Blaming homeless families
The odious notion of the undeserving poor is alive and well in our right to shelter state, which denies emergency housing to homeless families it deems responsible for their own predicaments
Oh sure, this is a right to shelter state. Unless it decides a family is to blame for their own homelessness.
On Oct.11, this state officially notified Tina Farrer, Carl Spinks, and their eight children that they were culpable for their own desperate straits, and denied them emergency shelter. And they were not just denied, but barred from state shelter for the next three years.
That is because the family was evicted from their Section 8 subsidized housing for withholding rent on their cockroach-infested apartment. If a family is evicted from public or subsidized housing for not paying rent, or for other disqualifying offenses, they are deemed ineligible for emergency shelter, and barred from getting it for three years, no matter how wretched their plight.
Eviction is always ruinous. Eviction from subsidized housing is even more so, leaving many homeless families with nowhere to go: No landlord wants to risk renting to them, and the state shelter system turns them away.
And that is how Tina, her husband, and their eight children ages 2 to 23 came to be crammed into a generous neighbor’s onebedroom Dorchester apartment, where they have been living for two months so far. The neighbor’s apartment is also subsidized: He said he spent 11 years on a waitlist before being placed there.
There are strict rules about how long guests can stay in subsidized housing, so the neighbor is risking his own eviction — one that would bar him, too, from state shelter for three years — to give them refuge.
On Tuesday night, Tina, 43, was cooking dinner amid chaos. Her four youngest children were giddy and rambunctious. When they weren’t pulling KarMychael, 2, off whatever he had climbed, or putting on the pants he kept pulling off, 9-year-old Starlyght and 7-year-old Dyemiand were singing and performing TikTok dance routines in perfect unison. Malachi, 6, was wrestling all comers.
“We’re homeless,” he said at one point.
“No we’re not,” Dyemiand snapped at her brother.
Tina, holding KarMychael now, dropped spaghetti into a pot
and tried to catch up on the day’s many emails from housing agencies, teachers, the psychologist treating one of her sons. The broken heart of her loving family, she was overwhelmed and weeping. The harder she fought, the worse their situation seemed to get. Now she wondered if she could even keep her family together any more.
She had tried to stop the eviction that began in the summer. The court documents are full of pleas in her neat handwriting.
“My family is overwhelmed, ashamed, disgusted, we have lost everything from roaches, mice and negligence by landlord,” she wrote in August.
“Your honor, I am asking kindly if you may give us more time to find stable housing,” she wrote in early October. Not having “another place to live is nerve wracking.”
She had lost her eviction case by default, because she missed court appearances: That was partly because, despite the conditions in the apartment, she had come to an arrangement with her landlord to pay what she owed, and wrongly believed she did not have to show up for a hearing — a common reason for default judgments.
If she had been able to argue her case, Tina could have told a judge that the apartment was unsafe to live in, and that she was within her rights to withhold her rent until repairs were made. There were mice, and so many roaches that she could no longer cook in the kitchen, instead spending hundreds each month on takeout for 10. Then there was the mold, the holes in the floor, and a refrigerator that wouldn’t stay cold. Inspection reports back up her claims. The pediatrician for her five youngest children wrote a note to say the mold and cockroaches had “had a significant negative impact on their health and well being.”
But, appalling as that apartment was, it was better than no home at all, which is what they ended up with after a constable arrived on Oct. 10 to force them to vacate. The family, who live on disability and cash assistance, got help from Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury, which paid for a couple of nights in a hotel. They then spent a few nights with another neighbor before moving into their friend’s small apartment. One of hundreds of families officially denied emergency shelter by the state each year, they were desperate, and grateful, for his help.
But after two months here, the frustration and confinement is making the younger kids act out like they never have before, and has raised tensions between older members of the family to dangerous levels. A few weeks ago, Tina’s 19-year-old, who struggles with mental illness, had a meltdown and called the police. Tina said they were kind, but they also filed a report with the Department of Children and Families.
“Imagine us and six cops in this apartment,” she said. “It didn’t have to happen.”
So now, to add to the pressure of being homeless, Tina and Carl are being scrutinized for abuse and neglect. The couple have lost custody of their children twice before: Briefly in 2009 and again in 2019. That time, Tina, whose childhood was no childhood at all, and who has battled mental illness and addiction since her teens, had been struggling after losing an infant son after a placental abruption. The state decided the children were better off away from her, split them up, and sent them to several foster homes.
“My grief was affecting me in every possible way, but it never affected my ability to care for my kids,” she said.
The state is not supposed to remove children from their parents because they are homeless. But being homeless has brought DCF back into this family’s lives and, given their circumstances and their history, the peril here is immense.
If the children are taken again, the same state whose shelter denial pushed this family to the precipice will be subjecting them to immeasurable suffering for falling over it.
“One thing that would kill my soul completely is if my babies got taken,” Tina texted, just after DCF contacted her.
This cannot be what anybody wants. Can it?
Tina knows people are quick to judge her. She feels it every time she walks down the street with Carl, or her eldest son Tyriek, 20, pushing the shopping cart that is the only way to get their mountain of clothes down Dudley Street to the laundromat, where the biggest washing machine, not nearly big enough, costs $15.25 per load. They see her tattoos and her piercings and her many children and they draw conclusions.
“I see the looks on certain people’s faces,” said Tina, who said she has been sober for several years.
What those people don’t see is that Tyriek, who works at a gas station, plans to join the Army next summer because, he said, “it’s going to instruct me to be a better person, it’s going to help my situation and my family, it’s going to show my siblings what is possible.”
They don’t know Starlyght loves making new friends and doing math because, she explains, “I’m not trying to show off, but it’s easy and it’s fun.” They don’t know bright Dyemiand, a ham who gets down on her knees and looks to heaven and says, “I wish we had a house and a car and a good life, I pray to you, God!”
And they don’t know how much Tina loves them all, and how hard she works trying to hold it together while she ties to get them out of this. Every day, she spends hours searching for housing, jumping on listings, racing to lease an apartment before her Section 8 voucher expires and she loses her housing subsidy. Four times, she thought she’d found a new place. Four times, she dropped everything and raced to gather all the documents she needed to apply. Four times, a landlord she was sure would give her a break ghosted her.
“If they would only hear my story, they would say, ‘I can’t believe what happened to you, I am going to override this and rent to you,’” she said. “But they’re just looking at that eviction.”
In addition to the searching and the applications and rejections, Tina spends hours dealing with caseworkers and officials. On a recent day, she sat on hold for 3 hours, 59 minutes, and 53 seconds with a housing agency, hoping to get her Section 8 voucher extended, praying someone would come on the line before the kids got home from school. When she finally reached someone, he told her she’d called the wrong department.
Being homeless is a full-time job. Most of us complain about waiting and red tape after spending a couple of hours renewing a driver’s license every once in a while. Tina’s life is like being at the RMV all day, every day, except she also has eight kids, her own health issues, no car, no margin for error, and unrelenting pressure.
Caring for the kids and trying to find a way out of their predicament requires the organizational skills of a corporate CEO, and most of the time, Tina has them. She barely sleeps, which is useful sometimes: The night before Thanksgiving, she stayed up all night putting together a huge feast using ingredients from a food pantry, and supermarket gift cards donated by the
‘If they would only hear my story, they would say, “I can’t believe what happened to you, I am going to override this and rent to you.” ’
TINA FARRER
kids’ schools. Dyemiand and Starlyght were still talking about it more than two weeks later, in awe of the cornbread and stuffing.
And though she is exhausted all the time, and often short on patience, she is also warm and tender with her children. Carrying a sniffly KarMychael on her hip on Tuesday night, Tina pulled a braid out of Dyemiand’s hair, giving her scalp a muchneeded scratch when she was done.
“Ooh it feels good when it comes out, doesn’t it,” she asked her blissed out daughter. And she was all there for 12-year-old Kaytina, a girl with a quiet certainty about her, when she came home from volleyball practice around 6 p.m.
“I’m listening, honey,” she told her daughter, as she downloaded her school day.
“You know next year I’ll have the same exact teachers,” Kaytina asked her mother, impervious to the chaos.
“If we’re here next year,” her mother reminded her.
Tina had told the kids they might be moving to Lynn. Tyriek had found yet another apartment online, and Tina jumped on it. The landlord said he’d accept her Section 8 voucher if she hurried, and without even going to see the place, Tina raced forward with her application.
“I am not, no way in hell, going to even second-guess an apartment that’s thrown at me like this less than 20 days before Christmas,” she texted, after sharing news of the find in all caps.
By that point, Elizabeth Alfred, a heroic housing attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, had been working on the family’s case for weeks. She was trying to get the emergency shelter denial reversed, arguing the family was not at fault in their eviction. After the agency that administers Section 8 housing balked at Tina’s application for the apartment in Lynn, Alfred set about explaining the eviction to them as well.
Finally, on Thursday, the state informed Alfred that Tina’s family now qualified for shelter, and that they had been put on the waiting list for a placement. The attorney was still working on clearing the family to apply for the apartment in Lynn, which would allow them to bypass shelter and go straight into five bedrooms and a fresh start. On Friday, she got word that the eviction would no longer hold up that application. A lease, if it comes, could still be a ways off.
It should never have required this much work — and 13-plus hours of an attorney’s time — to convince authorities that this family deserves help. At the very least, those who denied Tina’s first application for shelter should have looked more closely at the circumstances of her eviction. But state caseworkers are so overwhelmed right now because of an influx of migrants seeking shelter that they don’t have time for that kind of attention.
Moreover, the eviction should not have been an issue in the first place. How can a state as progressive as ours be judging and blocking from shelter those who lose subsidized housing for any reason? Even if it were not despicable to sort homeless people into Victorian-era categories of deserving and undeserving poor, why punish the children of parents deemed to have made mistakes? There can be no possible justification for making them pay for their elders’ supposed inadequacies by refusing them shelter. Not in any compassionate state, and certainly not in a right to shelter one.
Tina and Carl love their children as much as any parent does, have the same dreams for them as everyone else. To achieve them, these kids and their parents need shelter, and as much support as we can give them right now. Actually, they needed it months ago, before the family reached their breaking point.
If they had gotten it, maybe Tina would feel less worry and guilt now about what kind of Christmas she can give her kids. Maybe she wouldn’t need to hope for a miracle that will never come.
“Maybe somebody will come to me at Christmas time and say ‘Hey, we have this community that built you a home, here are the keys, go for it,’” she said one recent morning. “I always read about those and think, ‘Why couldn’t that be me?’ What do you have to do?”