America could soon face a wave of single moms being evicted

(By Lauren Sandler; may 28/2021.)

It will be the true measure of our society and the predictor of our future: Whenever the CDC moratorium on evictions expires – which it’s set to do next month — millions of people could find themselves homeless. And perhaps most heavily represented among those millions are single mothers and their kids. These mothers are not numbers, they are people. People with names and narratives, with passions and ambitions. Data can tell us who is unemployed, who is on welfare, who is at risk for eviction, who is homeless. Data is an aggregate of lives distilled into cold figures, devoid of humanity. And yet the statistics of this pandemic year tell a staggering story. Women’s labor force participation has dropped to 57% since the pandemic began, and of all groups of parents, single moms have seen the biggest drop in the proportion who are employed. The service industry, a sector largely made up of women of color, shed more jobs than any other sector. Pandemic life – with massive unemployment, zoom schooling and social isolation — has brutalized no group as direly as the single mothers raising 15.76 million children. Lost jobs mean no money for rent, at least with our miserly welfare system. It didn’t have to be this way. It still doesn’t. For decades, researchers from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to Harvard have shown that vouchers providing rent payment are themost effective form of homelessness-prevention intervention. Families who receive vouchers are not only less likely to experience housing instability, they’re also less likely to need foster care. And they’re considerably less likely to experience domestic violence: four times as many housing-insecure women report abuse compared to those with greater stability. Despite all this, Section 8 program, which provides housing assistance to families, is severely underfunded. We are defined by who we deem worthy of investment, as an economy as well as an ethical society. Today we are failing ourselves on both counts.

(Available at https://time.com. Adapted.)