Single mothers could be the first on the streets. (Gabrielle Lurie/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
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A year and a half into the coronavirus pandemic and, in the United States, one thing is clear: no one has suffered more than single mothers. They have lost their jobs and loved ones, and now — in what can only be described as America’s looming eviction crisis — they disproportionately face the threat of losing their homes, too. Nearly 19 million children in the US live with single parents, and more than 80% of them live with single mothers. These are the families who are largely struggling; more than 26% of solo parents reported being behind on rent between February and May, compared to 15% of renters generally. If a wave of evictions comes, it’s going to sweep these families out of their homes. Democrats have been trying to stanch this impending tsunami, but the dam may be about to burst. At the start of August, the Biden administration, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, imposed a federal ban on evictions in most of the United States. That prohibition is set to be lifted on 3 October, but it’s being challenged in court; one judge has already said she doesn’t believe it will hold up to Supreme Court scrutiny. In the meantime, the Biden administration and various state agencies are scrambling to disperse rental assistance funds to keep people in their homes for as long as possible.
But the roll-out of rental assistance has been a frenzied debacle of bureaucracy, malfunctioning technology and poor information-sharing. Crucially, it comes more than a year after pandemic eviction moratoriums kept tenants housed, but still let them accrue staggering bills for back rent and fees — all while offering little recourse to landlords who still had mortgages, taxes and bills to pay. I had a little glimpse into this already broken system years before the pandemic when I worked as a lawyer representing low-income tenants in housing court. One colleague described the work as akin to plugging up holes to stave off catastrophe, but unable to do anything about the never-ending flood. My clients were overwhelmingly single mothers dealing with complex challenges, and my job involved more time navigating New York’s byzantine welfare bureaucracy than just about anything else. Many clients wound up in housing court facing potential eviction again and again, often through no fault of their own. Some were women who paid rent through a combination of their own income and social assistance programmes, and would be surprised to learn that a few extra hours of work per week had, unbeknown to them, pushed their benefits down, resulting in months of under-paid or unpaid rent. Others had initially represented themselves in housing court — Americans typically are not entitled to free legal representation unless they’ve been charged with a crime —and signed on to an impossible-to-meet deal with their landlord, who typically had an attorney; those deals routinely included payments for back rent and significant fees that poor tenants simply couldn’t pay, setting them up for failure and eviction. Others were too broke to pay rent after missing work to care for a sick child. I was struck by how many of my clients’ children, who largely grew up in low-income housing, seemed to suffer from everything ranging from asthma to learning disabilities to profound physical and mental disabilities, and how often they were in the ER or the hospital, or needed full-time care at home. It was unusual that a client wouldn’t have a sick child, something I began to suspect was a direct outcome of the sub-standard housing environments in which they were being raised. And that was well before a pandemic pushed those already on the edge of the cliff clear off it. Since Covid shutdowns steamrolled the US economy and knocked workers — particularly those on low wages — out of their jobs, roughly 15 million Americans have fallen behind on rent. And that has ripple effects, particularly on the small landlords who depend on rental revenue to pay their mortgages, taxes and sometimes their own income. As of this spring, about a third of small landlords were behind on their mortgage payments and facing potential bankruptcy or foreclosure. American tenants’ collective unpaid rent bill now totals more than $20 billion dollars. So as soon as they legally can, landlords are going to demand that renters pay or get out — even if the result could be millions of children without homes. What’s worse, for many poor and single-parent families, the coming evictions are merely the culmination of a knot of hardships. Families with children face eviction more often than families without; domestic violence victims are also particularly vulnerable to being evicted. Even without pandemic-induced uncertainty, African-American renters are evicted more often than white Americans and female renters are disproportionately likely to be evicted. That’s not only because of racial and gender discrimination on the part of landlords, but rather the result of centuries-old inequities: African Americans make less money than white Americans, women make less money than men, and black and Latina women make the least of all. African Americans are also less likely than whites to have steady employment, more likely to rent and have far less generational wealth to rely on. If you’re the white parent of a young child, you are more likely than a similar black parent to have a parent or other family member who you can turn to for money when you need it — for example, if you’re behind on rent and don’t want to get evicted. While the story of Covid-19 and women has been well-documented — women were more likely to lose their jobs than men, and when school went remote and childcare