Last week, House the Homeless talked about the Kids 4 Kids Sake! campaign, which involves raising the awareness of potential presidential candidates about what needs to be done about children experiencing homelessness, and why. The illustration on today’s page, created by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, is probably outdated. Currently, HomelessChildrenAmerica.org says one in 30 children are homeless in any given year.
A recommended resource on all aspects of homelessness is a “No Safe Place: Advocacy Manual,” a report prepared by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. Here are some facts from it:
- Family homelessness has been on the rise since the inception of the foreclosure crisis in 2007.
- The U.S. States Conference of Mayors found that family homelessness increased an average of 4% between 2012 and 2013 in its survey of 25 major American cities.
- In some areas of the country, the numbers are even higher.
- From 2011 to 2012, the number of unaccompanied children in shelter increased by 28%.
To rely on the numbers is misleading anyway. Counting people who have nowhere to live is a difficult job. In counting children and youth experiencing homelessness, problems come up.
There are two main types of kids — those attached to a single parent or a set of parents, and those who are on their own. In a way, the ones with parents are easier to count, through the school system, although with irregular attendance and frequent address changes they can be difficult to keep track of.
Elusive numbers
Minors are easier to count if the family stays in a shelter. One of the administrative problems in that field is deciding how long a family can remain. Some helpers believe that authorized stays need to be longer, to give families a better chance to get on their feet.
The choice is between a rock and a hard place: Help more families, short-term, and spit them back out into the world unprepared, so they will probably end up on the waiting list again; or help fewer families for longer periods until they really get solid ground under them.
On the other hand, kids with parents might be harder to identify. Even if two adults and five children are inhabiting a one-car garage with no water or electricity, there may be reasons why a family does not want to be identified as homeless. Some bureaucracies will substitute the gentler word “displaced,” but changing the adjective doesn’t really help.
Older kids, called “unaccompanied,” are harder to count. Rather than officially entering the system by admitting that both parents are in jail, a teenager might prefer any kind of makeshift living arrangement. And she or he just might not bother with school. An accurate census is improbable. Also, different agencies, bureaucracies, and jurisdictions have different ways of defining homelessness.
Locating the lost
For Bridge Magazine, Pat Shellenbarger learned about the work done by Brenda Greenhoe, whose job (under a federal grant) is to find homeless kids and get them into school. Her beat includes four Michigan counties, comprising 2,400 square miles and more than 340,000 destitute kids living in some of the bleakest “poverty pockets” in any state. Overall, Michigan has more than 30,000 homeless students. In the 2013-14 school year, Greenhoe found 1,550 of them.
A couple of years back, Prof. Yvonne Vissing of Salem State College wrote a list titled “Being Ruthless for Homeless Children” that offered several suggestions for people who sincerely care about children. They included:
We must be ruthless against the everyday decisions that force parents to choose between which of their options are the least awful, instead of making decisions about which options are in the best interests of their children.
We must be ruthless against the policies and practices that force children to have no secure place to sleep and no where to call home.
Reactions?
Source: “No Safe Place: Advocacy Manual,” NLCHP.org, 2014
Source: “Along Michigan’s back roads, thousands of homeless children,” BridgeMi.com, 08/12/14
Image by National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty
