Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by Invisible People on May 9th ,2025.
Candice Turner on Redlining, Generational Instability, and the Link Between Homelessness and Systemic Harm
When you pass a homeless encampment or see someone sleeping on the street, you’re witnessing the end of a long journey that often begins with missed rent, unstable jobs, or a family crisis. But beneath all that is something less visible: housing trauma.
Candice Turner of the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust says these deep-seated wounds, passed down through generations, are often the root of housing instability and, by extension, homelessness.
What Is Housing Instability?
Before someone ends up on the streets, they often experience months or years of housing instability. That may look like:
- Frequent relocations due to unaffordable rent, unreliable landlords, or unstable income
- Low-quality housing with unsafe conditions, pest infestations, or structural issues
- Constant threats of eviction, compounded by late fees and mounting back rent
- Doubled-up living situations, where people crowd into a friend or relative’s space as a last resort
Housing instability can wear people down emotionally and financially. But Turner believes that to understand how people get there, we must examine housing trauma even deeper.
Turner is a social worker with over 15 years of experience working with unhoused individuals and communities affected by systemic housing injustice. Her work in Richmond offers a stark, localized example of how systemic housing policies have inflicted lasting trauma. She’s also lived through her own housing trauma.
“Growing up, we moved several times, but for the most part, our housing was stable until probably around middle school when we moved into this home that my mom worked so hard for us to acquire,” Turner shared.
“We built a home there and loved it. Tragically, we lost that home in a desperate effort to put me through college.”
“That’s a little piece of housing trauma because my mom struggled. I’m a first-generation college graduate. She did everything she could to get me through college, which was how she became the recipient of a predatory lending product that ballooned out of control.”
This personal history, combined with her work in public health and housing advocacy, gives Turner a unique perspective on the trauma that leads to and is caused by unstable housing.
In the interview below, she explains how housing trauma is linked to housing instability, as well as systemic racism, trauma, and policy failures that fuel homelessness, and what it takes to heal.
Invisible People: Good morning, Candice. Please provide our readers with some background on your professional experience with homelessness and housing trauma.
Candice Turner: “Sure. I am a social worker by profession. I started in the housing field [working] with veterans who were either facing homelessness or were actively, I will say, houseless. I’m making that distinction because you can have a home and not have a house, meaning you can create a home wherever you are, but it might not be a secure dwelling.”
“I worked with veterans initially. I was actively finding them places to live, and then that shriveled down into working with the health department. At that time, the health department looked at housing as one of the social determinants of health. For that reason, there was an initiative to help keep people who were living in public housing stable.“
“The housing authority was moving residents from one area to another because they were rebuilding a particular housing community. The health department decided to instill some prevention services to work with people and prepare them for the inevitable shift that was going to happen.”
What Housing Trauma Really Means and How It’s Still Shaping Lives Today
Invisible People: Please Define Housing Trauma
Candice Turner: “Housing trauma is a break in how someone sees themselves as stable regarding housing. It begins in the mind, whether someone can visualize themselves as stably housed without feeling a sense of anxiety, guilt, or general negativity.”
Trauma doesn’t always look obvious.
“The first thing to start with when we think about trauma is to acknowledge that some trauma is visual, but not all wounds are visible,” Turner said.
Some people live in poor-quality housing with high costs and constant stress, which takes a toll over time.
“Living in public housing and having these exaggerated expenses because the infrastructure is not updated and repairs are not made,” Turner said. “These unique expenses can create housing trauma.”
“Other examples involve redlining, replacement, relocation, family separation, and disconnection to the community and even the land,” Turner continued. “We talk about that often when we discuss Indigenous housing trauma. But, all people, regardless of their ethnic background, need to feel connected to the community and the land to feel deserving of the housing that is built within that framework.”
These experiences break trust in the idea that housing is secure or permanent.
This kind of trauma can be passed down through generations. Even if someone wasn’t directly impacted by things like redlining, they still live with the long-term effects—like lost wealth, community disconnection, or fear of losing housing again.
We often hear people praised for their “resilience,” but that just means they had to survive something hard. Instead of celebrating resilience, we should look at what caused the trauma in the first place—because housing affects everything, from a child’s ability to learn to a parent’s ability to provide.
“This can occur on any level,” Turner said. “For example, here in Richmond, we’re a product of redlining. The highway went straight through a very wealthy majority-black community called Jackson Ward. And it unfortunately disturbed the wealth in the neighborhood. It’s like disturbing an ecosystem where the economy went down, and people lost their homes and things of that nature.”
“Homeowners find somewhere else to try to rebuild, but what happens to the generation after that? And then the generation after that,” Turner said. “The coping mechanisms are passed down along with the narrative of what happened. Even that story creates fear, which fuels trauma generationally. The people who are experiencing it may not have endured the initial hit. However, they’re living in the aftereffect of that hit.
That’s part of housing trauma.”
Invisible People: How does this connect to homelessness and housing as far as mental health?
Candice Turner: “If we’re looking at housing as vital, then it is a human right to have housing, period. If that human right is taken away, someone’s mental capacity and ability to thrive on all cylinders will be compromised. It’s one thing to survive, but it’s another thing to thrive.
The mental capacity to be able to think about where you’re going to sleep, where your family may be safe, and how you’re going to pay for that is compromised by housing trauma.”
