Читать книгу In the Midst of Plenty - Marybeth Shinn - Страница 15

Nationally, on any given night, close to half (46%) of all people experiencing homelessness in shelters are members of families staying in shelters together (Henry, Mahathey, et al., 2018). In contrast, only a third (34%) of people in shelters at some time over the course of a year are in families (Henry, Bishop, et al., 2018; Henry, Mahathey, et al., 2018). Because families stay in shelters for longer periods of time than individuals, they are more likely to be found in shelters on any particular night. Expanding the definition of homelessness beyond literal homelessness—for example, using the Department of Education's definition that includes doubling up—could make the proportion of people with insecure housing that are in families with children rather than individuals even higher. But there is no count of people without children who meet the Department of Education definition, so we really don't know.⁶

More than 290,000 children under the age of 18 used shelters with their families at some time during the most recent year for which we have data (Henry, Bishop, et al., 2018, p. 3.9). Few children show up in the unsheltered counts (only available for a single night), as adults rarely take a child with them to an unsheltered location (Henry, Mahathey, et al., 2018, pp. 1–3 and exhibit 4.1). However, homelessness affects many more families with minor children than the data on people using shelters or found on the streets imply. Many people in shelters for single adults are in fact parents of minor children from whom they have been separated, and the same may be true of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. In one large national study of people experiencing homelessness conducted in 1996, 47% of the people surveyed reported that they had minor children, but only 15% had a child with them during the episode of homelessness. One third of mothers were separated from all of their minor children (Burt et al., 1999).

In the more recent Family Options Study, a large experiment that enrolled 2,282 families with children 15 or under from 57 homeless shelters in 12 sites,⁷ all families had a child with them, but 24% also had a minor child living elsewhere. The vast majority of these separations were informal; less than 1% of respondents reported that a child was in foster care. Over a quarter of families (27%) were headed by a couple, with both partners together in the shelter, but another 10% had a spouse or partner somewhere else (Gubits et al., 2015; Walton, Dunton, & Groves, 2017).

The separation of families is the first example of several we will cite about how demographic and other characteristics of people who are observed during an episode of homelessness may reflect the experience of homelessness and the programs communities use to address it. In in‐depth interviews with a subsample of 80 families in the Family Options Study, some parents reported separating from some children to spare them from shelter conditions (often after they had entered shelter together) although they most often described economic hardship as the reason for the separation, like this mother interviewed in Alameda County, California:

At the time I was pregnant, and we were living in motels. I found myself getting broke. We were eating fast foods. I got paid from my job and I called their dad, and I said, “[Ex‐Partner], I love my boys, I know you love them too, but I need help right now.” We met and he took the boys… I didn't have a refrigerator or nothing like that, so I don't want my boys to—it was beginning to be too much.⁸

Data for the entire sample show that only about a fifth of separations from children occurred around the time of a shelter entry; most separations happened well before (sometimes during episodes of precarious housing that would be counted as homeless under the broader Department of Education definition), and additional separations happened afterward (Walton et al., 2017). Mothers described separations from current partners or spouses, in contrast, as related to shelter rules that excluded men or couples that were not legally wed. Rules led to other family separations as well. Shelters were sometimes unable to accommodate all minor children, especially older boys (2 families in the group of 80 with in‐depth interviews), a 20‐year old child who moved back in with his family later, or a three‐generational family where the mother and grandmother each took one child so that both adults would be eligible for a family shelter. Altogether, shelters failed to accommodate 12 of the 80 families in their entirety (Shinn et al., 2015).

Mothers felt these separations acutely:

[T]hen I had to move all the stuff out, and there wasn't no help at the time, because it was just a shelter for women and children. He wasn't with me at the time. He was staying with his mom trying to situate stuff, so it was like—if he was here, it would be so much easier, but they didn't allow that.

Shelter policies and programs also shape patterns of homelessness for people who go to shelters. A study of family shelter users in New York City, Philadelphia, Columbus OH, and the State of Massachusetts found that the majority of people had just one fairly short stay, but “fairly short” ranged from episodes of 30 days in Columbus to 131 days in New York. About a fifth have long episodes, ranging from 144 days in Columbus to 467 days in New York. A small group (2–8%) had multiple brief episodes—these families were also more likely to use psychiatric and substance abuse service systems (Culhane, Metraux, Park, Schretzman, & Valente, 2007). Average stays three times as long in New York as in Columbus are unlikely to result from different characteristics of families in the two cities. In the Massachusetts sample, no one had more than two episodes, and no one with a long stay had more than one in the 2‐year observation period, because families usually are not permitted to return to Massachusetts shelters within a year of leaving them (Bourquin, 2015). Even relatively sophisticated researchers sometimes confuse patterns engendered by policies with characteristics of people.⁹