Imagine this scenario: You and your family are, as are most people in the US, what is called “asset poor.” That is, if family income suddenly disappeared, you would have inadequate reserve cash to live even at the federal poverty level for three months ($1962.50/month for a family of four) and stay current with your “must pay” bills.
Now, a layoff occurs, your car breaks down, and a child becomes quite ill. All normal parts of living. Your few assets are quickly depleted; credit cards maxed. Eventually, you are evicted from your residence.
You manage for quite a while with relatives, friends, shelters, quickly discovering the limitations of emergency food pantries and social services for families like yours.
As you wander this terrifying new life path, your children are pulled from their normal school routines and have even had to change schools a couple of times. At some point, you realize you have no address to put on their school records. The children are then classified as “homeless.”
And according to some people from Serve Denton with whom I spoke last week, there may be as many as 900 of those children in the Denton ISD.
A simply terrifying number.
There is no easy solution.
And it is very expensive to be poor and homeless.
Assume, in this desperate state, you put the family in a motel room. Cooking facilities are limited at best to a microwave and maybe a hotplate, so nutritious and far less expensive home-cooked meals are an impossibility. Cheap fast food and school-subsidized meals become the means of nutrition, leading to a less than optimum nutritional environment for growing bodies and brains as well as your own coping processes
Furthermore, too many people living too close together under deep emotional stress always leads to a heightened conflict level. Just keeping your children in some semblance of clean clothes becomes a logistical nightmare. Helping them keep up with their schoolwork is an impossibility.
The cost? Absolute bottom price, and a place where few would wish to stay, might come in at $45/night. That’s $1350/month, higher than a decent and far more spacious apartment.
So why not get one?
As I well know, just having moved into an apartment, it’s not as simple as that.
Landlords, for very good reasons, request a month’s deposit, plus the first month rent prior to move-in. If the credit rating is low or non-existent, utilities demand a deposit before making a connection. Although I chose not to get cable TV service, I could not work without an Internet connection–and discovered I had to pay $125 up front deposit. The homeless do not have access to that much ready cash.
Other issues the poor face: Many don’t have bank accounts, so have to depend on fee-taking check-cashing services to cash their paychecks. Routine and necessary car repairs are neglected. Insurance lapses.
Let’s add the scourge of pay-day loans, often taken out by the desperate, or predatory credit card companies, charging outrageous fees when a health or transportation crisis hits.
And speaking of health–one simple illness can throw a family struggling to get on their feet into financial chaos. It is really a treacherous thing in the US to get sick–and I write that as one who is well-insured and am still terrified of our out-of-control medical costs.
One family going under hurts all of us. And the reality of children living in that limbo world of uncertain housing is beyond tragic.
What are we going to do? The number of those falling into severe poverty is coming closer to reaching critical mass. The impact of that many below any margin of safety will be catastrophic.
They will have nothing to lose when absolute desperation finally overtakes them. Many political upheavals in history were fueled by unending human misery.
In The United Methodist Church, we say that we wish to do “Ministry WITH the Poor.” Now, that “With” is a key factor: doing ministry “for” the poor does little to affect the long-term outcomes. It’s got to be system-wide: efforts must deal with family issues, economic pressures, affordable housing availability, mental illness and substance abuse concerns, education and child-care, just to mention a few of the many factors feeding into the growing population of the desperate poor.
But how?
One big factor that pushes an unrecoverable tumble into poverty is the cost of health care. According to some research I have seen, medical bills are the THE BIGGEST cause of bankruptcy in the US. Medical bills, not frivolous spending or even job losses or addictions, or too many unwed mothers. It is our out-of-control and utterly incomprehensible medical billing/cost system. Frankly, I think this is where we need to start: an actual dialogue/national conversation about what we are doing as a nation about this.
As many who know me have heard, I’ve long said that anyone who has decent health insurance probably can’t actually do ministry WITH the poor, because we have a cushion that is incomprehensible to them. This is one of the reasons I personally have supported the Affordable Care Act, as flawed as it is, and it is most definitely flawed. It does not address the real problems and is only a patch for the desperate. Better than nothing, but not the solution.
I admit I don’t now where to start here, but also learned in doing research for my book, An Ordinary Death (the story of my mother’s death and an exploration into the way we die here in the US), that our medical system is probably broken beyond the possibility of repair.
What can we as a Christian people do to bring some healing and wholeness here?
