Homeless Dolls and Homeless Famiies

Family homelessness has migrated into the playrooms of privileged children, thanks to Gwen the homeless doll. Gwen is the latest creation of the American Girl Doll Company, which specializes in selling lovely and expensive dolls and their equally lovely and expensive accessories to the offspring of affluent families. And affluent parents expect more for their dollar than just entertainment: the dolls represent girls from specific historical periods and ethnic groups and are marketed with books that describe their lives. Playtime with a nudge toward AP history and one small step toward the Ivys- what could be better?
But Gwen, the latest doll, goes a bit farther. She is homeless, and her accompanying story describes the difficulties that she and her single mother have experienced. Gwen has provoked a great deal of controversy: Is she a further iteration of the poverty spectacle, a sanitized version of bum-bashing? Does she understate the difficulties of poverty- she is, after all, clothed neatly and has combed and styled blond hair. Is it wrong to allow affluent children to amuse themselves by playing with the less fortunate?
Maybe. But Gwen provides a new sort of learning. She shows us the developing face of homelessness, providing a valuable corrective to the dominant portrayal. We've all seen the dominant story, usually accompanied by photos that portray homeless individuals as a collection of pathologies. The homeless, they tell us, are are too disabled to work, won't take their psychiatric medication, are dirty, unkempt, and disruptive. This is an incomplete picture, and is, unfortunately, the portrayal that has become the the 'public' face of homelessness.
But the face of homelessness in contemporary America is increasingly the face of Gwen and her mother. Homeless families are a growing share of the population. In the majority of these families, the parents or parent work, or are looking for work. Like Gwen's fictive mother, they try to keep their children neat and to normalize their lives as they move from shelters, to vehicles, to friends' sofas. Their public face, in other words, is much like that of any other American family: a portrait gallery of this homeless population would look like families pictured in ads for Target or Sears.
It is amazing, in fact, that Gwen has made it into the American Girl line, because her story ought to be quite disturbing to the families who purchase her. The playrooms and designer-decorated bedrooms where Gwen lives with the other American Girls might not be forever: an increasing number of real Gwens have made the journey from similar environs to relatives' sofas. And there is something else: the playrooms and lovely bedrooms, the money to purchase Gwen and her expensive accessories and American Girl companions are produced by a system in which wealth at the top increasingly depends on the poverty and insecurity of families like Gwen's.
In real life, the Gwens live in one or two parent families where the parents or parent piece together multiple low-wage jobs, working wildly varying shits, and receiving no benefits.. And even these jobs are not secure: there are frequent layoffs, and taking a day off because you, or your child, is ill are grounds for termination. There is another thing about Gwen's real world- the parents who put forth this effort cannot always afford to provide stable housing. Gwen, in other words, reminds us that there are no storybook endings for an increasing number of American girls, their siblings, and the families in which they live.
For a discussion of the Gwen controversy, see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/29/american-girls-homeless-d_n_302981.html

Homeless Families: A Growth Industry in a Jobless Recovery

The population of homeless families with children has surged, The New York Times reports, overwhelming schools and shelter systems. A number of recent studies have similarly observed that the homeless population is increasingly composed of families. They typically focus on the proximate cause - unemployment, foreclosures and evictions cause by the recession.
But this misses an important point. The recession simply provided a stressor that revealed underlying weaknesses in the paradigm that structures national policies toward the homeless.
The paradigm that had structured homeless policies since the passage of the McKinney-Vento Act incorporated a set of assumptions about homelessness. These policies focused on providing assistance to the "chronically homeless," who were defined as "unaccompanied single individuals". Further, they assumed that most of these individuals were homeless due to disability. Patterns of funding followed this paradigm. Since disability rather than poverty was taken to be the major cause of homelessness, and since the chronically homeless were taken to be single individuals, programs to house them became top priority. These "supportive housing" programs provided intensive services to relatively small numbers of individuals who were single and severely disabled. Even as Section 8 vouchers that provided rental assistance to individuals and families who were simply too poor to afford market-rate housing were cut, experimental "supportive housing" programs expanded.
Why did this occur? There are two major reasons. First, homeless disabled adults were more visible and more disruptive than homeless families. Homeless families, for instance, were rarely seen sleeping on steam grates or panhandling at intersections. Secondly, families- including minimum-wage working families- are more likely to be homeless simply because they are too poor to afford housing. Policies ignore the connection between poverty and family homelessness because this connection suggests that the economic arrangements that benefit some of us leave others- literally- out in the cold.
A perverse sort of efficiency is at work here. By prioritizing service to the most disruptive and visible group of homeless individuals, status quo housing policies purchase the appearance of progress. And by focusing attention on a group of individuals who have multiple problems, these policies also distract attention from the more disturbing fact that our economy is structured in ways that create families who are too poor to afford to keep a roof over their heads.
And the truth is that our economy, as it is currently structured, requires more and more economically marginalized workers to maintain the status quo. Beneath the abstract talk of underemployment and a jobless recovery are simple facts: if real estate prices recover while employment markets continue to shed jobs, then family homelessness is a growth industry.






For an article on the surge in homeless children, see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/education/06homeless.html?scp=1&sq=family%20homelessness&st=cse