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

by Andrea Elliott

“Where are we?” “School!” the students reply. Miss Hester lets the word sink in. School. Not home. There is no home for Miss Hester right now. Two months ago, she was evicted by her landlord in Bed-Stuy, who was clearing the building for renovation. It will sell one week from now, on September 11, 2014, for $1.2 million (nearly double its value the previous year). Miss Hester packed up her life, putting most things in storage. Then, with a few suitcases, she took her fifteen-year-old daughter to the Bronx homeless intake office, joining more than sixty-four thousand New Yorkers now in city shelters. Miss Hester knows it would devastate her students if she told them this. She has always been their beacon, the one who made it out of the projects and into the professional class. But Miss Hester also knows that in today’s shelter system, she is no exception. Plenty of working New Yorkers have been uprooted by eviction. The city’s lack of affordable housing is the primary reason that families enter the shelter system.