Jeff Hobbs is the author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was made into the 2024 film Rob Peace. He is also the author of Show Them You’re Good and Children of the State.
What’s the big idea?
At the heart of Seeking Shelter is Evelyn, a mother who, with her young children, spent five years without a stable home in Los Angeles. Through her resilience, adaptability, and sheer will, she was able to escape the survival saga that had become her life. The urban wilderness of modern America would not be so unforgiving for homeless families if housed communities supported new policies.
Below, Jeff shares five key insights from his new book, Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America. Listen to the audio version—read by Jeff himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. American lessons about happiness and success don’t apply to those without shelter.
A part of growing up for most Americans included lessons from parents and teachers about finding your passions, following your dreams, being curious, working hard, working smart, and taking time to slow down. These are some of the gems of a society that values individual agency and celebrates upward mobility. A multi-billion-dollar industry of inspirational books and other products tailor these very lessons to different demographics of people.
Now consider Evelyn, who lost her home due to domestic violence, and a typical day in which her first priority was getting her young children to school by 8:05 a.m. and then getting herself to work on time. Some days, they might have been waking up in a cheap motel an hour or more away, while others were spent sleeping in her Toyota SUV. Imagine the process of washing and dressing to be presentable for school. Then, imagine Evelyn’s workdays as a restaurant server on her feet without pause. There was no option for her to spend an hour and a half on hold with city housing in hopes of receiving shelter space. Instead, after work and school pickups came the real pressure and fear, as each passing minute inched night closer. Those urgent and dire minutes were spent looking for a place where they might rest safely before doing it all again.
For families lacking the most basic element of stability—a home—the traditional lessons on how to get ahead are not relevant. This disconnect has to do with money, but even more so, it has to do with time and the starkly different value that one minute can hold. In Evelyn’s case, every minute was so desperate that there was never time to think realistically about what her passions were, and there was no time to make plans for anything not directly related to food and shelter. No time to breathe or meditate or form long-term goals. The only goal was survival that night. The one luxury Evelyn took the time and money for was flowers. She bought a small bouquet wholesale each week to maintain some small glimmer of beauty in their lives.
2. Most homeless families don’t want you to know that they are homeless.
For years, Evelyn knew that if she wasn’t able to be on the phone with Social Services at exactly 5:01 p.m. each evening, then there was a likelihood that she and her children would have to sleep in her SUV. An illness or a parking ticket could mean not being able to feed those children. She went over elementary school homework assignments in between working restaurant shifts while fearing retaliation from her ex-husband. She did all of this in secret and almost entirely alone because seeking traditional support sources or making her plight known could put her on the radar of city agencies and threaten her children’s future, possibly resulting in being relocated, separated, or worse. Even in the best case, her children would likely lose their placement in the public school that was the only stable and welcoming entity in their lives.
“She taught her children to lie as a matter of surviving together.”
For Evelyn, the key to keeping her family intact and her children in school was how successful she was at hiding her situation. She drilled into her children the understanding that no teacher or counselor at school or anywhere else, no matter how kind and nurturing, could know that they were homeless. She taught her children to lie as a matter of surviving together.
The wide public perception of homelessness in America has to do with panhandlers in transit stations and long lines outside of soup kitchens. But there is this huge population of people without shelter who are not in those places because they are striving to go unnoticed. These are parents who work and children who go to school, hundreds of thousands of people all around us who might have recently been evicted or fired from a job but are doing their best to function without much help in a society that makes it dangerous for them to ask for it.
3. Homeless children carry unseen social burdens that lead to lasting cycles of struggle.
The psychology of growing up is tightly entwined with the psychology of belonging, and when young people like Evelyn’s children are not permitted to confide the vital details of their lives even to close friends, then they are deprived of the essential experiences of honest relationships. Imagine growing up in a situation in which the risks of friends and teachers learning where you go after school include being pulled from that school, taken away from your family, and placed in the foster system. This burden is heavy, and it is embedded in every moment of daily social and academic life for thousands of children. And that is on top of the more obvious circumstance of not being able to afford supplies, clothes that fit right, shoes with intact soles, or going to lunch with people you like.
