Breathless Media: Kooky Millennials Choose to Live Out of Their Cars!
We can’t allow the Christian Science Monitor to frame homelessness as a “cool” lifestyle choice
The media loves a trend piece. There’s nothing an assignments editor loves more than being on the cutting edge of some craze or another; they’re always eager to send their youngest reporter to go and talk to average folks about the latest novelty to dominate the popular conversation. Here’s an incomplete list of fads that journalists have gushed over in the last year or so:
- Pokemon Go!
- Stranger Things!
- The Mannequin Challenge!
- Fidget spinners!
- The eclipse!
- Living out of your car!
So, uh, about that last one. I know it doesn’t really fit the fun and frivolous tone of the rest of the list, but if you read Jessica Mendoza’s gushy piece for the Christian Science Monitor yesterday, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a hot new trend. Headlined “Why it’s becoming cool to live in your car — or a 150-sq. ft. apartment,” Mendoza’s piece begins with a pair of jaw-dropping paragraphs:
When Shawna Nelson leaves her office in Seattle’s suburbs, she does what 28-year-olds often do: dines with friends, goes out dancing, or sees a show. Sometimes she hits her swanky gym.
But at the end of the night Ms. Nelson always returns to Dora, the dusty Ford Explorer she calls home. In the back, where a row of seats should be, lies a foam mattress covered with fuzzy animal-print blankets. Nelson keeps a headlamp handy for when she wants to read before bed. Then, once she’s sure she won’t get ticketed or towed, she turns in for the night.
I know you’re probably rubbing your eyes and wondering if you’re missing something, but let me assure you that you’re not. This is homelessness. Mendoza is describing homelessness as though it’s a luxury item, a summer spent backpacking in Guatemala.
But to be clear, Nelson is, simply, living out of her car. The piece is topped with a giant photo of Mendoza sitting in the back of Dora the Explorer (get it?) with her giraffe-print fleece blankets, her clothes on hangers, and an ominous roll of toilet paper that might escape your attention at first but which grows to dominate the picture after you notice it for the first time.
Mendoza frames it as a decision freely made by a quirky millennial, rather than a choice forced by a series of systemic failures in the structure of our economy:
“I still strive to have some sort of routine,” says Nelson, who started living in her car about a year ago. “Would I rather spend $1,200 on an apartment that I’m probably not going to be at very much, or would I rather spend $1,200 a month on traveling?”
For her, it was an easy choice.
Aside from a later mention of others who are “hitting the road in a truck or van, communing with nature and like-minded people along the way,” that’s the last we hear of Nelson in the piece. We don’t get to hear about the details of her day-to-day life (What does she do with that roll of toilet paper when she needs to use the bathroom? Where does she shower?) or the difficulties of her lifestyle (a young woman sleeping alone in her car in out-of-the-way places for a year has undoubtedly faced some uncomfortable situations) or how she survives when the weather turns cold. She’s presented as a freewheeling bon vivant, living life without many of the household burdens that the rest of us face.
Presenting Nelson’s experience as a hip alternative lifestyle is a reckless decision that justifies an increasingly unequal system. Someone enduring financial hardship who reads Mendoza’s piece could easily be convinced that the “cool” glamor of Nelson’s life is an appealing alternative. It transforms homelessness into something attractive, thereby guiding readers into an onerous cycle of poverty and neglect.
I don’t have any insight into Nelson’s mind. I suspect that if rent in the greater Seattle area was available at reasonable rates, she wouldn’t live in a car. But the fact is that whether she truly wants to live out of her car or not, she is, officially, homeless. (The city of Seattle estimates that roughly 40 percent of its homeless population lives out of cars or trucks.)
On the city and county level, we have procedures in place to help homeless citizens break the cycles of poverty and systemic failures that have put them out on the street. Most of us acknowledge that we must do more to bolster those systems and make them more efficient. Every Seattleite should have the opportunity to create a stable life for themselves—and housing is the most important aspect of any modern life. It is incredibly hard to secure a job, a bank account, and all the other necessities without a physical address.
At some point, the “cool” cache will wear off and they’ll need assistance to obtain security. And studies show that there is a high rate of recurrence in the homeless population — people who experience homelessness once have a more than one-in-five chance of becoming homeless again. One of the best ways to prevent homelessness is to stop people before they become homeless the first time.
As we can see on the streets of Seattle every day, the status quo is nearing a tipping point—the gap between the haves and the have-nots is expanding to unsustainable levels. If you keep pushing people out into the streets, you’ll eventually be outnumbered—and those are the societal conditions for a paradigm shift that people in power will not like at all.
