Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

by Andrea Elliott

At Auburn, the offense was chronic homelessness. And among the offenders were hundreds of children whose families had been identified as “the longest-term stayers” in need of “intensive case management” to find jobs and apartments. It did not help that Auburn’s only housing specialist had died a year earlier, never to be replaced—just as Brooklyn was becoming one of the most expensive rental markets in America. Dasani adapted to Auburn’s dehumanizing rituals. She learned to wait in line for the shelter’s prepackaged “Swedish meatballs,” ignoring the roaches in the water dispenser and the mouse pellets on the ground. She learned to keep time, nudging her mother to meet the shelter’s 10 p.m. curfew. If Chanel missed it, they would be “logged out,” which meant that the entire family would have to travel to the Bronx intake center to get “logged back in,” while the children missed school. She watched in silence as Auburn’s guards rifled through her family’s bags, tossing out glass bottles and canned food in the name of “security”—even as drugs, guns, and lovers came in through the fire escape. She found ways to verbally trick herself. She called her living arrangement “the house,” even after her family was moved into one cramped room. She choreographed her own privacy, taking turns with her siblings to undress while the others looked away. They maneuvered around the shelter’s rules as well. Residents were banned from bringing in bleach, yet the janitors refused to clean the ba...