Columbia’s War on Poverty: Get a job!
Few things irritate me more than when I hear someone telling someone else who is unhoused to “just get a job!” It just so totally misses the reality of what so many in our community are facing. It is too simple to offer any real value.
At the same time, I have to admit that I occasionally have the same thought myself. These things aren’t easy, are they?
For most of us, life has plenty of hardships, but we somehow muddle through. Most of us have a job — more and more we might even have two or three — and we manage to keep a roof over our heads. The kids mostly are not hungry and the bills get paid more often than not.
Why can’t everyone say that? Why can’t all of those folks living unhoused go get jobs and completely get their acts together? If my friends and I can do it, why can’t everybody?
It really is more complicated than that.
For starters, an awful lot of people living unhoused actually do have a job. We have plenty of people at The Salvation Army Harbor House who go to work every day (that’s Columbia’s oldest shelter for the unhoused and the only one serving families with children).
Columbia, like basically the entire country, is in the middle of an historic affordable housing crisis and there just is not enough housing here for people in lower income brackets. If your take-home pay is $2000 per month — realizing that this is pretty rich compared to a lot of folks — it is almost impossible to find something for the recommended $650 or so (one-third or less of take-home). It is harder and harder to find something for $1000.
Just ask the folks over at Love Columbia, one of our city’s most effective non-profit organizations related to affordable housing, and they will tell you how incredibly hard it is to find a place that a lower-income individual or family can afford.
And what about first and last month’s rent? What about a security deposit? Don’t even get me started on a down payment to actually buy a home. It is incredibly hard — and getting harder — for people with not a lot of money to find a place to live that they can afford.
“Get a job” really does absolutely nothing to help these neighbors of ours.
But let’s move beyond the employed unsheltered and think about the young mom living unsheltered with her three kids (a demographic we seem to see more and more). How is she supposed to get a job that pays the rent, other bills, and daycare? Some can, and an awful lot can’t. I am not sure that I could in that circumstance. At the very least, I realize how difficult it is.
These categories of folks are not outliers in the world of people living unsheltered; they are becoming the all-too-common. Then, of course, there are those with mental illness, those living with addiction, and countless others living with problems we mostly can’t see, problems that make getting and keeping a job — or enough of a job — pretty difficult.
So “get a job” is often not as easy do as it is to say, and it is often not the solution needed to a much larger set of problems.
What we need is something more complicated, more nuanced, more tailored to the needs of specific individuals and families, and we need to figure all of that out together — as a community.
Major Kevin Cedervall is a leader of The Salvation Army in Columbia. The Salvation Army provides a wide range of community services to address poverty and other issues, seeking to rebuild lives and create lasting change.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Columbia’s War on Poverty: Get a job!
