New York Times Book Review Podcast Matthew Desmond
Nonfiction
This Is What It'southward Like to Be Homeless in New York City
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THIS IS ALL I GOT
A New Female parent'southward Search for Abode
Past Lauren Sandler
I confess that reading about the travails of a homeless person amid all the electric current suffering held little appeal, but I actually found solace in the story of Camila, a pseudonym Lauren Sandler uses for the fundamental character of her riveting new volume, "This Is All I Got." Camila is a wildly impulsive, profoundly smart, deeply savvy and stunningly beautiful 22-year-old Dominican. She's likewise without a place to alive. And equally Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of "Evicted," one time told an interviewer, "Without stable shelter, everything else falls autonomously." Then it does for Camila except that she holds on with a tenacious grip, to detect some normalcy and to imagine an arable futurity, both for herself and for her young son.
Sandler, the author of two previous books ("One and Only," "Righteous"), first met Camila at a shelter in Brooklyn in 2015 where Sandler volunteered. Camila, who it becomes articulate works hard to present herself equally someone in control, is dressed in a fresh white blouse and a pair of twill short-shorts, a infant-blue handbag resting on her lap. Sandler writes that she sensed "her mind revving, her thoughts lurching forward as she equanimous herself. … From that commencement meeting, I sensed that she was a woman who was hellbent on propelling herself out of this shelter, away from the circumstances of her by, toward something solid, ambitious. And every bit I came to feel her, within and beyond her story, 1 thing was clear to me: If Camila couldn't use her wits and persistence to make the system piece of work for her, no one could."
It's one of many things that make Camila so appealing. She doesn't take kindly to authority, especially when someone disrespects her. When she meets a bureaucrat, she arrives well armed. She carries her nascence certificate in her backpack in case she ever needs to bear witness she is who she says she is. She records conversations and takes detailed notes.
The encounters are maddening. To call them Kafkaesque wouldn't do them justice. For rental assistance, Camila needs to make five separate trips to a job center, sometimes with waits of up to iii hours. In one case, she sits down on a plastic chair in the waiting room to find a puddle of urine below her — and she has to decide whether to go to the bathroom or risk losing her place in line. Nosotros larn that in lodge to get marked equally high priority for a unit of measurement in public housing, which has over a quarter of a million names on the await-list, you need to accept been a victim of domestic violence. And then at a shelter when a woman purposefully bumps Camila, she calls 911 and insists that the law consider information technology a case of domestic abuse and that they write up a restraining order. Even at her immature historic period, she's learned not to have abiding humiliation personally, only rather shrugs, thinking to herself: Perhaps it just wasn't meant to be.
5 years ago, sixty,000 people in New York were without a habitation. Nationally, on any given night, roughly 555,000 are without shelter, and while the number had been failing it began to rise again in the past two years. Given the astonishingly large number of people who have lost their jobs in the wake of the Covid-19 crunch, those numbers will only increment. Camila'southward story feels like a warning: If in prosperous times this is the best our government can practise to assist those struggling to go by, then in these coming difficult times we volition be able to exercise very little.
When Sandler met Camila at the shelter, she asked if she could spend time with her. And so over the next yr, Sandler became tethered to Camila, immersed in her solar day-to-twenty-four hours life — even, if my reading is correct, joining her on a appointment. Information technology'southward a remarkable feat of reporting. Sandler seems to be e'er at her side.
As the volume opens, Camila is pregnant, and desperately hoping the begetter is a young homo she dated while attending college in Buffalo. She texts him while in labor: "Kevin. Good morning time. I recall today is the day." Camila's Achilles' heel is her persistent search for someone to settle down with — her certainty that each human being she meets is the one. On 1 occasion, she meets a beau in the afternoon and by the evening is texting Sandler that maybe the next night she and her son will stay at his place. Nosotros come to larn, as well, that more than anything she's seeking love and affirmation from her father, who is a disappointment at every juncture. When he learns she'south pregnant, he blithely tells her, "You'll be on welfare, like all Mexican moms with five kids." He has at to the lowest degree 7 kids himself, by a number of women. She also has a tenuous human relationship at best with her mother, who was emotionally and physically calumniating with Camila and her siblings, and kicked Camila out of the business firm when she was 15.
