One City Works to Solve our National Embarrassment
Through No Fault
"When I pulled up to the house I knew something was wrong," Art told me. Yet it would be several days until he found out his world would soon be turned upside down.
Art greeted the well-dressed man with Brylcreemed hair and an adulating assistant returning from the front door. "Would you happen to know if Mr Smith is available?"
"That's my landlord. I hardly ever speak to him. I think he has a bunch of houses like this," Art answered back. When inquiring about the visit, he was only informed they were from a bank Mr Smith did business with, thank you very much, but confidentiality and all. Art told me this story early in 2020 over a pitcher of beer in Humble, TX. I had known him for about a year, though we worked in vastly different departments, and every time he advanced in his job, learned a new skill, he was driven almost to tears. In my paraphrase here of our discussions I'll tell his story, one that tens of thousands of Americans went through during the 2008 financial crises over sub-prime loans, where banks repossessed houses in every county, and almost every ZIP Code, in the country.
"It was 10 days later I found out the house was being taken from the owner," he continued, taking a healthy swig of lager. Art was dutifully making his lease payments. Mr Smith wasn't turning over these payments toward the mortgage, and the foreclosure meant Mr Smith was being evicted in 30 days. "From 10 days before," as Art told me.
Now, with only 20 days to go, he and his 2 children - about 5 and 8, as I recall - had to scramble to find affordable housing. Two years before, his wife died in a late-night drunk-driver double fatality crash returning from her nursing job in a rural Oklahoma hospital. His position as an apprentice in a machine shop meant the couple was doing fair financially; young, but slowly stepping up the ladder into the lower middle financial class. Mom, however, was the main bread winner, as apprentice wages were appreciably pale in comparison. Now, with her income gone and expenses piling up, Art finished his 3-bed apartment lease and found a 2-bed home with 2 full bathrooms and a small pool for less money. He even signed a 2-year lease, and paid 4 months' worth of payments in advance.
His brow furrowed, sweating, as me told me how he scrambled, when finding out about the pending eviction, trying to get money back from the owner, appealing to the bank, even trying to take the owner to small claims court. Yet the expenses he would incur, including revenue lost from taking time off to create and attend a court case, and the money already paid in, were more than the limit for small claims court, and no attorney would take him without a retainer fee when they could - during America's worst housing crisis since the 1930s - be paid to represent similar clients.
Through no fault of their own, Art and his children became homeless. "I picked us up a membership at the Y, and we carried duffle bags wherever we went, showered there and no one in the school or at work found out for weeks we were living in our car." Eventually the wife's family found out and moved the trio to a north Houston suburb. After nearly 5 weeks of homelessness, Art had a place to stay and started working at the same company I worked, slowly advancing him in new skills at a great company (where I have been for nearly 9 years now) with low-cost health insurance for the trio.
Others had it much worse during that crisis, still in nearby memory, becoming permanently homeless, dying of exposure, becoming addicted to drugs, in trouble with the law, beaten, robbed, ignored by society. The "dregs of the Earth," some have called the homeless. We avoid catching their gaze as we walk the streets in our shiny urban downtowns, blaming them for crime, blaming them for their looks, their smell, and of course the panhandling. Some see these supposed outcasts as victims of their own decisions only, and figure any help to them, from any source, only supports their habits, exacerbates their problems, and drains precious resources from the public coffers.
Overarching Crisis
A report released just this January surveyed the horrifying number from 2023. Over 653,000 people were homeless, meaning without a mailing address and permanent, reliable shelter. Just over half experience sheltered homelessness, meaning they occupied an emergency shelter, safe haven or transitional housing. The rest, the study reported, were "experiencing unsheltered homelessness in places not meant for human habitation." And nearly a quarter million were either part of a family with children, or under the age of 25, considered "unaccompanied youth".
The problem is not getting any better. In the past decade the number of people experiencing homelessness increased each year from 2016, though understandably the numbers from 2021 were not in the report. In those years, the scale went from 550,000 to over 100,000 additional Americans on the streets, or in some form of shelter. The largest numerical jump was after 2022, when the economic impact of the government's mishandling of the Covid-19 epidemic proved disastrous for household stability.
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