The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (2 page)

Almost always, any list of acknowledgments is incomplete and somewhat arbitrary. Let me, therefore, apologize in advance if I neglect to include individuals who feel they ought to have been included.

With that caveat, I owe particular thanks to the staff of Demos, a think tank at which I have been a fellow for a number of years and which, during that time, has done an extraordinary job of highlighting economic justice themes. My thanks to my colleagues at the University of California at Davis—to my friends in the University Writing Program, who have given me the great opportunity to teach nonfiction writing to always-fascinating, always-changing groups of young students; to the attorneys at the law school’s immigration law clinic, who have done so much to highlight the myriad challenges immigrants in America face; and to Ann Stevens, Marianne Page, and the other members of the wonderful team at the Center for Poverty Research, who are helping to put America’s poverty crisis center stage. My deepest gratitude, too, to Gary Dymski and A. G. Block, with whom I worked for several years at the University of California Center Sacramento, discussing public policy and economic questions with many of the best and the brightest from within the UC system and the world of California state politics. I owe a debt of gratitude as well to Jacob Hacker, Michael Katz, Katherine Newman, Alice O’Connor, Jim Ziliak, and the many other academics around the country who
took the time to explain their ideas to me and to point me in the direction of other people to talk to and additional books to read.

Among my friends, special thanks are due to Eyal Press, Adam Shatz, Theo Emery, Vicki Colliver, Kari Lydersen, Kitty Ussher, Jesse Moss, Danny Postel, John Hill, Steve Magagnini, Ben Ehrenreich, Jessica Garrison, Michael Soller, Rose George, Maura McDermott, Carolyn Juris, Raj Patel, George Lerner, and Jason Ziedenberg. Over the decades, you have acted as an extraordinary politics and journalism brain trust for discussing ideas and methods of telling a story. To my journalism professors and mentors Michael Shapiro and Sam Freedman at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and to Andrew Graham, Adam Swift, and Alan Montefiore, my tutors at Balliol College, Oxford, I remain forever indebted to all of you for your insights and teachings.

It would, of course, have been impossible to research and write this book without the love, the support, and the enthusiasm of my family. To my parents, Lenore and Jack; to my brother, Kolya, and my sister, Tanya; and to my wife, Julie Sze, and my children, Sofia and Leo, I shout out from the rooftops, “Thank you!” You have helped me ask the right questions and seek out the important answers. To Julie, who not only tolerated but also made possible my extended absences on reporting trips and at writing retreats, I owe my deepest gratitude. To Sofia and Leo, I owe my equilibrium: Your joy in life reminds me how important it is not to sweat the small stuff.

Above all, my thanks go to the many hundreds of men, women, and children in states around the country who let me into their lives and trusted me enough to share their most intimate stories. Sometimes you laughed, many times you cried, always you made clear that your experiences meant something—that the pain, the hardship, and the chaos so many have lived through these past several years were stories worth telling and stories worth listening to. Your words too often humbled me; your dignity inspired me.

PROLOGUE

A Scandal in the Making

Graffiti at the ruins of the Packard auto factory in Detroit.

F
ifty years after the social critic Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book
The Other America
, in which he chronicled the lives lived of those excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up both of the long-term, chronically poor and the newly impoverished, the victims of a broken economy and a collapsed housing market.

The saga of the timeless poor, of individuals immersed in poverty for decades, of communities mired in poverty for generations, is something of a dog-bites-man story: It’s sad, but it’s not new. The tale of the newly poor, however, is more akin to the man-bites-dog story: It is surprising and counterintuitive. It is the narrative of millions of Americans who had economic security, enjoyed something of the comforts of an affluent society, and then lost it. Not since the Great Depression have so many millions of people been so thoroughly beaten down by vast, destructive forces. Yet while the story of the more recent poor has more of a sensation factor to it, in reality the stories of the long-term poor and the newly destitute increasingly blend together, creating a common set of experiences that pummel the bodies and minds of those who live them; that corrode communities; and that, all too often, obliterate optimism.

As with the men and women Harrington wrote about in 1962, too frequently these poor Americans are invisible. “Here are the unskilled workers, the migrant farm workers, the aged, the minorities, and all the others who live in the economic underworld of American life,” Harrington wrote in his opening chapter. “The other America, the America of poverty, is hidden today in a way that it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to the rest of us. . . . The new poverty is constructed so as to destroy aspiration; it is a system designed to be impervious to hope.”
¹

