Why You Aren’t Homeless: How Privilege & Fortune Shape the Shelter Census


News

July 15, 2020

Rhonda Jackson never really thought about becoming homeless until, one day, she was.

Jackson and her children were living with her grandmother, who she cared for in the family’s Springfield Gardens home. But when her grandmother died, Jackson and her kids were left without a home. It was a shock to Jackson, now 59 and living in an apartment in Williamsburg that she secured through an affordable housing lottery.

“I grew up with the best things in life that my family could get me,” she says. “Most people don’t think about homelessness or being homeless until it directly affects them. I didn’t.”

Still fewer think about what it means to not be homeless, Jackson says.

Read the full story here.

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