Homelessness During Pandemic Making A Bad Situation Worse

Speaker 1: 00:00 A whole generation of children is going through the coronavirus pandemic. The educational challenge of distance learning is talked about a lot, but an even more basic challenge is facing the thousands of children who are chronically homeless and don't have anywhere safe and secure to quarantine San Diego's housing Federation, which advocates for the construction of affordable housing is holding its 30th annual conference this week. And one of the keynote speakers is dr. Megan sandal, who is co-director of the grow clinic at Boston medical center and has been researching children and homelessness for years. Dr. Sandel, thanks so much for joining us. Speaker 2: 00:37 Thank you so much for having me. Speaker 1: 00:40 So start off how, how much of the homeless population around the country is estimated to be children? Speaker 2: 00:45 Yeah, so we estimate actually that they're close to 8 million children that are both either homeless or housing unstable. What we now understand is that simple things like falling behind on rent often force families to make tough choices between say rent and food or heat or cooling costs. And so I think it's really essential for us when we talk about the impact on children and families, we don't just isolated to homelessness. We talk about all forms of housing instability. Speaker 1: 01:17 Yes. Good point. Because when people think about homelessness, they often think of people living either on the streets or in a shelter, but that may not be where many children, children who are homeless are actually living. Um, our regional task force for the homeless in San Diego said there were 223 homeless youth on the streets at last count. But the San Diego unified school district says up to 9,000 of the 100,000 children they educate are technically homeless. Speaker 2: 01:43 Yeah. I think that what's really important to understand is that you're right. There are many forms of homelessness. There can be the Frank homelessness where you'll see a family out in a tent or on the street, but there also are people that are moving frequently. They may be sleeping in a family member's living room and moving from house to house. They may be living over crowded in a single room, in an apartment that they're renting and that overcrowding can place them at risk, particularly right now, as we understand the virus and how it can spread in housing apartments when families are overcrowded. And so when you think about kind of what we're asking home to be right now, it is supposed to be where you learn. It's supposed to be sometimes where you work from it's where you need to rest. And our understanding of the toxic stress, the stress of always being worried about where you're going to sleep at night is something that not only affects, you know, a children, but it affects their parents and affects all interactions, waterfall Speaker 1: 02:48 [inaudible]. Does this have on their health specifically now during the pandemic? Speaker 2: 02:52 Absolutely. So our understanding is not only that it can affect their physical health. So say kids have asthma. They're living in overcrowded situations where there may be other toxic exposures can affect their sleep. It can affect their food insecurity, it can affect their mental health. And then we understand that it affects their parents. Their parents may have higher rates of depression or anxiety, and that can impact how they parent and therefore how their kids are doing. Um, I think that what's really important is that we not only understand it for the physical health, but we understand it for the mental health aspects and we know that it can affect everyone in the household itself. Yeah. Speaker 1: 03:31 You've written that during this pandemic, we've seen families who are homeless presenting to the emergency department without any medical complaints, simply because of a lack of housing. So some families are so desperate just to find a place to be. They go to the hospital emergency room. Speaker 2: 03:46 I think our emergency departments are on the front lines where families have no place to go and don't have a safe place to sleep. And so they'll come and sleep in our ed overnight. And so we really need to be able to invest in important measures. I'm in San Diego measure a is going to be really critical for investing in those housing prescription Speaker 1: 04:07 And measure a would raise about 900 million in order to build, uh, hundreds of affordable homes. Uh you're in Boston. And you talk about a program in your hometown where the, the housing authority and the public schools partnered to house a thousand families of public school kids, uh, at risk of homelessness, where did the money come from that? And has it been effective? Speaker 2: 04:28 Yeah, so we have started, um, uh, partnerships between our local housing authority, our hospital, and other, uh, important social service agencies where oftentimes housing vouchers can be difficult to use many landlords, um, may not be ready to accept them. And so we created a special partnership where we were able to identify the families, get all of the, um, paperwork and other types of certifications they needed and be able to identify the landlords that were then willing to take those vouchers. And we actually showed in a health affairs article that we were able to start to reduce, um, families, anxiety, and depression symptoms. And we were able to improve children's health just by being able to get them that stable, decent, affordable home. Speaker 1: 05:14 The, the pandemic is of course, shedding lights on the pace of racial and economic disparities that we experienced in our communities. Um, what, uh, what is your research discovered about this and how it's affecting children? Speaker 2: 05:27 Housing is probably the biggest illustrator of, of structural racism, um, because of historical ways in which certain families were preferenced to be able to buy houses and build, uh, generational wealth and others were really, uh, functionally shut out of those systems. I think what's exciting about being able to potentially build more affordable housing is, is that it gives that opportunity for families to be able to get into those systems and to be able to create some of that wealth. And it's that actually stimulates the economy. Those are jobs that people are going to be able to have, so that I think it's, I often say affordable housing is the triple bottom line, right? You have a stable home, it improves people's health. You actually create jobs and you actually stimulate the economy and you actually improve being able to have kids in school and to be able to have their parents at work, Speaker 1: 06:21 You are going to be a keynote speaker at the San Diego housing Federation conference this week. They, they are advocating for more affordable housing being built. What is the main point that you want to get across? Speaker 2: 06:32 I think we need to kind of reframe this from kind of the zero sum game. What do you get? What do I give up to? What do we all gain by being together San Diego is that a real cuss point where the community can really pivot up and, and be able to start to, to build that foundation for everyone to be safe? Um, or I think that we can continue this kind of spiral of just skyrocketing rents people, not being able to stay in the community, people not being able to find jobs. Speaker 1: 07:01 Well, thank you for your perspective on this very challenging problem, dr. Sandal, Speaker 2: 07:06 Thank you so much for having me and I hope people will join us on Wednesday for the keynote. Speaker 1: 07:11 We've been speaking with dr. Megan sandal co-director of the grow clinic at Boston medical center.