Tag: economic class

Stats to Show Why BBHSing is Getting Harder

From Wikimedia Commons

Remember how in BBHSing is Hard, Part 2 I discussed the ongoing demographic shift that keeps making it harder to be a BBHSer? Today, I happened to see an article about that very dynamic, here’s an excerpt:

“The sharpest decline in the(sic) Boston’s population of children, the study found, has been among middle-income families with children.

“‘These are families that tend to be above the income cutoff for subsidized housing programs and yet earn below what it takes to afford the fast-rising housing costs in many of these high-income cities,’ researchers wrote. ‘In today’s Boston, there are almost 6,000 fewer middle-income households with kids compared with 1980, even though our city has grown in total population.’”

Occasionally, I’ve spoken about our housing challenges with area homeschoolers. It’s unbelievable how casually insensitive people can be. I think some just cannot even imagine what life is like for the rest of us. It really brings to mind the parable of the brass pot and the earthenware pot. Three of these things are not good responses to the other:

Our landlord is raising our rent $250 which a 13% increase and we can’t afford it. We can’t find any affordable housing within an hour of Boston, I don’t know what I’m going to do.I know just what you mean, we had to pay $600,000 over asking price for our home.
I know just what you mean, we own our home but want more space and we can’t find a home we want to buy.Oh, North Central Massachusetts? I was thinking of buying a 40-acre farm up there. There’s a 200-acre farm in Vermont for the same price that I would love to move to.

I started this blog with the hopes of finding and bringing together other BBHSers for mutual support. We’re a vanishing tiny minority in a group that’s already a minority. Yo, clay pots! Hit me up in the comments!

BBHSing is Hard, Part 2

This is the second part of a two part series. Click here for Part 1.

For a really long time I didn’t understand why I couldn’t get much traction with homeschoolers in Greater Boston. Sometimes I would meet people who we seemed to get along with, but then something made it become clear we weren’t compatible, and I wasn’t entirely sure what it was.

Photo by João Jesus on Pexels.com

In 2017 we lost our apartment to a $250 rent increase, we struggled for almost 6 months to find a new apartment. We couldn’t find anything within an hour’s drive of Boston and ended up in North Central Massachusetts. We lived there for almost 2 years, all the while working to find an apartment back in our old neighborhood.

So anyway, while in exile, what I learned about homeschoolers there opened my eyes. If you go outside the I-95 belt, and especially outside I-495, you will very quickly find more middle class and lower-middle class homeschoolers. You will easily find organized events catering to those homeschoolers. YMCA’s with very affordable homeschool gym and swim classes. A Boys & Girls club with a competitive swim team for $50/year. Mass Audubon homeschool classes that cost only $15 per class meeting. So many libraries with homeschool specific events! Coops that cost $50/year plus materials. Organizations of all kinds have easily found affordable homeschool classes.

I came to realize that the PRIMARY reason we couldn’t connect with homeschoolers in Greater Boston was that we were not in the same class. It’s so expensive in Greater Boston, it’s almost impossible for anyone below upper middle class to homeschool here. The cost of housing is the number 1 reason. If you have a middle class job, you really need 2 incomes to make it work in Greater Boston. Homeschooling and living on one income is wicked hard.

So many area homeschool events are SO EXPENSIVE! $300/academic class. Dance/martial arts/fine arts classes priced at $30/class meeting or above. Parts & Crafts! The coop at the Blue Hills! Not to mention that people with good resources are likely doing things on their own together and not advertising them on local homeschooling boards. Therefore many homeschoolers in the area are unavailable to BBHSers, we just can’t go where they go.

Add to that the fact that countless families have already been displaced and you have an awful demographic shift, where most of the people left in Boston are wealthy or poor. There are so few BBHSers because of the cold realities of economics which makes it harder to join together to create opportunities for ourselves.

There are always sacrifices that must be made when you live according to values. Sometimes it’s painful and solitary. And so, this post is dedicated to the BBHSers out there, homeschooling through stress, taking care of their families and making it work!