shut down, it was women who were forced to drop out of the workforce to care for children — what’s been less discussed is that these hardships were not evenly distributed. More than 5 million women left the workforce when Covid closed businesses and sent children home full-time, and more than a million of them have still not returned. Single mothers, who already faced much higher unemployment rates than married mothers before Covid, saw their joblessness rates skyrocket as Covid peaked, and stay high through the present. Last year, unmarried mothers were more than twice as likely as married mothers to be unemployed. And despite being more likely than white women to be their family’s primary breadwinner, black and Latina mothers were also much more likely to say that they were responsible for all of their family’s housework when Covid hit. The same groups that tend to see higher shares of single mothers — black families, low-income families, Americans with less than a college degree — also saw higher infection and death rates from Covid-19. It’s no real surprise, then, that black parents were more sceptical of schools reopening in person than white parents, and may have been less likely to send their kids to school where in-person learning was available. But many black mothers tell reporters and researchers they’re making the obvious choice to keep their kids safe and alive, even if it hurts their family’s financial bottom line. To put a finer point on it: it’s not Covid job losses alone that have left so many unable to pay rent and created the coming storm of evicted single moms and their kids. It’s school closures. It’s a generational wealth gap that has single mothers, who are disproportionately black and low-income, living on the edge and with no one to call for help. And perhaps most of all, it’s the fact that so many low-income Americans have long been paying more than they can afford in rent, because there are no other options and so little help. The American housing system was broken before Covid, with unbearably high rents and too few affordable and even middle-class housing options in the most popular and populous urban areas, where so many of us have to live for work. Covid has now pushed it past the brink. And make no mistake: eviction comes with a cascade of effects downstream. Tenants who have an eviction on their record have a much harder time finding housing in the future, and may wind up more reliant on landlords who charge a premium for housing the otherwise unhouseable. Children in families that are evicted move around a lot, and as a result have lower school attendance rates and lower academic achievement. They have less consistent access to nutritious food and wind up more sick than kids with consistent housing. The US is gearing itself for a recovery. Single mothers, though, are not. Unless the federal government does something more radical than a temporary eviction moratorium — and something more sustainable and efficient than the current rent relief program — it’s single mothers and their kids who will be among the first to find themselves out of a home. And the negative impact on women and children — poorer health, fewer days in school, falling behind academically, less stable housing going forward — could take generations to heal.
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SubscribeThis kind of tragedy is a stress test for the quality of Western society. If you read between the lines and ask a question, you see the elephant in the room: “Why are so many children being brought up by lone parents?”
In the UK we had a report with these findings:
‘ Family breakdown is one of the main reasons for educational failure and crime, the report says. “Family is also the foundation stone of success for many ethnic minorities,”’.
‘ The commission said it had “great concern” about high rates of family breakdown in some communities, with 63% of children from black Caribbean backgrounds growing up in lone parent families compared to a UK average of 14.7%. Lone parenthood is much lower than average in south Asian and Chinese families.’
Why are we ignoring this and simply expecting Government to throw money at the problem? Without a reset which recognises the importance of marriage and family I’m sure we are on a long march to chaos.
There are too many people in the world. It is not necessary for these women to be mothers at all. Rather than obsessing about archaic patriarchal structures like marriage, we need a reset which recognises the importance of properly paid and secure jobs for all adults, and encourages women to want other things in life than relationships and children. We should also teach children that the pre-requisites for producing children of their own are qualifications and skills, a properly paid job, a stable relationship and a secure home. Children are a responsibility not a right and only people who are able to take that responsibility should be encouraged to have them. That means a proactive return to the concept of Family Planning, through Sure Start centres and the like. Freely available contraception helped to increase the standard of living of ordinary people in the 1960s tremendously. Abortion and sterilisation should also be encouraged in certain cases. Many parents are inadequate and many children would have been better not being born.
Hi Caroline, I agree about the need for stable relationships, and most certainly that children are a responsibility and not a right.
My observations are mainly from teaching children over 40 years. It’s not that marriage is patriarchal, simply that all the studies show it to be the most stable relationship for bringing up children who go on to do the best for themselves. Most of all children should be loved and enjoyed and not viewed as a burden or impediment to personal ambitions.