Harrington was a Jesuit-educated political activist, born and raised in St. Louis during the years between the world wars. Over several decades he carved out a reputation for himself as a longtime chronicler of the American condition. In the run-up to his book’s publication, he had spent years in poor communities as a volunteer with Catholic
Worker and as a left-leaning political organizer—hardly the most fruitful of pursuits in the conservative, affluent era following the end of World War II. In fact,
The Other America
hit a raw nerve at least in part because so many Americans, living comfortably in suburbias miles from the epicenters of hardship, thought their country had already solved the poverty conundrum. With many having a mind-set of out of sight, out of mind, poverty simply wasn’t a part of the national political discourse in the 1950s. Indeed, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government lecturer and author Richard Parker, in his biography of the progressive economist John Kenneth Galbraith, noted that when the Joint Economic Committee of Congress commissioned University of Wisconsin economist Robert Lampman to put together “a complete bibliography of postwar books and articles by economists on modern poverty, his typed list required only two pages.”
²
That the Gordian knot of poverty hadn’t actually been unraveled, and that it could continue to exist alongside the Affluent Society, was a source of tremendous national embarrassment for many. In the wake of
The Other America
’s publication, a critical mass of policy makers doubled down, using Harrington’s writings as a Virgil-like guide to America’s hidden underbelly and laying the foundations for an all-out assault on the causes and conditions of poverty that would fundamentally impact American social policy for a generation.

Liberal America’s belief during the 1960s that with one more great push the scourges associated with poverty could be forever eradicated from America’s shores was naïve, possibly even disingenuous. After all, no society in human history has ever successfully banished poverty; and no polity with a modicum of respect for individual liberty has entirely negated the presence of inequality. But it did reflect a confidence in America’s innate sense of possibility; in an era of space travel and antibiotics, computers and robots, poverty was just one more frontier to be conquered, one more communal obstacle to be pushed aside. When it turned out to be an order of magnitude more complicated, Americans quickly grew tired of the effort. In 1968, four years after the War on Poverty was launched,
Richard Nixon won election to the White House, in part by stoking popular resentment against welfare recipients. Twelve years after that, Ronald Reagan was elected president on a platform of rolling back much of the Great Society. Today, after four decades during which tackling economic hardship took a distant backseat to other priorities, one in six Americans live below the poverty line, their lives as constricted and as difficult as those of the men, women, and children who peopled the pages of
The Other America
in the Kennedy era. And this is despite the fact that the president, Barack Obama, is a onetime community organizer who understands the impact of poverty on people’s lives better than almost any other of his predecessors.

Too poor to participate in the consumption rituals that define most Americans’ lives, too cash-strapped to go to malls, to visit cafés or movie theaters, to buy food anywhere other than dollar stores, these men and women live on America’s edge. The poorest of the poor live under freeway ramps and bridges in out-of-the-way neighborhoods such as the Alphabet district of northern Las Vegas or Los Angeles’s Skid Row. Others live in trailer parks far from central cities. Then there are those living in apartment buildings and even suburban houses, who for a variety of reasons have lost their financial security; their deprivation remains hidden behind closed doors. All of these people share an existential loneliness, a sense of being shut out of the most basic rituals of society.

In mid-2011, the Open Society Foundation’s Special Fund for Poverty Alleviation gave me a grant to chronicle the faces and voices of economic hardship in America. To do so, I began traveling around the country interviewing and photographing people on the economic margins—Harrington’s “economic underworld”—and the environments in which they lived.

As the stories accumulated, three things struck me with particular force.

The first is the sheer loneliness of poverty, the fact that profound economic hardship pushes people to the psychological and physical margins of society—isolated from friends and relatives; shunted into dilapidated trailer parks, shanties, or ghettoized public housing; and removed from banks and stores, transit systems and cultural institutions. The poor live on society’s scraps—a few dollars in government assistance or charity, donated food, thrift-store clothes. They can afford neither transport to venture out of their communities nor simple luxuries such as movies or a cup of coffee with friends in a café. They cannot afford to vary the routines of their daily lives. Embarrassed by their poverty, worried about being judged failures in life, and humiliated by that judgment, many told me that they have essentially withdrawn from all but the most necessary, unavoidable social interactions.

The second thing that one realizes in telling this story is the diversity, the complexity, of poverty. Its causes, and therefore its potential solutions, cannot meaningfully be reduced to a pat list of features. There are people with no high school education who are poor, but there are also university graduates on food bank lines. There are people who are poor because they have made bad choices, gotten addicted to drugs, burned bridges with friends and family—and then there are people who have never taken a drug in their lives, who have huge social networks, and who still can’t make ends meet. There are people who have never held down a job, and others who hold down multiple, but always low-paying, jobs, frequently for some of the most powerful corporations on earth. There are people who have never had a bank account and use payday loans and other predatory lending sources whenever they need access to extra cash, and there are others who, during more flush times, owned huge suburban houses and expensive cars. There are children whose only hot meals are what they are given at school, and young adults who have
nothing now and never really had anything earlier in life either. There are military veterans who have struggled to find a place in civilian life, middle-aged and once-middle-class people falling down the economic ladder as the recession fails to fully lift, and elderly people cascading into destitution as savings evaporate and expected equity in their homes fails to materialize.