Plight of Homeless Families in Los Angeles
Substance abusers and the mentally ill represent the most familiar picture of the homeless, but, in fact, families are the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population, according to USC sociologist Kay Young McChesney, who recently conducted an in-depth study of homeless mothers and children at Los Angeles County shelters.
McChesney, head of the USC Homeless Families Project, and her team interviewed 87 mothers. Their median age was 28; their median number of children was two. About two-thirds of them were single mothers.
“These women are not crazy,” she said in the project release on the study. “They aren’t substance abusers either. Even though most of them were very poor, they had managed to keep a roof over their children’s heads until something happened to upset their already precarious economic balance.”
That something was eviction or the threat of eviction for almost half of these families. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is $491 a month; the average monthly Aid to Families with Dependent Children payment to a mother with one child is $448, McChesney pointed out. Many of these mothers had to literally decide between having a home or having food. “Some months, they decide to eat,” McChesney said.
For a third of the families, the financial turning point was that they ran out of money after moving to Los Angeles. The latter problem was common for the married couples among the homeless families, many of whom came here when the husbands lost their jobs in other states. In many cases, these families either had money stolen or could not save enough for the high move-in costs of rentals.
Crippled by Low Pay
About one in four of the single mothers became homeless when they left or were thrown out by a man, in some cases an abusive man. These women were being supported at a reasonable level when they suddenly found themselves in the street. Trying to make it on their own, they were crippled by low pay and inability to pay for child care while they worked or looked for jobs.
McChesney found one very important difference between the homeless families she interviewed and other families: Considering the relative youth of most of the subjects, a “surprisingly high number had deceased parents,” she said. These women had no immediate family to turn to when financial disaster struck.
A third of the women had deceased mothers and 43% had fathers who were dead or with whom they’d had so little contact they didn’t know if they were alive or dead. “Fully 16% were orphans,” McChesney said, and “five (of the 87) were not only orphans but had no living siblings.
“The difference between the poor who wind up homeless and those who don’t seems to be a matter of having relatives to turn to when problems come up,” McChesney said.
Those who did have families had the kind who don’t or can’t help. Of those who had living parents or siblings, only about half had a mother or brothers or sisters in the Los Angeles area.
In addition, almost half of the homeless mothers McChesney’s team interviewed in the shelters got into their cycle of poverty initially because they had been runaways or in foster or institutional care as teen-agers. Many of them had been abused, not only by their natural parents, but in many cases by foster parents too. “They ran away in their teens and had been doing what they could to survive,” McChesney said. “Then they got pregnant. And as one said, ‘I can make it by myself. But what can I do with my baby?’ So they wind up in Los Angeles County shelters, where they can stay for a month at most. Then they’re back in the streets--this time with their babies.”
McChesney said the primary cause of homelessness is an acute shortage of low-cost housing. While the number of families living in poverty has increased in the ‘80s, she said, the number of low-cost housing units has decreased. Nationally for every unit available, there are two families in need of low-cost housing, she said. What will solve the problem is housing, she said, not more beds in emergency shelters.
Leslie Stone, publisher of the Los Angeles-based Women’s Yellow Pages, has been elected founding president of the newly formed National Assn. of Women’s Yellow Pages.
The Los Angeles publication, in its ninth year, lists almost 1,400 women’s enterprises ranging from physicians and lawyers to house painters for those who would like to give their business to women. It also includes a “Survival Guide” listing community resources and an information section for equal opportunity employers and state agencies that subcontract to women-owned businesses.
In the last few years, more than 50 such directories have sprung up in cities around the country--the Southern California annual volume is the largest--and publishers formed the new national association this year to enhance cooperation and information sharing. The Women’s Yellow Pages is available in bookstores ($4.95).
The Los Angeles Regional Family Planning Council, with funds from the National Institutes of Health, is conducting tests to evaluate a new contraceptive sponge.
The product, sold over the counter in France and Switzerland but not yet approved for use in the United States, contains benzalkonium chloride, a chemical used for many years here as an antiseptic. It is believed to be an effective spermicide and also an agent that renders mid-cycle cervical mucus hostile to sperm and inhibits sperm motility.
The tests are being conducted--with volunteers who receive free gynecological care and contraceptives for their participation--at the Westside Women’s Clinic in Santa Monica and Planned Parenthood-World Population/L.A. in Sherman Oaks. For information, call the clinic at (213) 450-2191 or Planned Parenthood at (818) 990-4300.