“The other thing to point out is the abundance of structural issues for people with housing instability. For example, if a residence is not equipped with a proper kitchen and they have no ability to cook, then even going somewhere like a food bank is problematic. How are they going to cook what may be received at the food bank?”
“During Christmas and Thanksgiving, we do toy collections and toy drives, and we do food drives to [air quotes] ‘feed the homeless.’ However, people have to eat the other 363 days of the year as well. To do that, they need a home with a suitable kitchen.”
“You’re thinking about that ability being compromised, their health being compromised, and their wellness being compromised. All of that is not just physical, but it’s mental. We know that there’s a comorbidity between houselessness and mental stability. There’s a connection there.”
Invisible People: Please be more specific about the lines between housing, trauma, homelessness, and redlining.
Candice Turner: “Redlining is a systemic issue in the sense that it was a government-sanctioned process that was set up to separate or divide communities that were thriving, that were communities of color. When you are separating people, you are not only disconnecting them from their homes but disconnecting them from the community, disconnecting them from the things that ground them, their spiritual practices, their cultural practices, their support systems, etc.”
“These previously thriving communities of color had neighborhood aunties and uncles who played a pivotal role in the stability of the neighborhood, not just that particular family but the whole neighborhood.
Redlining separated people from everything that grounded and rooted their way of life, their ability to be stable in many things, even outside of having housing security.”
“We still see the effects of redlining because there’s a separation along neighborhood lines, too. Typically, there’s a part that is being gentrified and another part that’s still struggling. Here in Richmond, we have a part that’s thriving and a part that is impoverished, coexisting on opposite ends of the freeway.“
“While speaking of that occurrence here in Richmond, it’s nationwide. We see redlining in cities throughout the country. This separation is very much affecting things presently.“
Invisible People: In the past, some public housing policies — such as the “Man in the House” rules — forced families to separate if they wanted to qualify for assistance. These rules, along with similar restrictions in early housing voucher programs, often required fathers to leave the household, contributing to long-term instability. Can you talk about how policies like these helped create generational housing trauma and shaped perceptions of families living in public housing?
Candice Turner: “Let us look at the stereotype that so many authors have created of the ‘welfare mom.’ During the Reagan era, that stereotype was rampant. Houses were divided. If fathers were on the lease, they were asked to leave.”
“That is shifting the dynamic. It’s shifting the ecosystem. We also know all the things that happened in the Reagan era that played a pivotal role in separating homes, families, and community members. All of this is housing trauma.”
“How do you explain a disrupted family? How do you explain when someone, a father, is removed from the household?”
“On top of that, when we think about generational housing trauma, the biggest hurdle is often a mental one. It’s financial, but it’s also the systemic issues that arise out of what people think is happening when the perception becomes the reality. There is love in public housing, there’s community in public housing, there’s support in public housing, but those are not the stories that are highlighted.”
“When there is a disturbance in the forest or a shift in the atmosphere, you have to expect the entire community to decline. There’s less money coming into the households. There are fewer opportunities.”
“By removing the fathers, you’re then requiring the financial burden to increase on one person, the mother alone. There’s a lot to be said for that. I think people still maintain but at the price of stability.“
Invisible People: How do you think forcing fathers out of their own households affected the mental health of the men involved — and their families? And do you believe the trauma and anxiety from these policies could be passed down across generations?
Candice Turner: “I believe that behaviors are often passed down generationally. During the Reagan era, it was a crime for a black man to live in a house. Today, with African American men being grossly overrepresented in the homeless population, and with the rise of homeless criminalization laws, it is a crime for a black man to not live in a house.”
“Think about that. You’re a criminal if you live in a house, and you’re a criminal if you don’t live in a house. When this is the situation, think about how policed the community is.”
“And I’ll take it a step further because this also deals with things like hostile architecture and anti-loitering laws, which target homeless people and people of color. A lot of society sees this as, and I’m going to use the term here, which has its own historical issues but loitering – What people often consider as loitering, I would describe as a boardroom.”
“It isn’t even just about the legality of having housing stability. It’s about the legality of having conversations on the golf course. It is the legality coming together. Right now, what I have in mind is a few communities and places where people congregate that have been said to be loitering, and they’re just having a ‘Hey, haven’t seen you in a while’ discussion. It’s a moment of connection. And it’s no different than a boardroom meeting or people meeting on a golf course.”
“They’re just meeting in a gathering area. Even that is illegal in some places. It’s loitering. Therefore, what happens is now the bus stop bench has been split up so there can be no boardroom and no public space to congregate. If we’re not offering affordable housing opportunities, what do we expect people to do socially now that we’ve made it illegal for them to connect and have discussions in a public space?“
“There’s a proverb or a saying, which is called Sankofa. And that is, ‘you have to look back to know where you’re going.’ If you remove somebody’s ability to look back completely, can they go forward? And if so, how far are they going without knowing where they come from? That part of housing trauma doesn’t go away. It’s like a shadow that is always playing in the background.”
Talk to Your Lawmakers About Acknowledging How Homelessness is Linked to Oppression and Trauma
Housing trauma isn’t just about the past—it’s alive in the way policies still separate families, still criminalize poverty, and still keep healing out of reach. Lawmakers can’t legislate compassion—but they can stop writing laws that punish pain.
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