is used to cover moving costs, if the family has been evicted. Doreen, a mother who lives with four children, three grandchildren, and a dog, has income of $628 from Supplemental Security Income and $437 from a state-funded child support supplement. When this family of three generations moved, their new house cost $1,100, already exceeding the total of supports combined. Thus, they end up being evicted. Scarce resources lead to a “scarcity mindset,” a kind of tunnel vision that prioritizes the satisfaction of immediate needs over long-term planning. Instead of saving what little money they have in their bank account (they can only save up to $2,000 without losing their eligibility for SSI), many people spend what they have when they have it. Crystal, for example, chooses to spend her check on expensive groceries and a lobster tail, splurging for one meal, and then relying for the rest of the month on canned food.
In order to lessen the feeling of “feast or famine” that the current structure of disbursements yields, payments should be made weekly, rather than monthly, and the maximum savings cap should be enlarged to $4,000. Separating the amount into a weekly basis would provide a better understanding of budget, from Monday to Sunday, and long term, which leaves people less likely to find themselves completely broke. Moreover, the weekly distribution of welfare would slow the rate of eviction because rent could be taken out weekly as well. Families will be able to stay where they are, and fewer evictions mean a safer, more stable, and a more interactive community where relationships can be cultivated and initially fragile bonds assemble into a “community.” Children can explore and find role models to emulate. Maybe one day, Arleen’s dream of sitting back and looking at her kids fully grown, living together, and laughing at past memories will finally be achieved.
In our way of fighting poverty, no matter what solutions or policies end up in place, we have to remember one thing: Children are the pillars of the future. The course of history is defined by the repeated cycle of generational change, one replacing the other, and we have a responsibility to craft a future that is bright for them. Matthew Desmond’s Evicted presents eight families in the city of Milwaukee, out of tens of thousands in America, millions on Earth, leaving so much tragedy, suffering, and injustice undiscovered. Housing injustices exist everywhere, and children are the main victims of this brutality. It is our time to step up, to raise our voice, to fight with our fingers tight, and give these children a place that they deserve and a place they finally get to call home.