Camila refuses to be typecast. She ofttimes dresses in a black blazer and matching slacks, a slightly preppy await. She tells the other women in the shelter that she wants a nanny. "I don't desire to put him in mean solar day care," she tells her swain residents. "Nannies teach them, they learn sooner, they walk sooner. I'k concerned nearly putting him in a identify that's not educational activity him." She loves the theater, and at one point attends a production of Federico García Lorca'south "Claret Wedding" — and becomes and so captivated by the performance that she's 20 minutes late picking up her son, which means she has to pay a $35 charge to the twenty-four hour period care. She texts Sandler to inquire if she wants to spend a 24-hour interval at the Guggenheim Museum.
Sandler'southward such a bang-up observer, her writing so cleareyed. Mind to this moment when Camila and her babe son, Alonso, enter an apartment occupied by 2 parents and a child; Camila has rented a room in that location, sight unseen, for $160 a calendar week. "Jovanka led Camila into the anteroom. A clothesline strewn with sheets and undergarments hung overhead. Underneath, a couch was jammed against a wall, near invisible nether all style of clothing, shoeboxes and baby toys. An ill-fitting paper-thin accordion door hung open to what had been the living room and was now Jovanka's entire living quarters, a double bed and a crib stuffed beside a couch and chair."
I read that and wanted to pull Camila out of there, to plead with her to find somewhere else to live. Simply of course that's the problem: She has no options. The waiting list for housing in New York City'due south Section 8 programme — which provides vouchers for hire — has been capped at 10,000 names. It stopped taking applications in 2008. Retrieve about that for a moment. Our government'due south primary program to provide affordable housing is and so oversubscribed that you can't even get your name on a waiting listing. What'south going to happen in these subsequent months as our unemployment rolls smashing? Where will people notice shelter? As Camila'south story underscores, and to quote Matthew Desmond again: Without a home, everything else falls apart.
Beginning in 2008, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation regularly brought together experts in housing policy to talk nearly the central identify of prophylactic and affordable shelter in our lives. (I was involved in some of those conversations.) What some of the foundation-funded research found I imagine would not surprise Camila, who past the age of 22 had lived in 29 places. Moving 3 or more than times in babyhood is associated with lower earning and less educational attainment after in life. 1 report of Latino mothers found that poor housing conditions and overcrowding is associated with more than low and hostility. As the foundation writes on its website: "Trace the lineage of many social welfare problems today, and you volition likely uncover a history of substandard, unaffordable housing."
"This Is All I Got" is a testament to the enormousness of the modest story, to the power of intimate narratives to speak to something much larger. Sandler wisely lets Camila'southward story stand on its own without lecturing us. Non to sound clichéd, but we walk in Camila'southward shoes. We come to understand what Sandler recognized early on: If Camila can't navigate the dearth of housing, how tin can others? Not only is she in search of shelter, but she'southward working toward her caste at a community college; she'south commuting over an 60 minutes each way to day care and school; she'south raising a son; she's seeking child support from her son's father; she'south trying to mend relations with her parents, who separated soon subsequently she was conceived. She is, like all of us, looking for a sense of purpose and for a livelihood, and yet without a place to alive all of that feels about impossible to reach.
I relished my time aslope Camila. Spirited and undaunted, she trudges forward, bathing in what little joy she finds along the way. At one signal, a woman working at a job center tells Camila not to heed to those who insist that she get out school. The bureaucrat says: "They volition tell you to go pick upwardly cans in the park instead of schoolhouse. Do non mind to them." She urges Camila to pursue her dream, which is to get a job in law enforcement.
"As she left the office, a blissful smile spread across her face," Sandler writes. "Information technology was the commencement time I'd encountered this smile. It seemed to release itself from deep inside her torso. … Someone had seen her as worth more minimum wage and a dead-end life." A lesson for the states all.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/books/review/this-is-all-i-got-lauren-sandler.html
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