You could be homeless

“Homeless people are all druggies and alcoholics that can’t hold a job.”

Is this true? If it ever was (which, it probably wasn’t ever fully true), it isn’t true anymore. Read this excerpt from The Guardian to meet the new faces of homelessness.

Suburbanites are becoming the new face of homelessness

“People look at me and say, ‘You’re not homeless,’” says Rita Sharratt, a 57-year-old grandmother of three. “And I look right at them and say, ‘Yes I am.’”

Sharratt is sitting at a table at the New Life Evangelistic Center, a homeless shelter in the heart of downtown St Louis. New Life is a 25-minute drive from Bridgeton, Missouri, the quiet suburban town where Sharratt lived until 2013. In her former life, Sharratt was a telecommunications specialist, earning an average of $50,000-$60,000 a year. In 2000 her husband fell ill, and as his health worsened she quit her job to care for him full time. They lived off his retirement money and Social Security until February 2012, when he passed away.

That’s when everything fell apart. Sharratt, now in her 50s, couldn’t find a job in a St Louis economy decimated by the recession, and felt discriminated against due to her age. She burned through her savings, and in 2013 foreclosure on her house began. Sharratt discovered that her mortgage lender had sold her bank loan to another financial establishment, but had written it only in her deceased husband’s name.

“Bank of America would not talk with me to negotiate, no matter what I tried,” she recalls. “They said they couldn’t because my name wasn’t on the loan. In September 2013 they kicked me and my grandchildren out.”

Sharratt and her grandchildren lived in her car, searching for shelter, but there was nowhere for them to go. Not only is there no homeless shelter in Bridgeton, there are no homeless shelters anywhere in St Louis County, a region of over one million people (St Louis the city is not part of the county).

In late 2013, Sharratt was googling shelters at the library and discovered New Life. She has been living and working there ever since.

“I am far from the only person from the suburbs to be here,” Sharratt says. “More and more people are losing their jobs and it’s not because they’re doing something wrong, it’s because companies keep downsizing. People in the suburbs are losing their homes because the money is not there and the banks aren’t willing to negotiate. Middle class people that had never had this problem before are facing it all the time. People you would never think are homeless, are.”

Sharratt’s story is not unusual. Over the past 15 years, suburban poverty and homelessness have grown rapidly. Between 2000 and 2011 the number of poor residents in the suburbs of the US’s largest metropolitan areas grew by 64%. By 2008 the number of suburban poor exceeded the poor in cities by 1.5 million. Whereas once-poor city residents fled to the suburbs for a better life, impoverished suburbanites like Sharratt now rely on city shelters to take them in.

“The hardest thing at first was admitting that I was homeless,” she says. “It took a lot for me to do that, because of the way I was raised, because of the way suburban people think. But it can happen to anyone. One person ends up unemployed, and then you lose your house and everything else. The first thing is you deplete your savings, then your home, then you’re gone.”

Read the full article here

Why does this matter?

Our Method is to relate, empower, and transform the homeless. In order to do this well, we must assess our own heart and opinions of them. You really never know who you’re meeting on the street so please, go with an open mind and check your assumptions at the door – or, the street corner.