In This Town, Even the Mayor Is Parenting Through Housing Insecurity

In Meadville, Pennsylvania, housing insecurity is endemic, painful, and threatening family life.

"Living housing insecure is the norm here."

Jaime Kinder often walks the few blocks across town to work. Her office is the first door on the right in the city building, and it’s where she conducts many of the meetings she holds as mayor of Meadville, Pennsylvania. Kinder is in a unique situation as mayor—when taking office, she became Meadville’s first female mayor and the small city’s first Black mayor. In this capacity, she gives voice to historically overlooked populations, including those families who currently live as housing insecure.

Kinder is also a single mother and, like many of her residents, her family knows how hard it is to secure decent housing as she has navigated a years-long process of attempting to purchase the home she currently lives in.

Kinder says, as a mother, she often feels like she’s failing when she’s living housing insecure, and she knows her story is just one of many. While her situation is somewhat unique—she currently has an article of agreement (something similar to a “rent to own” arrangement) with the home’s owner—the precarity for her family is very real. At the moment she is struggling to have the home appraised for a sum that would allow her to secure a mortgage to cover the remaining payment due to the owner which would allow them to finalize the sale and formally have the deed in her name. The historic home stood vacant for years and requires so many structural repairs that balancing the appraisal value with the cost of repairs is complicating the road to a mortgage even further. Still, Kinder remains realistic and candid about the struggles she faces.

“My story is not sad. It is what is happening,” she says. “It is the norm here. Whatever people are pretending is happening, this is what is normal, and it’s not OK. There are people living in tents along the river. People living in our town without plumbing, with raw sewage coming out of the drain. And why do they deserve that? Because they don’t have money? They’re human beings.”

A Renter's Crisis

Dr. Madeleine Hamlin, a visiting assistant professor of geography at Colgate University, is an urban scholar whose research includes housing, race, and class in U.S. cities. Hamlin says the country has been dealing with a housing insecurity crisis for decades. She notes that while one of the most visible examples of this was the mortgage foreclosure crisis of 2008, in recent years it has become predominantly a renter crisis.

“There’s a huge percentage of the population that’s what’s known as ‘rent burdened,’” Hamlin says, pointing to the formal definition that designates families and individuals paying more than thirty percent of their monthly income towards rent. “[Thirty percent] is a really hefty burden to pay,” she says, noting that for many individuals, designating that much of their income for housing might be unrealistic. “You can see how housing could be really difficult to secure for people who are potentially paying less than that.”

The majority of Meadville residents rent their homes, and nearly one in five residents lives at or below the poverty line. With these demographics, Kinder says she’s not surprised that her city is dealing with a crisis of housing insecurity.

“The minimum wage is $7.25. You tell me how anybody affords anything here,” she says. “And that’s by design. We’ve created this crisis, and then we pretend we don’t know how it happened. People don’t have equity in where they live. They don’t have dignity in where they live.”

Though housing insecurity disproportionately affects families living in poverty, Hamlin says this can also intersect with and compound other forms of disadvantage, noting that structural discrimination has existed in the housing market for decades.

“If you’re a racial minority it’s harder to access housing [because] you tend to be discriminated against in rental markets,” she says. “There are studies that show that queer people, disabled people, single mothers with lots of children, all of these groups get discriminated against in rental markets and it’s really hard to uphold renters' rights. A lot of states don’t have robust housing discrimination protections in place for renters, especially for low-income groups.”

Living in Fear of Eviction, With No Place To Go

Kinder has seen the effects of living with housing insecurity as a family not only through her time as mayor but also through her own experience watching her mother raise six children.

“My mother lived in the same house for 40 years [...] When she first moved in she had six kids. We lived in [...] two bedrooms and a closet. And she couldn’t move. Number one, she couldn’t afford it, number two, no one wanted brown kids in this place.”

Kinder says that families like hers who live in poverty have few opportunities to make real choices about their living situations. “We are forced to make choices with no time, no resources. We could make better choices if we had more time or better resources.”

