Did Inequality Make Dasani Homeless?
...Chanel, Dasani’s mother and herself the daughter of a welfare-dependent drug addict in Brooklyn, has six children by three different men, a long history of debilitating drug use, an explosive temper, and numerous arrests. Her husband, Supreme, has brought his own drug addiction and two more children by a deceased wife into the mix; Elliott makes vague reference to previous children as well. At some point, Supreme worked as a barber, but as far as we can tell, Chanel has never held a job. In truth, she isn’t much of a mother, either. She is often “listless from methadone”; the family’s room is filled with “piles of unwashed clothes.” Dasani appears to be the primary caretaker of her seven siblings. She wakes up early to change and feed her baby half-sister and get the other children ready for school; understandably, though her school is only two blocks from the shelter, she is chronically late. What role, if any, her parents play in this morning chaos known to every mother and father, rich and poor, is left unsaid....

...Chanel inherits $49,000 on her mother’s death; within a short time the money is gone, and she can’t figure out where it went. A local charter school, the lifeline for many other poor parents and children, advertises its “rigor and excellence”; Elliott sniffs that it sounds “exclusive.” In the wake of welfare reform—howlingly protested by the New York Times, by the way—Chanel’s mother, Joanie, “turned her life around,” landing a $22,000-a-year job cleaning subway cars. Calling her first day of work the “the happiest day of her life,” she was able to save enough for “a cozy apartment in Bedford Stuyvesant” and to earn a pension that would be inherited—and apparently squandered—by Chanel....