There are two ways to dehumanize: the first is to strip people of all virtue, the second is to clear them of all sin.
In the end, we can only do the best we can with who we are, paying close attention to the ways pieces of ourselves matter to the work while never losing sight of the most important questions.
Arleen thanked Pana. Getting off the phone, she thanked Jesus. She smiled. When she smiled she looked like a different person. The press had loosened its grip. From landlords, she had heard eighty-nine nos but one yes. Jori accepted his motherβs high five. He and his brother would have to switch schools. Jori didnβt care. He switched schools all the time. Between seventh and eighth grades, he had attended five different schoolsβwhen he went at all. At the domestic-violence shelter alone, Jori had racked up seventeen consecutive absences. Arleen saw school as a higher-order need, something to worry about after she found a house.
I love Milwaukee, the rust belt. It's a very special part of America that's full of promise but also full of pain, where poverty is acute.
If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the canard about this rich country being unable to afford more.
Do we believe housing is a right and that affordable housing is part of what it should mean to be an American? I say yes.
I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.
The standard of 'affordable' housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family's income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent.
We can start with housing, the sturdiest of footholds for economic mobility. A national affordable housing program would be an anti-poverty effort, human capital investment, community improvement plan, and public health initiative all rolled into one.
African American women, and moms in particular, are evicted at disproportionately high rates.
Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market.
Arguably, the families most at need of housing assistance are systematically denied it because they're stamped with an eviction record. Moms and kids are bearing the brunt of those consequences.
It's true that eviction affects the young and the old, the sick and the able-bodied. It affects white folks and black folks and Hispanic folks and immigrants. If you spend time in housing court, you see a really diverse array of folks there.
Tenants don't have any right to court-appointed attorneys in civil court, so they're either facing their landlord - or his or her attorney - alone, or they just don't show up. That reflects a severe power imbalance.
Eviction comes with a record. Just like a criminal record can hurt you in the jobs market, eviction can hurt you in the housing market. A lot of landlords turn folks away who have an eviction, and a lot of public housing authorities do the same.
You lose your home, you are much more likely to lose your job the year following. The reason for that comes back to the bandwidth problem: You're so focused on this event that you're making mistakes at work; you can relocate further from work, which can increase your tardiness and absenteeism and cause you to lose your job.
The poor don't want some small life. They don't want to game the system. They want to contribute, and they want to thrive. But poverty reduces people born for better things.
Ours was not always a nation of homeowners; the New Deal fashioned it so, particularly through the G.I. Bill of Rights.
Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11% reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31% of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44.7%.
Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.
