If you made a Bingo card for attending a local city government meeting, a couple of squares would be guaranteed winners. The free space would be something like “thinly veiled contempt.” Other spaces might be “Freeattle,” “mandatory rehab” and “why do people living outside get free stuff and I don’t?”
These are the sentiments that get repeated at every single town hall, open forum and Q&A about homelessness. Another — only slightly less rare than the demand to “make homelessness illegal” — is some form of “think of the children.”
I remember someone once crying out, as if in physical pain, “How am I supposed to talk to my kids about the people in tents?”
That’s a strange question. I’m not a parent and never will be, but I am a caretaker of many children by choice, and one thing that I think parents tend to underestimate about their own children is their capacity for empathy. In my experience, if you tell a child that a person is sleeping in a doorway because they have nowhere else to go, they get sad. They want to help. They want to know why. How could someone have nowhere else to go?
And really, if we think about everything else we explain to children — the crucifixion, the old man who fits down the chimney, the fact that the moon is an enormous rock really far away that somehow controls the tides — people who are homeless isn’t that strange.
It seems like the real concern adults have about this isn’t that children will have to see poverty — wait until the grown-ups hear about the tens of thousands of children who live in it! — but that the adults will have to explain how they, as grown-ups, have let this happen. How they have been an accomplice to a system that allows people to end up unshod, unwashed, unfed and unhoused. That all of the lessons they teach their children about being nice, about helping others, only count for some people when you’re an adult. That when you grow up, you can ignore or even revile people you see as a problem.
The larger issue isn’t how to explain to your children why some people live in tents. It’s how to explain to your children that you have, in their name, in their honor, persistently blocked access to housing and other assistance.
Hanna Brooks Olsen is a writer living in Portland.
Read more of the April 10–16, 2024 issue.