“‘It’s a catastrophe’: low-income workers get priced out of California beach city” (Guardian) interests me for the linguistic angle:
At first, Jamie Kahn tried ignoring the repeated knocks on her front door. It was September 2015, and the 52-year-old Santa Cruz woman had recently faced an unexpected 40% rent increase that she could not afford.
After missing a rent payment, her new landlords in the northern California beach city quickly moved to evict the single mother and her two children. Kahn thought that if she refused to open the door and accept a summons, she could bide some time to fight the increase from $1,400 to $2,000 a month. She was wrong.
Court records show that a process server repeatedly showed up, and the Kahns ultimately had no choice but to vacate their home of six years.
A sad tale, certainly. Helpless and blameless children are now on the street. But exactly how old are the helpless children?
Her 22-year-old daughter subsequently moved into a small back porch room in a neighboring city. Her 19-year-old son crashed on couches.
Linguistically this could have been described as potentially a three-income household containing three working-age adults. But apparently in 2016 it is still mom and two kids who can’t work. (If the mother didn’t herself work, but instead perhaps had been living on child support profits (that 19-year-old would have just recently aged out of the California system; the mom would have been in better shape if she had sex in Massachusetts where the cashflow continues until the subject of the litigation turns 23), the fact that the children also didn’t or couldn’t work would have been predicted by The Son Also Rises.)
Readers: What do you think? Can a person still be described as a “single mother” once the offspring have become adults?
You read it in the Guardian, right? that’s the answer for ya’.
So a 23yo is a kid if living at home, a 14yo is an adult if he murders someone, and a 16yo having sex can either be an adult or a kid. What a country!
billg
better yet, a 16 year old can be tried as an adult for taking a nude photo of herself/himself therefore producing child pornography:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/21/n-c-just-prosecuted-a-teenage-couple-for-making-child-porn-of-themselves/
Leave it to philg to find the absurdity in the article. 🙂
But it is a good question, when does a person’s single motherhood title end?
We can debate this endlessly, but let’s face it – in the end our liberal friends, the social justice warriors, will have to tell us what the reasonable thresholds would be, because they are the ultimate purveyors of justice.
I’d be interested to see what your ultra-liberal facebook friend would say. I suspect he would dodge the question and tell us the issue is not about single motherhood but affordable housing for all people.
Anyway, the next question here is – why can’t the residents of Santa Cruz simply get more housing made in the area? Is there some rule that restricts the amount of housing to be developed?
This article: http://goodtimes.sc/santa-cruz-news/no-place-to-call-home/ shows how little imagination the City Council has in resolving the problem. The options are to create a new tax to fund public low-income housing, or to raise the minimum wage even further.These are the kind of ‘leaders’ they have ? What about reducing regulations to develop housing?
Let me raise the level of absurdity.
Actually, come to think of it, the term single mother is derogatory. It implies that this person is incomplete because they are single and not attached to a man (or someone who declares themselves to be a man). It also suggests that the two-parent model of a family is the only normal model of a family. I propose a less negative, and more gender neutral term: “individual parent”.
As always, they tell half a story. Why can’t the children go live with their father? Why can’t the children get a job? Why can’t the children go to school and live there? Why can’t mom move in with relatives? Why can’t mom decide to work as a live-in companion for an old lady and get paid under the table so that mom is still eligible for “low or no-income” benefits? Mom has a college degree – what is her work history? Why can’t she get a W-2 job? If she can’t, why isn’t she eligible for SSDI and senior housing (defined in many communities as over age 55 or disabled).
Any apartment that was $2000 last year is $3000 now. It’s very normal for a software engineer to crash on couches during the workdays while owning a house thousands of miles away for the days off. It’s cheaper to buy a house in unemployment heaven & fly a Cessna to work than buy a house near the jobs.
Who knows? The kids could be UCSC students and legal dependents. Maybe the kids work at the surf shops in the summers, and at that late night burger place during the school year to pay tuition.
That still counts as single motherhood in my book.
I feel like some commenters are stretching to fit this story into a prearranged outrage narrative.
None of it detracts from the point of the article, which is that Santa Cruz is changing, and some people can’t afford it any more, and that’s sad for them. Human interest 101. It’s not a new story though. Americans are moving to cities, and the very large ones and the very small ones feel it the most.
Santa Cruz has seemed to me like a city on the cusp for at least 15 years…and I’ve only been visiting since the late 90s.
Any woman who ever gave birth and that is not in the stable relationship can be described as a single mother, obviously.
I think that as long as they are full-time students under 23 you can use the moniker.
Because this poor woman had to stay home and take care of her kids, she was taken out of the job market and her skills became stale. So someone, anyone (the children’s father, us with our tax dollars) should support this single mother for the rest of her natural life. Not only that, but she should be allowed to remain in her community even though rents have risen there. To force her to move to say Fresno where rents are cheaper is nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment.
Whenever a process server comes to your house, all intelligent people know that if you don’t answer the doorbell they can never evict you, ever. This is known as the “head in the sand” strategy. It also works for ostriches.
I also learned this helpful and highly relevant bit of history from the article:
“Santa Cruz…. was originally controlled by Mexico”
That really added to my understanding. I do however wish that they had mentioned that Santa Cruz was the territory of the Ohlone Indians prior to that. That would have been more helpful.
“Recently, skeletal remains of a young Native American child were unearthed during initial site work at a housing development in Santa Cruz. KB Home is attempting to build homes, driveways and a road on top of “The Knoll”, a 6000 year old Ohlone village and burial site.
Ohlone elders have asked that the sacredness of this area be respected. People from all walks of life have come together as the Save the Knoll Coalition to demand that KB Home and the City of Santa Cruz halt development and permanently protect the Branciforte Creek Knoll.”
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/09/07/18689637.php
On the one hand, there is a severe shortage of housing in the area, but if anyone actually tries to remedy that by building some, then the skeleton of a single child buried thousands of years ago makes a whole subdivision sacred soil.
http://patch.com/california/santacruz/kb-homes-wont-build-on-native-american-burial-grounds
In the end, a compromise was reached – they fenced off the mound but the 32 homes were still built, but KB’s costs were surely raised by the delay, legal fees, etc. Who do you think pays for these costs?
And if is is not an Indian burial mound then there must be some endangered guppy or moth that lives in the area. Or something. But no one can understand why the market doesn’t respond by building more housing. Must be some failure of capitalism.