Cincinnati’s Unhoused Children: A Capitalist Crisis
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Housing in Cincinnati is becoming increasingly unaffordable. Hamilton County saw an average residential value increase of 32% over the last year. This, paired with increases in residential property taxes, means that more and more working class people are unable to afford to own homes, leaving only real estate developers and speculators–with the help of local tax abatements–to continue buying up property in Cincinnati. This ‘urban development’ (which suits the interests of the Cincinnati bourgeoisie) results in the jacking up of rents, leading to the gentrification of historically working class neighborhoods and increasing numbers of unhoused people. In Cincinnati, this especially affects children
Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) found that over 3,500 students were unhoused at the end of the 2022-2023 school year. In Hamilton County, children under 18 make up nearly one fourth of the unhoused population. Compare this to the national average, which is around one sixth. College students in Cincinnati also endure homelessness at significant rates–11% at UC, 12% at Xavier and 25-30% (!) at Cincinnati State.
At the end of the 2018-2019 school year, the unhoused student population was even higher at 4,245. Federal COVID relief funding given to Cincinnati Public Schools slightly alleviated the number of unhoused students. CPS used this funding to hire staffers for their schools whose primary job was to assist students and their families in finding interim housing. The COVID aid money is now dwindling down with an expiration date of Fall 2024, leaving a growing number of children without housing assistance.
Housing instability affects students’ attendance levels, test scores, graduation rates and has serious psychological effects (e.g., social isolation; vulnerability to drug abuse, domestic abuse and sexual abuse; sleep; anxiety; depression; and loss of sense of place and belonging). These effects, both psychological and school-related, impact students’ futures. Exposure to such trauma has lasting effects on children spanning into adulthood, often taking years, if not decades, of therapy to process and heal from.
These circumstances produce literal dire consequences for some. Executive director of the Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition, Josh Spring, said that 169 people in the community who died as a result of homelessness were honored in 2023. Of those 169 people, the average age was 55. The youngest among them was “not yet 3 months old.”
In Cincinnati and around the US, the right of private property ownership is enjoyed by an increasingly smaller number of wealthy real estate owners at the expense of working class children, both grade-school and collegiate alike, who are subjected to housing instability while attempting to focus on completing their education. Here, stable housing is a right afforded only to those who can afford to pay–an impossibility for the majority of the working class in the US. Landlords and property management companies hoarding large numbers of housing units, preying on tenants (who often have no choice but to rent) by charging obscene rates and not even doing the bare-minimum to keep homes in functioning order are the natural results of housing being treated as a commodity. It's not in the interests of this parasitic class of landlords for housing to be affordable as long as there’s profit to be made. This unavoidable fact means that working class people are forced to sacrifice more and more of their time performing wage-labor so that they can make enough money to simply exist. This position is a precarious one, leaving renters one missed paycheck away from being thrown into the streets along with their children. Capitalism depends on this large class of desperate people cut off from ownership of means of subsistence (like food and shelter) to profit off of in order to function.
The liberation of the poor and working class and its children from this oppression can only be achieved through a long and determined struggle against those classes who profit off of their oppression and the laws which protect their right to do so. A precondition for the success of this struggle is the organization of the oppressed masses, through tenant unions and political organizations, into a movement willing to fight for a livable world for our children. In Cincinnati, we need to take this fight to the landlords and developers like 3CDC, Gaslight Properties, Towne Properties, Vision and Beyond, Urban Sites, etc., as well as city and state governments who provide tax abatements and incentives to those developers. For our children, we have a world to win!