Nairkahe Touray speaks with Reuters where she lives with her five children.
While her 32-year-old mother, Nairkahe Touray, sat in destitution in downtown Miami, talking about her economic struggles, expressing how she parched through her savings and wound up living in a car with five of her eight children earlier this year, and her loss of faith in the U.S. political system, there was no telling what the 3-year-old Aeisha Touray thinking as she suddenly uttered out what seems to be the new slogan for the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.
Can anyone explain to youngsters like Aeisha and numerous others how they ended up homeless in the world’s richest nation?
In a report issued by Reuters, the National Center on Family Homelessness, based in Needham, Massachusetts, said 1.6 million children were living on the streets, or in shelters and motels mixed-up with other families in the United States last year.
Such marked a 38 percent increase in child homelessness since 2007 which made Ellen Bassuk, the center’s president, to attribute the breakthrough to fallout from the U.S. recession and a rush in the number of severely poor households headed by women.
Based on experimental methodology aspired in providing a voluminous picture of poverty, a recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which provided a controllable preparation, showed that approximately 48 percent of Americans are in destitution.
The bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure for 2010, stated the poverty level for a family of four was set at income below $24,343 per year.
When asked about child homelessness, 73-year-old Alfredo Brown, a retired army officer and deputy director of the non-profit Chapman Partnership, said “I see it every day.”.
The organization, funded extensively by a 1 percent food and beverage tax on larger restaurants to help homeless programs, provided two extended homeless shelters in Miami-Dade County.
“It’s a sad situation that we live in a country that has so much and many people have so little,” Brown said.
Child homelessness is somewhat a new social problem in the United States, where being on the street and the stain attached to it has long been associated with alcohol or drug dependency issues.
DISTRESSED MOTHERS
For less than 1 percent families of the U.S. homeless population in the mid-1980s, according to Bassuk, now comprise about a third of the homeless population. A lot of children are dependent on poverty-stricken single moms.
“There’s sort of a Third World emerging right in our backyard. You know, we talk about developing countries but look at what’s going on here,” Bassuk said.
To put a face to the breadth and depth of the homeless problem, a team of Reuters journalists moved across the country, for interviews with parents and children who are down on their luck.
From Skid Row in Los Angeles to the South Bronx in New York, a common thread of hope running through their these people’s compressed life stories.
Touray sounded like an Occupy Wall Street protester herself, as she complained about bailout money for banks but not people. “You get treated like an animal because you’re homeless,” said Touray, who said she lives on just $583 a month in child support after going through a divorce last year. Her parents, who live separately in Atlanta and Chicago, are also homeless.
“I’m living the real deal,” Touray said. “I don’t need for somebody to come up here and tell me what the economy’s doing. They (the politicians) need to get out here and see these children, see these parents.”
RIDING THE RAILS
Reuters came across 34-year-old Luis Martinez, a single parent. He lives with his three children at the Union Rescue Mission on a trash-strewn city block where homeless men and women stand attentively over plastic shopping carts.
But the shelter is an improvement over the time when Martinez passed nights on the L.A. subway with his children, riding the rails to nowhere.
A junior high school dropout who became unemployed after he injured his back on construction site job about six years ago, Martinez spoke proudly about how well he said his kids were doing in school.
They have a laptop computer, which they use to help do homework through free wireless connections at McDonalds and Starbucks. They also have an Xbox video game system and Martinez, who wears a necklace that says “My Kids First,” has a cell phone to stay in touch with family and potential employers.
“I mean, I’m homeless but not hopeless,” Martinez said.
Highlighting the shrinking middle class in America, a reporter found Tracy and Elizabeth Burger and their 8-year-old son, Dylan. The Burgers said they once earned nearly $100,000 a year combined but saw their middle-class lifestyle evaporate when Tracy lost his job in audiovisual system sales.
Unable to pay rent, they were expelled from their apartment in 2009 and move into a motel. In March they moved into a cramped converted garage at Elizabeth’s mother’s house in Los Angeles.
A former medical assistant, Elizabeth, said she has less than six weeks left on her unemployment insurance and was anxiously watching this week’s standoff in Congress over extending those payments, along with the payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans.
The congressional debate highlighted the sympathetic bickering that has made this a unrestrained year in U.S. politics, while throwing Washington’s ability to make sound economic policy into doubt.
In central Florida, Justin Santiago, 15, said he was not surprised when he, his parents and three younger siblings landed in a downtown Orlando shelter last September.
Since the national economic collapse in 2008, his out-of-work family bounced from one relative’s home to another, and left California in search of employment and stability.
“I wasn’t shocked. When the economy’s going down and it just drops, it’s out of control,” Justin said.
EYES ON THE PRIZE
In 16 years of marriage, his parents, Theresa and Timothy Santiago, managed to provide for their family by working multiple jobs, earning about $20,000 in their best year. But work dried up and the family set out for Florida last spring in search of cheaper living expenses.
After a run of more bad luck, they found their way to the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida shelter. But Justin is taking eighth grade honor classes now and says his family’s experience will not keep him from pursuing his dream in video game production and becoming an Internet success story.
“It will get better for me and my family,” he said. “I’ll be making billions, I know that.”
Bassuk, a psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor, said medical problems and under-achievement in school were among the things that often go hand in hand with childhood homelessness.
“These are kids who don’t have any opportunities,” she said. “If you look at some of the educational variables, they’re doing really poorly. And they’re kids who can do OK. They just don’t have appropriate support.
“It just seems that on every front this is a very vulnerable group of kids,” she said.