Do you agree or disagree with Desmond’s views on home? “The home is the center of life—a refuge from the grind of work, pressure of school, menace of the streets, a place to be ourselves. Home is the wellspring of personhood, where our identity takes root; where civic life begins; America is supposed to be a place where you can better yourself, your family, and your community” (page 293). How does unstable housing prevent attainment of this kind of life?
This question appears in the Penguin Study Guide.
April 3, 2019 at 1:44 pm
I strongly agree with the notion that having a stable place for one to call home is of the utmost importance in ensuring the betterment of people’s lives. As we discussed last class, the attainment of a home, at least in financial terms, is a vital component of being able to maintain multigenerational financial security. It allows for families to buy into one of the most resilient markets in history, the American housing market, and to be able to benefit from its guaranteed gains over the duration of people’s lifetimes. Owning property is the greatest tool to create and preserve wealth known to society, and provides a strong counter to the systemic forces that disproportionately attempt to push back the advancement of certain groups, particularly people of colour.
Moving away from the financial connotations of having a steady home and homeownership, as a child who lived in 8 different homes growing up, the value of stability in a location in children’s lives can not be underestimated psychologically either. We develop social skills and understand our responsibilities to contribute as members of communities when we have a community that we consistently interact with. We are able to focus more on education and, consequently, the bettering of our lives, when we don’t need to worry about whether we will be able to have access to the most basic necessities. Having to sacrifice food some nights for shelter, or not knowing where these necessities will come from, can overtake people’s lives because we first have to survive before we can be enabled to thrive.
Having a home is, in many ways, feeling a sense of belonging in your community and in society as a whole. We are not a nomadic people – having a place where you know you can consistently return to where there is a roof over your head, even when your life can be uprooted in any which way, is of tremendous value and provides us with the reassurance that we are safe, and allows us to confront those issues instead of spiralling downwards. Stable housing should be a right because it would mean everyone could start working closer to achieving their potential.