The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (10 page)

Despite the passage of healthcare reform in 2010, a growing number of Americans either lack access to health insurance; have to pay more out of pocket to remain insured; or despite having basic coverage, are receiving increasingly substandard and constricted healthcare. Fifty million Americans don’t have any health insurance—when they get sick, they go into debt, sometimes to cataclysmic effect.

This happened to 61-year-old grandmother Marta Montano, a night porter in a nonunion casino in Las Vegas, who racked up medical bills paying both for the hospitalization of a young niece she was caring for and also for her own medical treatments. Montano ended up owing $18,000 and had to file for bankruptcy. She lost her credit and was reduced to borrowing from payday loan companies to make her monthly rent—loans that, when we met more than a year after she took them out, she had not been able to make a dent in repaying. On her feet all night every night, Montano couldn’t afford new shoes; those she had were worn down and worn through. When she came home in the early morning and removed
her broken shoes, her legs ached, and the nerves in her back shot fire up her spine.

For Joe, who lived in a small town in a onetime mining region in Appalachian Pennsylvania, the breaking point came when he had a massive heart attack at the age of 54. Uninsured, he found himself having to sell his house just to cover his medical bills. Years afterward, he’d spent all his assets and, isolated and lonesome, was living on just a little more than $600 a month in federal disability payments. “I just sat home now. I just sat home. I can’t even afford to go out. Like I said, I couldn’t even afford toilet paper if it wouldn’t be for my boys helping me out,” he said in a deep, slow voice, the words rolled out over a mellifluous Appalachian accent.

They help me out with toilet paper, soap, dish detergents, wash detergents. I couldn’t even afford that. By the time I’m done with my bills, I’m lucky if I have ten dollars a month. Now if a person can go out and have a social life on ten dollars a month, I’d like to know how they do it. I have no luxuries, buddy, no luxuries whatsoever. I can’t afford luxuries. I’m lucky if I go shoppin’ twice a month; and that’s the best I go anyplace. It makes me feel worthless. My whole life’s worthless. What are you going to do about it? You can’t do it if you ain’t got to do it with; and I ain’t got to do it with. If I didn’t have my TV to watch and my bird to talk to, I don’t know, I’d probably go nuts. And that’s about the extent of my life. That’s about it for my great lifestyle.

Further fueling America’s poverty epidemic are two other trends. The first is the breakdown of pension systems, be they private systems into which employers have stopped paying contributions or state and municipal systems teetering on the edge of insolvency. Elderly men and women who have worked for decades, have paid into their pension plans, and have been promised certain monthly payments upon retirement are now finding those promises have been
voided, with companies blaming high pension costs rather than mismanagement for their fiscal difficulties. In Longview, Washington, for example, hundreds of middle-aged aluminum workers lost their union pensions and their promised healthcare benefits after the company they worked for filed for bankruptcy. Men who worked for decades as skilled smelters were reduced to begging for casual work as landscapers, porters, or supermarket baggers. One of the workers ended up sleeping in his car in mall parking lots; another got a job at Walmart, earning half of what he had earned at the foundry. Another took to drinking, one man ended up institutionalized, and yet another took his own life.
¹⁸
More recently, the small towns of Prichard, Alabama, and Central Falls, Rhode Island, have filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, the financial collapse taking down not only pensions promised to current workers but also those already being paid to retirees. Pennsylvania’s state capital, Harrisburg, has entered insolvency. And larger cities, such as Stockton, California, and Providence, Rhode Island, were also brought to the brink of the financial abyss by the financial collapse and its aftermath. Stockton was forced into bankruptcy in mid-2012; Providence, to date, has narrowly avoided bankruptcy. In 2011, there was a flurry of media speculation that this trend might even reach up to state level, with Rhode Island’s entire state pension system thought to be at risk.

The second trend is the problem of the ongoing housing bust and a political response that has seen large numbers of politicians blaming the poor for taking out loans they could not afford rather than the financial institutions that marketed such dubious products in the first place. For tens of millions of American families, savings painstakingly accumulated during the years have been wiped out since 2006 as property values plummeted. More homes went underwater—the owners owing more on the mortgages than the homes were now worth—and millions of homes were foreclosed on. Between 2006 and 2012, three million homes were repossessed by
banks, their owners left either homeless or living in downscale rentals. Realty experts predicted that, despite a federal settlement with the five largest banks intended to provide $26 billion of mortgage relief to homeowners, and notwithstanding state-level efforts by attorneys-general in California and elsewhere to protect homeowners from foreclosures, another three million homes could be repossessed before the crisis burned itself out, with as many as three million seniors at risk of losing the houses they lived in, according to an AARP study.
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These are not simply abstract numbers. They are lives shattered.

“It’s hard because it’s like you were begging the bank to go ahead and give you something, so you have a house to come back home to,” recalled 50-year-old Matthew Joseph, a sheet-metal worker and church deacon in the hard-hit California Central Valley town of Stockton, who lost his job after the 2008 crash and spent the years that followed struggling mightily to keep his home.