If you are interested in looking into it, this is a good start: Top Ten Key Facts on Marriage – Marriage Foundation
“African Americans make less money than white Americans, women make less money than men, and Black and Latina women make the least of all. African Americans are also less likely than whites to have steady employment, more likely to rent and have far less generational wealth to rely on. If you’re the white parent of a young child, you are more likely than a similar Black parent to have a parent or other family member who you can turn to for money when you need it — for example, if you’re behind on rent and don’t want to get evicted.”
I stopped reading the article after this paragraph. Capitalising ‘black’ while not capitalising ‘white’ is blatant anti-white racism. I will be contacting Unherd directly about my subscription, because I am not prepared to pay for this.
Doesn’t matter because we will pay for this, whether it’s that massive welfare check because #B#lack dads won’t, suffering high crime rates which is our own fault apparently, or seeing your brown skinned Indian origin kid have to be three times better, work ten times harder to get the same opportunities as some other kid who suffered from “racism” or “sexism”
This capitalization is a good example of what we NEED to see; the left in all its glory, focusing on the trivial while destroying the necessary. I would not put this down to Unherd, but rather to the idiocy of the writer and what they foolishly believe is the proper, new grammar. It is good to see this and to call out the racism behind it. So, kudos to Unherd to not change the author’s preferred spelling, but to keep it right where we can see it and make fun of it.
I take your point, but am still delighted that they have seen reason and changed it back to the non-woke-racist grammar.
I agree with you, but the point is to call out the author….
I emailed her several hours ago:-
Dear Ms. Filipovic
I have just been reading your article in Unherd about the USA’s looming eviction crisis. However, I stopped reading upon encountering the paragraph below:-
“That’s not only because of racial and gender discrimination on the part of landlords, but rather the result of centuries-old inequities: African Americans make less money than white Americans, women make less money than men, and Black and Latina women make the least of all. African Americans are also less likely than whites to have steady employment, more likely to rent and have far less generational wealth to rely on. If you’re the white parent of a young child, you are more likely than a similar Black parent to have a parent or other family member who you can turn to for money when you need it — for example, if you’re behind on rent and don’t want to get evicted.”
Capitalising ‘black’ while not capitalising ‘white’ is blatant anti-white racism. You are a racist and should be ashamed of yourself. I have contacted Unherd to tell them that, unless they can reassure me that racists like you will no longer be given the oxygen of publicity between their pages, I will be cancelling my subscription.
Yours sincerely
R.Craven
Looks like they changed it…
So they have! This is very pleasing. Kudos to Unherd for doing the right thing.
I completely agree with your position regarding the capitalization of Black and not White, but I respectfully disagree with forcing Unherd to correct that racist language. I believe all views should be expressed here on Unherd. Because Unherd publishes an article in which the author chooses to prioritize black over white doesn’t mean Unherd subscribes to that view.
As other commenters have said, let each author show who they are. Let them reveal their prejudices and permit reasoned commentary on those prejudices. I’m a bit dismayed that Unherd actually edited the article to remove the objectionable language.
I don’t mean to call you out or start a war here in the comments section, but I don’t believe censorship is the antidote to the toxin of so-called anti-racist language.
Btw, kudos for contacting the author directly with your concerns.
Nothing wrong with respectful disagreement, and I certainly don’t feel ‘called out’ or ‘warred against’.
Update: I’ve had a very nice email from Unherd confirming that they changed the racist paragraph in response to my complaint, and assuring me that they will do their best to ensure that this doesn’t happen in future.
“I stopped reading the article after this paragraph. Capitalising ‘black’ while not capitalising ‘white’ is blatant anti-white racism.”
haha, I assume you are joking – if this is what bothered you about this article.
If we let woke racists get away with bad behaviour, they feel emboldened to engage in worse behaviour.
Dear God, how much longer are publications going to keep perpetuating rubbish like this? The Democrats, like all leftists, don’t give one infinitesimal damn about the poor. In their eyes, the poor are cannon fodder which they, the left, are entitled to hurl against the capitalist fortress, as Napoleon did his own men at Waterloo. Their purpose is to die for the empire. It’s the left which created the situation with their false compassion. Their governors maliciously shut down America under the lying deception of Covid prevention because Trump’s policies were delivering jobs, wages and crucially, undoing the necessity for government dependence. But we can’t admit that because Orange Man Bad and he was disproving leftist theory. So the poor had to suffer AGAIN. But that’s OK, they’ll thank us for it later. Don’t these people EVER learn?
