Wise lessons from a book about poverty

Homelessness is a clusterfuck

I am currently reading Armoede uitgelegd aan mensen met geld, a book about poverty by Tim ’s Jongers. Honestly, I thought I already understood a fair amount about poverty and financial insecurity. Through my work I often meet people struggling with money, housing, debt and rebuilding their lives.

Even so, this book opened my eyes. Not because it taught me entirely new facts, but because it puts words to something I have been seeing for a long time. One sentence stayed with me above all: “poverty is a clusterfuck”.

When I read that, my first thought was: so is homelessness.

We tend to look at the moment someone becomes homeless. The divorce. The redundancy. The debt. The addiction. But that is usually not where the story starts. It is often the result of years of accumulating vulnerability, bad luck and a lack of opportunity.

The three forms of capital

The book also made me think about my own life. I did not grow up wealthy. After my divorce I was left with two children and a substantial residual debt, because our house was worth less than the mortgage. Financially I was completely on the floor. Yet I got my life back on track relatively quickly. Not because I was stronger or smarter than anyone else. Or because I worked harder. But because I had something I was barely aware of at the time.

Tim describes three forms of capital: financial, cultural and social. Financial capital is money. That I did not have. But cultural capital (education, knowledge, knowing how systems work) and social capital (people who stand beside you, think along with you and open doors) I did have. That made a world of difference.

I had loving family and friends who were there for me. A safety net.

I knew which doors to knock on.

I dared to ask for help.

That gave me confidence in myself and the courage to take steps, even when it was hard.

At Room for Change we meet many people who never had that luck. People who grew up without a solid safety net. Without role models. Without a network. People who learned early on that they mostly have to figure it out alone. Who keep hearing that they are worthless, who are sent from pillar to post and end up feeling that they do not deserve to be helped.

And that touches on another insight from the book: sometimes your postcode says more about your future than your DNA. That may sound extreme, but once you hear the stories of our participants it makes complete sense. Years of insecurity, scarcity and stress do something to a person. To your health. To your confidence. To your belief that life could be different.

So homelessness is rarely only a housing problem

It is a clusterfuck of circumstances that reinforce one another. A shortage of affordable homes, a fragile network, financial stress, bureaucracy, bad luck and sometimes simply too few people around you saying: “Come on, we will sort this out together.”

That is exactly why I believe so strongly in what we do at Room for Change. Not because a hotel room solves every problem. It does not. But because calm is often the first step towards recovery. Because you can only think about tomorrow once you know where you are sleeping tonight. Because you only come out of survival mode when there is a little breathing space. Because you are not a case number but a person, a guest like every other guest in the hotel.

The longer I do this work, the less I believe in self-reliance as an individual achievement. And the more I see how much of our success depends on the people, chances and circumstances we meet along the way.

Or do not meet.

Perhaps the question is not why someone becomes homeless. Perhaps the question is how many dominoes it would take before the same thing happened to you.

PS The book Armoede uitgelegd aan mensen met geld by Tim ’s Jongers comes highly recommended!!