We used to worry about latch-key kids.
Now, with banks changing locks on 3,000 homes per day, families can feel fortunate if their kids still have a key that fits the front door.
We’ve heard about all we can handle about what the foreclosure crisis is doing to car sales, home values, the Dow Industrials and unemployment claims. But, experts and policy wonks are just beginning to fathom what being locked out will mean for its youngest and most vulnerable victims: our kids.Dub them Generation F, for foreclosure. For them, the boogie man has morphed into the repo man.
“Experts tell us the lingering effects of foreclosure on the kids impacted by it and on our communities will remain for years after the economy goes from bust back to boom,” writes Chicago Parent Magazine Editor Tamara O’Shaughnessy, in a forward to this month’s cover story, a six-part investigative series “Locked Out.”
“That means the suffering of our children is only beginning.”
With the national average at .82 children per family, the ranks of Generation F swell by about 2,500 every day. There were 360,000 more of them in July, according RealtyTrac. By the time the recession winds down in 2010, people who earn a living studying child homelessness like Ellen Bassuk say upwards of 8 million kids will have been shown the door to their own homes.
“Children without homes are on the frontline of the nation’s economic crisis. These numbers will grow as home foreclosures continue to rise,” said Bassuk, president of the National Center on Family Homelessness and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Generation F
People who study kids and homelessness have a handle on how many kids don’t have a roof over their heads. But, they can’t yet tell how many of them wound up that way because their home was repossessed.
A 2009 Foundation for Child and Youth Well-Being predicts young people will suffer a hodgepodge of hitches from the bubble that burst this decade. Millions more kids will be living in poverty, losing health insurance, witnessing the domestic violence that comes with a family financial crisis and facing burgeoning crime spawning in boarded-up blocks.
At the same time, they’ll be switching schools, living in overcrowded households, and relying on public support systems weakened by anemic tax rolls, says Malcolm Bush, a researcher in low and middle-income communities at the University of Chicago.
In March, UC brought experts from around the country for a groundbreaking forum, “Children and Foreclosures: The Economic Crisis Hits Home.” As families vacate houses and property values dwindle in blocks around them, Bush says, the city coffers collect less tax money and have less to spend on violence prevention, youth programs and schools.
“These cuts have a direct impact on the health, education and protection, that immediately impacts kids,” he said.
Don’t take my kodachrome away
While the field of Generation F still is far from exact science, policy pros have enough facts to get the picture that losing a home isn’t the stuff of Kodak moments.
In fact, the repo man literally confiscated the kodachrome of Dawn and Audrey Tonkinson, two areas Chicago tweens. On the day the eviction company left its wordless memo to the Tonkinsons that time in their sprawling suburban home was up, it hauled away boxes of school art projects and CD’s loaded with pictures of dance recitals, swim meets, gymnastic competitions.
“That was the thing that was really hard on the girls,” said Stacey Tonkinson a 42-year-old elementary school teacher. “It was like they lost a portion of their memories.”
Tisha Canada still has her children’s stories about having no place to sleep and the drawings of sad stick figures that tipped off teachers that something was wrong after school. But don’t ask her to see them.
“I could never find them in a day,” she said. “They’re buried deep in a rented storage space.”
Canada, of Minneapolis, is among more than half of families displaced by foreclosure who find themselves on the streets because their landlord didn’t pay their mortgage.
She also puts a face on the pattern of doubling up.
New York urban policy expert Ingrid Gould Ellen reports a 35 percent spike in New York families checking into homeless shelters the same day the bank reclaimed their house. But workers at Chicago agencies say they’re not yet feeling the influx because families first go through a process of “doubling up,” a cycle of moving in with relatives, then friends, until problems like conflict, transportation, overcrowding, inevitably surface.
Studies show that stuffing in more than 1.5 people per room fosters disease and family violence, Bush said.
“Overcrowding doesn’t just have immediate health ramifications, but also ramifications of family stress and family violence,” he said.
It’s painless to rationalize that all these parents are getting kicked out of their homes because they busted their budgets and listened when lenders sold them a house of cards. It tougher to swallow a story of parents working hard to support their families, making decisions that worked one year and were doomed the next.
It’s even harder to blame the victim when we see a picture of kids packing their bedrooms into boxes.
Comments
Thank you for doing a story about those who loose the most in all of this yucky mess. The boogie man (repo man) visited at 4am this morning to take the last thing we had left - our family car. My kids have already lost a home and have had to travel from place to place for a year now. We make the best out of it and are lucky to have a super loving family that is thankful for everyday with each other. I cry myself to sleep wondering what all this will do to my children in the future. There is no choice but to wake up put a brave face on and fight the fight. I take every chance to fill my little generation F's with the extra love and knowledge that lets them have peace in there hearts on this journey through our current situation.
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