As a father who works full time in a demanding job to pay for my daughter’s private school fees and spends pretty much all of my free time on my child (gladly, I should add)
I must say I find this mixture quite delightful: promote single parent families with the implicit assumption that fathers are worthless, expect non deadbeat fathers like me to pay for those single mothers with my tax money (while still berating me for being a man)…..
and then also implying some kind of “patriarchal” or “racist” conspiracy when single moms (and groups like blacks, not “Blacks”, who have 80% missing fathers) demonstrate why matriarchies never work, because they end up with lower economic levels than two-parent families while raising children suffering from much worse education, crime rates etc.
Bravo. Takes some doing, that.
Democrats have been trying to stop the tsunami? Democrats have created this situation! D policies have incentivized single motherhood. D policies have shot the economy to s*** (remember two weeks to slow the curve? Yeah, we see you too.) At this point, it is a house of cards being played like Jenga. And the edifice is getting pretty shaky.
There is some of that in South Africa too. Though of course the child grant isn’t enough to fully support the child besides very basic needs.
I think South Africa is their paradigm!
Yep.
I was raised in a world in which our elites displayed “commonplace incompetence”: The kind of incompetence to which we are all prone and with consequences that can be rectified. We seem to have entered a phase in which we are governed by people who display an outrageousily spectacular level of incompetence. People who can’t tie their own shoe laces without falling over. Eventually such regimes collapse. I wonder what will replace this lot.
One of the most profound comments today. Thanks, T.N.
Which begs the question…. Why are so many women so quick to have children when they cannot afford them? I exclude from this some who do not have access to birth control in paternalistic societies. I also understand that some have circumstances that have changed (bearing in mind that many women have built in some fat when the decision is made to have a child).
As an example I have a helper who works for me one day a week. She is poor and she is single. She had a good education. She decided in the middle of the pandemic in a poor country with a failing economy…. to have a child.
Having children is the most normal thing in the world and the US fertility rate is below replacement levels. Obviously, the situation is a bit different in countries like Afghanistan or Niger but American women have access to contraception and abortion on demand. There are many welfare programs too. As the author points us, these programs are so inefficient and numerous that it can be quite complicated to navigate them. Perhaps, rather than blaming people for doing something entirely natural, we should focus on the behaviours and the perverse government policies at play? As another example, the US spends more on healthcare and education than many countries that produce superior outcomes for their citizens. This is the real issue. The country is entirely dysfunctional and throwing more money at these problems won’t solve them.
Having children may be normal, but some people consider their economic circumstances before having them and limit the size of their families on the same basis. Others don’t seem to consider this until the stark realities hit them.
It is this notion that one should normally or automatically have a child that has lead us to this place of huge growths in populations that are not sustainable to humanity or to the environment. If you cannot support a child well until their majority, don’t have the child. If you are concerned about the future of the child in the world or the country, don’t have the child. If you can support your children, just severely limit the amount of children you have and show them the way to live with the least amount of damage to the environment.
If the birth rate falls below 2.1 per woman, though, you end up with an ageing population, which is a recipe for disaster. It is why China will never be the power it imagines; the one-child policy will wreck their demography as sure as eggs is eggs.
Eventually balance would be found and people have to die. There are too many people. All this continuous obsession about growth of everything, excepting things that really matter.
So only the wealthy should be allowed to have children? Seeing as the wealth in America is being owned by an ever decreasing percentage of the population, and the birth rate is already below replacement levels, this sounds like a recipe for disaster
I suppose I’d be guilty of an ic or an ism if I pointed out that no one is forced to have children before they can emotionally and financially support them. And that teaching people that single parent families are exactly morally equivalent to stable married families is the root cause of a lot of society’s problems.
“may have been less likely to send their kids to school where in-person learning was available. But many Black mothers tell reporters and researchers they’re making the obvious choice to keep their kids safe and alive,”
How is that Obvious? I find the value assumptions by the writes less than neutral.
