On the Frontlines of the COVID-19 Economic Crisis
The COVID-19 pandemic has created huge medical, financial, and emotional burdens for families across the nation. From furloughs to business and school closures, we’ve seen sky rocketing unemployment claims leaving many parents wondering how they will pay their bills and care for their children. While the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has left no one immune to its economic effects, it has disproportionately affected low-income families: school and daycare closures mean many parents cannot work even if they have jobs, and children and their families who depended on school meals are facing greater food insecurity.
Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, family homelessness was a growing crisis in Boston. Over the course of the last year, Boston jumped from the 6th to the 3rd most expensive city to live in and saw the largest growth in family homelessness across the United States. On any given night, Boston has 3,653 homeless children and parents worried about where they will sleep.
But this growing crisis doesn’t end there. In addition to the over 3,600 homeless children and parents in Boston, there are an another 65,000 children and parents in Boston that are living in poverty and teetering on the edge of homelessness. These families have been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic; they are Boston’s “working poor” who after months of business closures and furloughs are now faced with an entrenched, long-term economic disaster that isn’t readily fixed by a $1,200 stimulus check.
FamilyAid Boston now finds itself on the frontlines of the economic crisis that the COVID-19 pandemic has left in its wake.
In addition to its now ongoing daily humanitarian relief to more than 1,200 children and parents, FamilyAid Boston has launched new and innovative prevention programs for families connected to Boston Public Schools (BPS) and Boston Children’s Hospital. Teachers and hospital staff can now contact FamilyAid Boston social workers through online portals that connect families at risk of becoming homeless with support services, immediate crisis intervention, and emergency funds to help them stay in their homes and avoid ever becoming homeless.
When FamilyAid launched these partnerships this past winter, there was no predicting what would happen in the ensuing months. In the first three months of our partnership with BPS, FamilyAid Boston assisted 80 families. By April, a little over a month into the pandemic, that number jumped to 297 families – a 271% increase. By May, the number swelled to 350 families and in these first week in June more than 450 families have been referred to the agency.
This number is only going to grow, as the end of Massachusetts’ moratorium on evictions and supplements to unemployment creep closer.
The latest numbers reveal that in order to afford a 2-bedroom apartment at fair market rent in Boston, a single parent working a minimum wage job would need to work 91 hours each week. With restaurants and retail stores slowly returning, and few minimum wage jobs back to full-time, the reality of keeping a working family safely housed in a 2-bedroom apartment has gone from almost impossible to unfeasible. Many families are staying with friends and families in overcrowded apartments for the short term, exacerbating potential exposure to COVID-19. And, for families with no support system, they’re quickly trying to find some way, anyway, to stay in their homes.
Through FamilyAid Boston’s partnership with BPS and Boston Children’s Hospital, families are being connected to resources they didn’t know existed. Even as they tried to make it on their own, the families referred to us realized without intervention they would soon end up homeless. As always, our goal is to keep children and families in their homes whenever possible. Now, as the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic become clearer, FamilyAid Boston remains as dedicated as ever to keeping families in their homes and bringing innovative programs to our community.
