In this excerpt from her book “This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home,” laurenosandler looks at a day in the life of a homeless single mother
Photo: Getty Images The child-support office was in the MetroTech complex, Brooklyn’s first billion-dollar real estate development deal. It was May but freezing and blustery. Camila* came out of the wind and rain into the vast, marble-walled lobby, where an enormous flower arrangement towered over a reception desk for J.P. Morgan, one of the building’s main tenants.
She composed herself, looked up the DeKalb address on her phone, and braved the freezing rain to the subway. French tourists scrutinizing a guidebook blocked the exit of the G train in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Camila waited politely for them to let her pass and walked down Bedford to DeKalb. She was hungry. A sandwich board at the café next to the welfare office promoted a beef tongue confit on special. She decided she wouldn’t be able to eat until she got back to the Bronx.
“No, you may not. You may reapply and they will let you know the decision in forty-five days. So you want to reapply today?” she asked, finally looking up. Both of her parents were born in Corona, Queens, to Dominican parents. Camila grew up mainly in Corona apartments paid for by her mother’s Section 8 housing voucher, back when a single mother could count on such support. No more: Section 8 hasn’t offered support to new applicants since 2008, despite ongoing academic research and findings that housing vouchers were the best and cheapest prevention of homelessness.
In addition to its vicious stranglehold, poverty—on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis—is often numbingly boring. In New York, it means traveling miles of subway tracks stretching from one remote neighborhood to another to file and certify paperwork, meet with administrators, and follow byzantine procedures, part of navigating what public policy scholars call “administrative burden.
The elevator doors opened on the third floor to a din of wailing babies, television at top volume, strangers yelling at one another. The air carried the same ripe scent as the elevator.
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