In my neighborhood where I live now, the saddest sight is to realize half your neighbors aren’t there. There’re empty lots; the grass is growing up above the For Sale signs. Houses look as if they’ve been abandoned, windows broken. Western Ranch at one time was one of
the
prime areas to live. In the last few years, all you see is people losing their houses. I cannot tell you how many U-Haul vans I’ve seen coming into our neighborhood, moving people out; people losing their houses.

I bought my house for $245,000. My house, at one time, went up to $575,000, and then it nosedived down to $171,000. When I called my bank, my bank went ahead and told me I was in an upside-down situation. My house is going down, and I’m looking at unemployment only. My wife, Celia, had been through quite a few medical procedures, operations on her shoulders—she had worked at Toys “R” Us warehouse; and doing repetitive pulling put her in a situation where she couldn’t work. I went ahead and took it upon
myself to say, “What am I going to do? Am I going to lose my house? Am I going to look for another job—when there is no job?” The bank puts you through so many hoops, saying they’re doing something for you; but they’re really not. They’re not giving the normal guy a hand to be able to go ahead and save his house.

In some poor neighborhoods, schools are now inundated with homeless students, some of them street kids, but many of them children whose families have either lost their homes to foreclosure or have been evicted after the parents lost their jobs.

“We have 150-plus homeless students,” said Angela Urquiaga, the full-time advocate for kids without places to call home at Rancho High School in a deeply impoverished part of North Las Vegas.

One child, she’s 14 years of age, a freshman. She was very hurt because her father had lost his job; the mother threw the father out, and the child said she was going to go with him. The mother said, “You both leave.” They were staying in a car three or four days. I got him in a church—they’re staying in a church right now. The child comes and sits with me at lunchtime and talks with me. She’s 14 years of age, wears a size 12 little girls. She was hungry. The father came and talked with me. He cried. We both cried. My goal is for them to continue with education, so they become somebody in the future. I have lots of heartbreaking stories—children who’ve been molested, been refused their families’ love, they’ve been on drugs.

Urquiaga had been a homeless advocate at Rancho for the past eleven years. When she started there, she was working with ten to fifteen kids each year. Then the numbers exploded. “After 2009 it became a hundred; 2010, 120 or 130; 2011, over 200 students. This year we’ve been in a few months, and I’ve already got over 130 students. Two families living in cars, families the community brought them in to sleep in their garage. These are very, very hard things for
kids who deserve a room of their own, a TV, and an atmosphere where they can do their homework in peace and have a meal.”

The men, women, and children caught in these traps of poverty—whether made homeless by economic collapse or rendered bankrupt by medical bills—came from all corners of America and virtually all walks of life. Suffering the indignities of poverty, they also suffered the shame of stigma, of being blamed for their plight and ignored by those lucky enough to still have resources to fall back on. Their presence complicated the American story, and as with the presence of paupers in the nineteenth century or sharecroppers, tenements, and ghettoes in the twentieth, made the rosy, oftentimes complacent, national self-image harder to maintain. The presence of wholesale poverty was a societal embarrassment and, as with all embarrassments, it was one the broader community could bear only if the victims themselves were made blameable for their condition.

CHAPTER THREE

AN AMERICAN DILEMMA

Immigrant rights advocate Carlos Marentes on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico. Immigrant farmworkers’ possessions are left in bags hanging from trees.

F
or America, a country that presumes to measure itself against high ideals codified in its founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, in particular—balancing the demands of individual freedom with those of economic justice has, historically, been especially challenging. What if untrammeled economic liberty for some ends up in a diminution of happiness for others? What if the right to flourish implies as well the chance that many others will flounder? And what if those who prosper the most then turn around and rig the game against their fellow citizens? What if the political rights enshrined in the Constitution aren’t always in harmony with the economic rights so embedded in the country’s psyche?

In the early twentieth century, the German sociologist Max Weber theorized in
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
that Protestantism generated a unique set of traits that promoted thrift and capital accumulation. Threaded through his ideas was a complex psychological theory: Calvinism, he argued, preached a doctrine of predestination, the idea that some people had been marked by God for salvation and others for damnation. There wasn’t a whole lot in practice that one could do to alter one’s status, but there
were
signs one could interpret as suggesting that one was among the chosen ones. Among those was secular success, achievement in the realm of business being a core part of this.

For Weber, this helped explain why and how England came to thrive economically during the first Industrial Revolution. From Henry VIII’s time on, the country had been majority Protestant, and, argued Weber, it had placed a premium on capital accumulation that had created huge momentum toward economic growth, and by extension, scientific accomplishment and expanding military and political influence on a global scale. By the same rationale, that ethic had played a role in defining America’s extraordinary economic success down the centuries. You want to be saved, so you work hard in order to acquire a sign of God’s approval—wealth—that justifies the assumption that
you are indeed one of the lucky ones. And when enough people buy into this, the country’s economy flourishes.