From Living in Her Car to Congress

Cori Bush, who later became a member of the US House of Representatives from Missouri, experienced homelessness about twenty years before she entered Congress. A Voice of America Learning English report ties the story to 2001, when she was pregnant with her second child.

During the pregnancy she became sick and had to quit her job at a preschool. The loss of that income led to the family's eviction from their rented home. For about three months, she and her husband at the time lived out of their car, with their two young children. The article does not say where the family parked or what the arrangement was like day to day. It reports only that her family, which was already struggling, helped her find a home.

Bush later separated from her husband and earned a nursing degree. After the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, she took part in leading protests. She lost races for the Senate in 2016 and the House in 2018, and then won a seat in the House of Representatives in November 2020, with support from the group Justice Democrats. The article identifies her district as the city of St. Louis.

In office she campaigned to help others avoid evictions, drawing on her own experience. She told the reporter that she did not want anyone else to have to go through what she went through, ever.