Autumn Vogel serves on Meadville’s city council and has been working to create protections for renting families, such as a rental licensing program that would require an inspection once every two years for every rental unit in the city. The program is designed to ensure safe housing for renters, noting these protections are especially important to families with children.

“Housing security is important especially when you’re a parent,” Vogel notes, pointing out that before Meadville’s anti-retaliation ordinance was approved this spring, many renters, especially parents, were hesitant to report unsafe living conditions out of fear they would later be evicted for speaking out.

“People are worried about safety conditions for their kids,” she says. “but also worried about not being displaced because they have kids.”

While Meadville has emergency eviction funds available to families through both local and county programs, income guidelines often exclude families who don’t meet official requirements for aid.

"Many families may struggle but aren’t defined as ‘impoverished’ because the poverty line is so low,” Hamlin says. She notes that it's difficult to capture a full picture of who is affected by these issues because the U.S. government’s statistical definition of poverty doesn’t adequately account for individual circumstances, for example, how much a family of five might need to spend to heat their home during an especially cold winter vs. what a family of three might need to spend.

Other times, there simply aren’t enough resources to meet the needs of local populations. The need for assistance is urgently clear in organizations like the Center for Family Services (CFS) that assist housing insecure families in Meadville.

Diann Bolharsky, Housing Department Supervisor and HUD-certified housing counselor, has worked with Meadville’s CFS office for more than eighteen years and says the housing situation in her city has become progressively worse in the past decade.  Bolharsky shares that she has seen that housing insecurity has obvious impacts on family life and that many of the calls she receives are from parents who fear eviction.

“I have a lot of calls from people who are just so scared of being homeless,” Bolharsky says, noting that her office often doesn’t have enough resources to support the local population, let alone offer aid to the residents of neighboring counties that call for help.

“There’s only so much money a year, and we ran out the first of May,” she says, pointing to the fiscal calendar her office works within. “That’s two and a half months with no money at all. And I’m getting eight to ten calls a week about rent, and I just have to tell people, ‘I’m sorry, call back in July.’”

A Crisis of Affordability

Bolharsky says that even if families do want to move, the current rental market is so unaffordable for the majority of residents that they have no option but to stay where they are, regardless of the conditions they live in.

“There aren’t a lot of affordable options. The places that do have anything remotely affordable have very long waiting lists. A couple of [the landlords] I talked to last week have upwards of 50 people on the waiting list. And that’s not even subsidized housing, that’s just private landlords with decent prices. People on the list for subsidized housing—it’s just as bad.”

Jessica Matthews is a mother of three and has often experienced housing insecurity throughout her adult life. Matthews, who is currently involved in a dispute with her landlord, says she is concerned she will become homeless again. Above everything else, she worries about what effect living in a shelter has on her children.

“When we were living in the shelter, you can’t sleep at night, especially as a mother,” she says.

“Bringing your children to a shelter is horrible. They do everything they can to make it homey there, and they’re very kind, but it’s degrading. It feels like you’re not providing for them in a way. You feel stuck.”

“You definitely feel like you’re in poverty. It’s depressing. It’s not a time I ever want to go back to. As a parent, you would do anything [for your children] and that’s why we work with bad landlords because we’re so desperate not to go back to a shelter.”

“Especially for a mom, it’s the worst. It’s so important to be able to feel like you’re giving them a safe, clean, healthy home. It’s everything. There’s no price tag for that.”

Uninhabitable for a Newborn

While many associate renting with apartment complexes or houses in town split into units, another common form of tenancy for many living in the United States is found in the increasingly prevalent mobile home parks.

McKenzie Smith lives with her boyfriend and his 7-year-old daughter, and only recently found an apartment that they feel offers a safe and healthy environment for their family. They recently left a troubled rental situation at a local trailer park with an unresponsive landlord. Smith says it was immediately clear that her unit needed substantial repairs to make it liveable, but that the landlord was at times absent for weeks on end, or completely unresponsive.

