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The Safe Families dinner and Rob Henderson memoir I wrote about last month got me thinking more about “the relationship between foster care and homelessness”: That’s the title of a paper delivered at a 1996 conference hosted by the American Public Welfare Association and based on client files and case data from 21 homeless service organizations located in every region of the United States. Of the 1,134 homeless individuals covered by the study, 36 percent had a foster care history. The paper’s authors, Nan P. Roman and Phyllis B. Wolfe, determined that “the foster care system can fail to deal adequately with problems caused by sexual abuse, physical abuse, or troubled or dysfunctional families — that is to say, with Read More ›

Seattle’s nonprofit affordable-housing providers are finding themselves in deep water. According to an Alex Fryer column in the Seattle Times, the City of Seattle has recently given $14 million in emergency funding to affordable housing nonprofits and developers in an attempt to stabilize them and mitigate their losses. The article reports the financial losses of several nonprofit housing providers due to non-payment of rent, costly evictions, vacancies, and behavioral challenges with tenants. However well-intentioned the efforts to finance nonprofit housing have been, the properties have been plagued by policies that strip tenants of accountability at the cost of landlords and a legal system that seemingly stonewalls attempts to remove non-paying or destructive tenants. But the problem isn’t isolated to urban Read More ›

Rob Henderson’s Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (Gallery Books, 2024) is well worth reading. I’ll give you two reasons Henderson’s life and book are not exceptional, then two reasons why they are. 1. Sad to say, Henderson’s background does not make his book exceptional these days. Mother: drug addict. Father: nowhere in sight. Number of foster care placements: ten, more than the national average of seven or eight. Once a child gets past three he often lives with dread, the word Henderson says best summarizes his feelings while growing up and sliding down. He dreads “suddenly being moved somewhere else. . . . The dread was sharp — I’d see an unfamiliar car outside or Read More ›