Returning to the cogent reality of numbers: According to the U.S. Census Bureau 2018 Report in Income and Poverty in the United States 38.1 million people, or 11.8 percent of the population, live in poverty. Those who live in poverty struggle to afford basic necessities, especially housing. At any given moment in America, families everywhere are on the verge of becoming homeless. Of the approximately 38.1 million people who live in poverty, most experience a severe struggle to pay for the cost of their housing. It only takes one event, maybe the loss of a job or declining health or a natural disaster such as a hurricane or a tornado, that can send people reeling into the street.
Dr. Shankar-Brown puts a human face on the untold damage that homelessness does to children. She mentions Jazz, a young girl who is soon to be a ‘tween. Everything Jazz owns is in a little shopping bag. Jazz lives in a tent with her mother. They made the tent that they live in from tarp and duct tape. During routine clean-ups, the police tear down their tent. Jazz never feels safe. She does not know from one day to the next, whether she will have a home, even if that home is only a tent.
Children become homeless for a whole host of reasons. Some are the children of an adult who is fleeing domestic violence. Other children are thrown out by their parents who disapprove of their child’s gender identity or sexual orientation. Children wind up homeless when they lose a parent to death, disease, or incarceration. Fifty percent of foster children become homeless once they turn 18. While there are many reasons why children become homeless, in all cases there is one constant—children find themselves in this predicament because they are poor.
Again, the numbers speak: “In 2009 it was estimated that one out of 50 children or 1.5 million children in the United States of America would experience some form of homelessness each year.” More recent data is close to that estimate. In 2017 the National Center for Education Statisticsreported 1.35 million homeless students. Further, a study by Chicago University’s Chapin Hall shows 4.3 million youth (13+) experience homelessness annually. Shankar-Brown reminds us that these significant and heartbreaking statistics are also severely underestimated.
Whether the numbers of children who are homeless are current or outdated matters little when we consider that children who grow up in poverty are destined to be trapped in a cycle of poverty. How do children stand a chance of success in a world where the cards have already been stacked against them? “People are suffering in huge ways and we as a society are not meeting those needs,” said Dr. Shankar-Brown.
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