Families With Children More at Risk of Homelessness

Families with kids are at special risk of homelessness according to experts.

Eviction expert and lawyer Tina Rosales with the Western Center on Law and Poverty,describes parents making impossible choices during the pandemic.  She describes two people whose cases she got involved in. “A father with a little girl getting cancer treatment, who risks infecting his child when he goes to work. A mother with four children had to choose between paying her rent, or getting the tire fixed on her car.  Since she didn’t want to lose her housing, she paid her rent, she could not pay to fix the tire, and couldn’t get to work, and lost her job.”

Compounding the problem she says, is: COVID-19 relief is getting cut off, while many tenants and landlords never received the federal help they were promised.

Rosales said, ”What we have seen during the pandemic is that people will do whatever they can to pay their rent. That is their first priority.  You cannot recover from the health crisis or the economic crisis while thousands of people in thousands of communities are being displaced, while we have money in the bank.”