Smith says that as early as two days following her move-in date, she and her family began to experience a variety of problems within their unit ranging from inadequate to non-existent water pressure to fecal matter coming up into their home from a malfunctioning sewage system. At one point, a leak in the roof became so bad that the addition to the unit began to separate from the trailer, and groundwater seeped into the carpet.

“There was often no [running] water at all,” Smith says. “Or if there was water, it would literally trickle to the point where we couldn’t take a shower in our own home. We had to pay for a hotel for a night just to get clean.”

Of one particularly horrific experience, Smith recounts how she had to use every towel in the trailer to mop up excrement that had come up out of their toilet. She said it was days before her landlord responded to her call.

“She came over with a wax ring for the toilet and said, 'Here you can put this on it, this might fix it,'” Smith says. “She never came back again. We did not hear from her until about three days before we moved out.” At the time, Smith was six months pregnant.

Smith and her family continued to endure unsanitary living conditions in part because they had nowhere to go. Although she began searching for a new apartment immediately, she and her partner faced rejection after rejection due to a felony record from his youth. As her pregnancy progressed, she became desperate to find a new home for her family.

“Our trailer was uninhabitable for a newborn,” Smith says, noting that they spent approximately $900 in application fees for other apartments. “I would tell them, ‘You’re going to reject us because of his background,’” she says but notes that they were encouraged to apply regardless and promised a chance at acceptance. “They always ended up with someone else,” she says. “Everybody was rejecting us everywhere no matter what.”

Thankfully, Smith and her family were offered a rental through an acquaintance, but though they’ve relocated, Smith still thinks about the families she left behind at the park. Another family she knew told her they didn’t have working water in their trailer for the entire three years they lived there. The water they do have is “pitch black,” Smith says.

“They take sponge baths or go elsewhere to shower,” Smith says. “They still live there.”

Smith’s neighbors are not alone. Joe Tompkins, a member of Common Roots, a local rental cooperative in Meadville, PA says that many properties in town are not well maintained.

“I’ve [...] been in places where the electrical wiring is not in good condition, where there’s leaks in the home with water filtering through the light systems,” Tompkins says. “There was a gentleman that had mushrooms growing in his bathroom because of the mold situation, and I’ve heard stories of people with lead in their homes and it’s making their children sick, and I’ve heard of people developing asthma and other issues because of mold conditions.”

Tompkins agrees that affordability is a problem across the board.

“I think health and safety is a big problem and obviously that’s going to affect people in their day-to-day life,” he says. Unfortunately, those renters living in unhealthy conditions have little choice but to stay where they are.

“When over half the city struggles to pay for basic things like housing, food, and transportation, they don’t have many options when it comes to leaving town or finding another place to live,” Tompkins says. “I shouldn’t even say ‘many.’ They have virtually no options. “

A Path Forward

Little by little, local advocacy groups are working to change the status quo for residents and families living in Meadville.

Kinder says that despite her own struggles with housing insecurity, she’s proud of what they’ve accomplished thus far through coordinated community efforts.

“We’re starting to try to fix the problem of people having dignity where they live,” she says. “Everybody who is paying rent to someone should have a roof over their head that is safe, be able to walk on a porch that is safe, they should be able to be ok with their children playing in this home without falling through the floor, without having lead lined bones. That’s what we’re creating here.”

Kinder notes that as a mother, housing security is a very personal issue. “I believe in ‘it takes a village to raise a child,’” she says. “It truly does. And if people won’t take care of their rentals, it’s the government’s responsibility. If you can’t do the right thing, it needs to be regulated,” she says of the recent rental registration ordinance the council passed last December.

“I feel blessed that I get to know the situation they’re in so that I can understand that it is urgent, that it is right now that these people don’t have a choice,” she continues. “When I say I’m giving voice to people it’s because I am people. I am the people that I’m talking about. I’m thankful that I get to be that for them.”

“When you plan for the poor, for the most marginalized, everybody wins, everybody is elevated,” Kinder says. “Everybody does better.”

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