Evelyn’s oldest son, Orlando, was starting seventh grade when his family was cast into homelessness. He was good at math and gamed out their food budget each month. He was often responsible for four younger siblings so that Mom could work. He took pride in all that. He also made friends skateboarding until his mother realized that any injury requiring medical care could ruin their finances, so he had to stop. From a distance, he would watch kids skate and buy food he couldn’t afford. He couldn’t text with them without a phone data plan. He didn’t know how to play the video games they played. A sleepover at a friend’s house meant good food and a comfortable place to sleep, but it also made him feel like he was abandoning his mother and younger siblings. A lot of pressure, a lot of friction, a lot of taut strings yanking in different ways. He was not permitted to express these feelings. This was a lonely way to experience childhood.
4. Local communities take action to combat homelessness too late.
Housing affordability appeared near the top of many 2024 election-year polls regarding issues that Americans cared about. But for most Americans, even those who reside in cities with staggering disparity, homelessness remains an abstract concern. It is an important topic at family dinner tables, school classrooms, and places of worship. But homeless populations still tend to be concentrated in distinct out-of-the-way areas of cities. They are geographically othered. This isolation from mainstream society is intentional on the part of civic agencies, as it is easy to herd transient people around through policing, sanitation practices, and the placement of services. Housed people feel a lot better about their neighborhoods and elected officials when their concern for the homeless crisis can be expressed in spaces of their own choosing without the discomfort of direct interaction and seeing scarcity in the flesh.
“This isolation from mainstream society is intentional.”
To be fair, most people work hard for their homes and take pride in their communities and schools, and people want to feel safe. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t matter. But when homelessness in a community is no longer abstract—when there are so many human beings surviving on the street that housed people are constantly confronted by this tragedy—that is when voters care concretely in the form of funding measures and demanding changes that drive new public policy. But by the time this happens, the existing infrastructure of services has already been maxed out. It’s been overrun by need. This is Evelyn’s Los Angeles. This is a lot of cities right now. Since politics only gets moving at this crisis point, the results of that movement nearly always resemble triage at best. This cycle is centuries old. Homelessness is a humanitarian issue that no city in America has ever gotten ahead of.
5. Powerless people are unimaginably strong, smart, capable, and caring.
Evelyn is a person who, through bad timing, bad luck, bad people, and a few decisions she wishes she could take back, was left without hope amid a broken American dream. She was a single, working mother of five, homeless in one of the country’s most merciless housing markets. Yet she found a way to both earn money for subsistence and care enough for her children to see them off to school every morning and pick them up each evening, feeding and nurturing them in between, volunteering at their school, going to sports games and dance recitals, taking them to the beach and museums on weekends. She found shelter, and she evaded people and agencies that threatened her family.
Her oldest son is now a college freshman, and her younger children are all on different pathways to college. One is great at science. One loves baseball. One considers herself more of an artist. They can do and be these things because Evelyn believed in herself and her children amid a society that didn’t believe in them at all—that was, at some points, pitying, at other points repulsed, and widely apathetic to their hardships. The sheer force of her love and determination and self-advocacy in this story still overwhelms me.
The one thing that can truly help families like Evelyn’s is a community ethos that shares even a measure of that belief. Evelyn eventually found transitional housing in a small, faith-based shelter in a residential area of greater Los Angeles. This group provided her with counseling and childcare without condition or judgment. She could find decent work nearby, and her kids could all go to a good public school and form meaningful relationships within a few square blocks. They could play safely outside and ride bikes. Evelyn could pick her flowers.
Here, Evelyn finally had the time and calmness necessary to plan a future thoughtfully. The shelter wasn’t going to turn her out the next morning, demand hours of driving, waiting in line, or waiting on hold for help. Such altruism is exceedingly rare in cities today. There’s no lack of organizations equipped to provide it or money to pay for it. But it’s hard to move this idea through local zoning restrictions because it’s hard to find welcoming local communities—homeowners who will assume the mantle of helping the unhoused where they themselves live.
If every neighborhood in every city afflicted by severe housing disparity made the effort to host a single shelter housing six to ten vetted families for a few months at a time, then there would no longer be homelessness in this country for working families. Hundreds of thousands of children would be able to free themselves from this American cycle of isolation.
To listen to the audio version read by author Jeff Hobbs, download the Next Big Idea App today:
