Without a Net: Middle Class and Homeless (with Kids) in America: My Story

Young, educated, and homeless: one woman’s account.

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The summer she turned 25, Michelle Kennedy spent three months living in a decrepit Subaru station wagon with her three young children. They stayed in a small town on the coast of Maine, and she worked nights as a waitress. The family scraped along by eating ramen noodles, buying clothes at thrift stores, showering at a local truck stop, and sleeping in parking lots.

Many of the details about the family’s day-to-day survival are compelling, but it’s hard to muster much sympathy for Kennedy. After all, the book’s title, Without a Net, is not quite accurate. Kennedy actually does have a safety net: She has parents who care about her and who live 40 miles away. She could have picked up the phone, told them she was sleeping in her car, and asked for help, but instead–driven by a mixture of stubbornness and pride–she decided to persevere on her own.

Kennedy calls herself the “queen of bad judgment,” an assertion that’s hard to contest. She married her high school boyfriend, dropped out of American University, had three babies in quick succession, ran up her credit card debt, then followed her husband to Maine. The husband turned out to be a loser, and when she left him, her station wagon became her temporary home.

The title suggests a book packed with insights about what it means to be middle class and homeless, but Kennedy doesn’t deliver, in part because she writes narrowly about her own experiences. There’s no exploration of the myriad reasons—domestic abuse, drug addiction, a sick child and no health insurance—why educated young people can, and do, end up homeless. And while Kennedy touches briefly on the failure of the social safety net when she describes trying to qualify for Section 8—the federal program that provides housing vouchers to low-income people—she offers no context about the cuts to this program that have exacerbated the nation’s housing crisis.

Kennedy’s perseverance in saving money and finally finding a home for her family is impressive. In the end, though, Without a Net is less a meditation on homelessness than a first-person memoir about the steep cost of bad decisions.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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