A Nevada County forces families to gamble with their children’s lives

 

 The county offers families a cruel choice – and effectively admits they DO police families for poverty “alone.” 

Over and over, family policing apologists tell us they don’t police families because of poverty “alone.” It’s always some other issue. There are two problems with that: 

● First, the other issues often are caused by poverty and/or can be alleviated with money – instead of putting the family under traumatic surveillance or tearing the family apart entirely. 

● Second, every few months, somewhere in America, someone in the family police effectively admits that yes – they do intervene because of poverty alone. 

In Washoe County, Nevada (metropolitan Reno), in some cases, it’s agency policy. 

In that county, here’s the choice homeless families face when the county-run shelter is full: Accept an offer of a place at a hotel, and face an automatic investigation by the county family police agency. Reject the offer, stay homeless, or find something on their own, and stay free of having the family police in their lives. 

Here’s how the Nevada Current reported it: 

Washoe County operates a 38-private room facility for families with children called Our Place Shelter. 

If the shelter runs out of space and families have no other housing options, the county can offer to pay for a hotel room. Accepting the assistance to stay in a hotel comes with an automatic referral to child welfare, said Sabrina Sweet, a human services coordinator with Washoe County. [Emphasis added.] 

The county had no data on how many times the referral led to foster care. The county also had no data on how many families refused the help because of their fear of a family police investigation. 

And while they have the resources to send an investigator, they somehow don’t have the resources to provide help to the families in the hotels. From the story: 

“We don’t have the bandwidth to go out into the motels,”[Tara Sterrett, a human services supervisor] said. “Once we put them in a motel, we don’t really have the ability to go in and say, ‘Okay, now what is it that’s keeping you from being able to provide for your kids?’” 

The county also admits it knows what’s generally keeping homeless families from being able to provide for their kids – and it’s not primarily drug abuse, mental illness or domestic violence – the big three excuses foster-care apologists cling to when it’s pointed out that they take away children because their families are poor. As the story explains: 

The high cost of rents and the lack of affordable places to live are driving people into homelessness in Washoe just like the rest of the state – as well as the country. 

“One of the biggest barriers is affordable housing, especially for families,” Sterrett said. 

The larger the family, the more challenging it becomes for them to find adequate housing.  

“It’s really hard to find an apartment that’s going to be large enough that they’re going to be able to afford and sustain,” Sterrett said. [Emphasis added.] 

So now let’s consider how the county might deal with that. The average monthly rent in Reno is $1,462.  So: What if the county paid a rent subsidy of a bit less than that, say only $858 per month, per child, to every homeless family?  That would go a long way toward reducing homelessness. 

Why $858?  Because that’s the minimum amount Washoe County will pay foster parents (tax-free, by the way) for every child – and it can go much higher, if they take a child from, say, a family that accepted the offer of housing in a hotel only to have that child taken away. 

All this may help explain why Nevada tears apart families at a rate 46% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in.  

Sure, they’re fond of gambling in Reno. But the stakes should never be whether a family is destroyed.