Milking the Poor: One Family's Fall Into Homelessness - Christina ...

by Christina Davidson

The descent into homelessness can be equated to falling off a cliff. Wealth buys passage on toll roads a safe distance from the edge, but poverty's foot path runs along the craggy and unstable lip of a gaping precipice. Emma and her family hit a few ledges on the way down, blown by winds of misfortune every time they began to regain stable footing. As Emma describes their story: "It's too much bad luck for anyone to believe." 

At the moment, Emma's fiance, Wilkins, sits in a windowless cell of the Lynnwood City Holding Facility serving a 30-day sentence for driving with a suspended license--the result of an unpaid ticket for driving without insurance. Though the term 'debtor's prison' evokes Dickensian inequalities of a past era, I find it difficult to characterize Wilkins's incarceration as anything more just. "If you don't have money for insurance, and you get pulled over, then you'll never have money again," Emma explains, summarizing the painful lesson realized through her entanglement with Washington law. "Fines rack up every time they make a judgment against you. If you don't respond, if you don't get the notice, then it goes to collections, additional penalties are levied. It just gets worse and worse. And that's how our hole got deeper and deeper." The couple arrived home in Seattle to learn two housemates had abruptly moved out, leaving them $1000 short on rent. "You have 15 days to respond to a ticket, and I got wrapped up in trying to save the house," Emma explains. "I don't know why I bothered. We lost the house anyway. And basically my life has been downhill ever since." After a new housemate's rent check bounced, the landlord filed papers for their eviction. The couple had begun the process of moving belongings to an apartment when Emma, by then seven months pregnant, realized she hadn't felt any movement in her womb for two days. Diagnosed with intense preeclampsia, likely caused by stress, Emma was admitted to the hospital...

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