But what I keep wondering is if the Government is going to pay all the $20 Billion back rent when the system catches up – well, what about those who paid? I have a couple rentals and they paid every month. Is it not unfair to them then, I mean they could have not paid, they are not well off, have children. Isn’t it kind of a perverse incentive for them? The rental company which handles my property said they had no problem of people not paying to take advantage of this, and they mostly have lower income working people.
It’s a non-sequitur in a very, very poorly written and blatantly racist article.
AND by all the reason – the children referred by this loon of a writer are the ones who can LEAST afford to miss school, no matter what the risk, as it likely will doom them to unemployability as a missed year of school is never made up by any but the best students.
Of course, it’s unfair to the people who have paid. Have you seen the D plan for student loan debt? There is a pattern…..
The flip side of that quote is that other parents are ignoring this ‘obvious choice’ by sending their kids back to school. That is offensive. I’m sure most parents weigh the risks before making a choice. And the evidence suggests that young people are not affected badly by Covid anyway. I suspect there are other reasons why they are not sending their children to school that are not being investigated by the researchers.l
What’s another $20 billion when we are already paying about $400 billion per year in interest alone on our national debt?
An article full of empathy but devoid of common sense.
“Nearly 19 million children in the US live with single parents, and more than 80% of them live with single mothers. These are the families who are largely struggling;”
I am not crticising single mothers. I accept that most single mothers are doing their best, and that single mothers are single for a variety of reasons, many of which are outside of their control. But they are not families. Our social structure is based on the family and if you live outside of a family you will usually struggle. That is just the way it is.
A lot of women have a child like they want a doll. I have seen this in certain communities where so many have a child in their teens – with no responsible father in sight.
In USA they do it for the welfare $$$ – this is fact, I know these groups, it is just thought to be what one does, it is how they make a living. The social costs are devastating.
Most of the single mothers are doing a cr*p job. I know the welfare people, they do a horrible job of parenting almost all the time –
It is clear this author has no clue about America. First of all women with children who are poor get assistance. Housing, food and medical. None of that ends. In addition there are more job openings in America right now than there are unemployed. Wages have gone up even for unskilled jobs of which there are a plenty. Somebody has to explain why someone cannot get a job and pay rent. The extra unemployment money from the Feds is going to officially run out but in Progressives states they are being allowed to use the extra money given to them in the American Rescue Bill Biden passed early in his term.
If you were a women who could pay rent prior to the pandemic I cannot think of one reason you cannot do so now. If your rent was being paid by Housing Assistance money prior to the Pandemic it has continued. The behemoth Democrats are proposing includes child care. I agree this could free up single mothers to get a job or go to school or learn a trade….But everything the Govt. gives out in poverty programs or the working poor should have a time limit. With the exception of the afflicted and addicted or the mentally insufficient….able bodied people should be assisted until they learn a trade and can get a job. Child care is a problem….I believe we could afford child care is we could shrink the rolls of dependent single mothers…..One way we could do that is to encourage children with marriage then without. Outcomes for those women and their children are way better.
Excellent responses below to this article, as I agree with most. However, I’d like to make two simple points. First, this is a classic example of government stepping in to create a massive problem and then having to step in and “help”, creating more need for Government.
And does anyone now wonder why the traditional family unit model has survived for 5,000+ years of recorded human history?
By the way, I am working on a campaign to eliminate all bridges, overpasses and sign posts from our roadways. This is due to the growing number of people who are dying in accidents while driving their vehicles into them while trying to text on their smart phones. 🙂
The USA housing market is incredibly tight at the moment and prices have been reaching historic highs. Compounding the problem is the million plus illegal immigrants coming over the border, then add in 100k Afghani refugees for a particularly interesting challenge.
The million plus immigrants coming over the border and counting. Counting till when one has to ask….
America is a hopelessly divided society at present. But are the poor the agents of this division? Do they make up the ranks of the Proud Boys or Antifa activists? Or is it, as Peter Turchin would suggest, disappointed elite aspirants who are raging against America? I think the latter and they are mostly White and housing for the homeless poor is not really part of their agenda. I guess this piece (which really is about the poor) made me understand the force of the remark that the book “White Fragility” and the rest of it is all about White people.
“…single mothers are going to lose their homes…”. But they are not THEIR homes, are they. Landlords unable to keep up their mortgages because of rent deadbeats are losing their homes.