Three years into the mortgage crisis, the public debate over how to stem the unprecedented tide of foreclosures and the damage they are doing to the housing market has largely overshadowed any discussion of the human toll.
But researchers have begun to probe what happens to people after they lose their homes and are becoming especially concerned about the harm done to children.
The number of children displaced has been climbing steadily in recent years, with nearly 40 percent of U.S. school districts surveyed citing foreclosure as the top reason for the surge in homeless students, according to a report this summer by First Focus and the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.
Children forcibly uprooted from their homes and schools tend to suffer emotionally, socially and academically, studies preceding the mortgage meltdown show. Researchers suspect the same may be happening with children who have been dragged through foreclosure.
“This foreclosure crisis is the largest forced relocation event we’ve had in this country since the Great Depression. In the modern educational environment, we’ve never seen anything come close to this,” said Dan Immergluck, a housing policy professor at Georgia Tech.
Susan Brooking never imagined her family would get tangled up in a mortgage crisis when she and her husband, Robert Brooking Jr., started building a home just north of Charlottesville, Va., nine years ago.
But the family’s finances collapsed after her husband was laid off from his job with a homebuilder in early 2008. In August, the couple received a foreclosure notice and moved out a few weeks later, soon after their 5-year-old son, Connor, began kindergarten.
Susan Brooking settled in at her sister’s house with Connor and his 19-month-old brother. Her husband lives nearby with his parents. Neither home was large enough to accommodate the family, but the arrangement enabled them to stay close to Connor’s school.
“My son keeps asking why, why, why at every step,” Susan Brooking said.
Why did they have to move? Why can’t he visit his bedroom at the old house? Why are his toys in storage? Why do they have to live apart? Why did he have to leave behind the playground that he and his father had just started building?
“Now he’s acting up in class,” she said. “All we think about is renting a house in the same school district so we can get some normalcy back into our lives. We don’t want to deal with another school and another transition.”
Nor is the fallout limited to families that own their homes.
About 40 percent of families facing eviction were renters whose landlords were foreclosed upon, according to an estimate by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
