The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (20 page)

When the pantry doors finally were unlocked, Vicenta slowly, painfully, made her way down the stone steps, went under the heavy arched entryway, signed in with the volunteers sitting behind bulletproof windows, and was admitted into the large food supply room to choose her weekly groceries. It was a demoralizing ritual, but at least it kept her fed.

“Right now, I’m fighting cancer, I’m really sick,” Delgada said, speaking slowly, her voice a little slurred. “I need fruit, vegetables, all different things I’m not able to buy. That’s why I come to this place to get it. I get $34 a month [in food stamps]. You can buy hardly nothing. You go to the store with $34, you can’t buy nothing.” Coming to the pantry made her feel “sad, depressed. You know. ’Cause nobody do anything for you. The people [in the line] don’t care.” Delgada couldn’t afford her nutritional supplements and went without some of her medicines. “If I can afford it, I buy it; if I can’t, I do without it. I’m on four medications for my depression. I have high blood pressure, diabetes, a chronic bad back. I have to walk with a walker. I can’t drive. If I need somebody to drive me, I have to pay for gas. Nobody take you anywhere if you can’t pay for gas.”

RUINS PORN

Bill Clark was used to all of this. As the executive director of a huge nonprofit food distribution organization named PhilAbundance, he
oversaw 450 pantries throughout the Delaware Valley that, cumulatively, helped support 650,000 families per week. Some of the communities PhilAbundance served—Camden, New Jersey; North Philadelphia—counted among the very poorest in the country. The congressional district in which this area was located came in as America’s fourth hungriest. Across the Philadelphia region, approximately one in three children were living in poverty.
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Like Ginny Wallace at her pantry in the Appalachian Mountains off to the west, Clark had had to navigate a minefield since the economic collapse of 2008. PhilAbundance was receiving less surplus food from the USDA and at the same time was also getting less salvaged foods. Dented cans, for example, that in the recent past had been donated by food producers to the pantries, were now winding up in dollar stores, where they were sold at discount rather than given away. For the working poor, this might have been a blessing; for those too poor to even afford discounted food, however, it was more akin to a curse. The amount of salvaged food ending up in Phil Abundance pantries had fallen off a cliff, down 85 percent from 2008 to 2011. At the same time, the numbers attending the centers each Saturday morning had skyrocketed, leaving pantry administrators scrambling to plug the gap—canvassing the community for food donations and launching frantic fund-raising drives to generate money that they could then spend to buy food to give away.

Clark, bald, with a trimmed white beard and glasses, was sitting in a tiny, file-filled office, behind the food room. Behind him, pasted to the wall, was a piece of cardboard on which was typed a Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” Clark had made it his mission in life to speak out.

This is an area of the city that has probably seen the most poverty for the longest time. It’s multigenerational poverty. It’s an area where the housing stock goes back prior to World War II, most of it prior to World War I, and it has seen very little investment since that time.
The industry that existed historically has been leaving continuously. Families are generally unemployed. The population is predominantly seriously below the poverty line. The population that we serve, the unemployment is probably close to 95 percent.

North Philadelphia was an extreme case, but it was hardly alone in its desolation. Areas of New York City; Washington, D.C.; Newark; Detroit; Chicago; Los Angeles; New Orleans; and many other cities were equally apocalyptic.

In Detroit, for example, where hundreds of thousands of workers had once made good money working in auto manufacturing, so many people had departed the city in recent decades, and so many lots had been abandoned, that in large numbers of neighborhoods there were more vacant homes than occupied ones.

From the 1960s onward, plants started to shed jobs, as production processes increasingly became automated. In 1979, for example, General Motors was producing as many cars in Detroit as it had done twenty years earlier, but with half the number of workers. Finally, however, even those workers proved too costly, and companies shuttered their factories entirely, the jobs outsourced to nonunion sites in other states, or overseas. Once iconic factories, such as the enormous Packard complex that, at its mighty zenith, had employed 60,000 people, remained only as vast shells, the ground carpeted by broken glass, the entranceways to buildings that used to house state-of-the-art industrial machinery piled high with tires, bricks, and twisted metal piping. “Detroit had what appeared to be a curse,” explained Shea Howell, a local university professor of communications and longtime community organizer, who had made something of a hobby of taking out-of-towners on tours of the Motor City’s underside. “People left to follow a job. In the late ’70s, there used to be a bumper sticker: ‘Last one out of Michigan, turn out the lights.’ It was so many people leaving so fast. They just walked out of the house, got in the car and left behind the house. You have magnificent one- and two-story brick homes built for the workers of the auto industry. And
people walked out, couldn’t afford them, couldn’t afford the heat, couldn’t pay the mortgages. It’s overwhelming. Over 30 percent of the city is abandoned; over forty square miles. The abandoned land became a curse; it pulled the heart out of neighborhoods.”

During the days, tourists, engaging in what locals termed “ruins porn” watching, would venture out to the Packard plant in their cars to take photographs of the ruins—as impressive in their own way as those of the pyramids of Egypt. At night, the ruins belonged to graffiti artists, the homeless, drug addicts, and scrap metal scavengers, who would load up stolen grocery store carts with their wares and cart them off to recycling plants. “Decay,” one tagger had thoughtfully painted along one shattered interior wall, empty windows staring vacantly on either side. There was enough piping and other metal amidst the ruins to keep the scavengers occupied for decades.

From one neighborhood to the next, blight flourished, although the word itself didn’t really do justice to the magnitude of the catastrophe. Jobs disappeared; factories ceased operations; supermarkets, banks and other basic business amenities closed up shop. And, in their hundreds of thousands, those residents who could left. Abandoned, their homes—once some of working-class America’s loveliest housing—fell into disrepair, burned down, or crumbled to the ground. The lots became overgrown. At night, coyotes, possums, and other wildlife roamed free. For those who remained, two-thirds of them living at or near the poverty line, the poverty getting deeper and more entrenched by the year, converting the vacant lots to urban gardens became both a way to keep neighborhoods functioning and also a somewhat desperate pathway toward self-sufficiency in an environment increasingly hostile to the poor.

And thus the surreal sight, in the shadows of the Packard ruins barely a stone’s throw from downtown, of small family farms dotting the landscape. Many of them were farmed by African American residents whose families had migrated from the rural Deep South decades earlier and who still retained knowledge of family farming
methods from their youth. By 2012, there were perhaps as many as 2,600 such farms in the city, community organizers estimated. Some of them were just a few rows of vegetables; others, however, included rambling orchards, chicken runs, little plots on which resided sheep and goats; a few were even home to bulls and horses. One, run by a group of Capuchin friars, was experimenting with year-round growing techniques; others were using sophisticated organic methods to leach the myriad of pollutants from the topsoil. A minute or two’s drive from the heart of what used to be one of America’s largest and fastest cities, one could see locals, dressed in muddied jeans and shirts, straw hats atop their heads, pushing wheelbarrows filled with dirt down cracked sidewalks, and carefully hoeing their farms.

By necessity, said Howell, Detroit had become something of an incubator for a new kind of urban living, a kind of utopia carved out of despair and post-industrial desolation. “What will replace industrial society? How will people live? What creates work? How do we do that now? These are fundamental questions. Human beings are in a transition now that’s as great as the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, or from agriculture to industry.”

Things weren’t quite as bad in New York City, financial capital of the world and home to many of the richest people on earth, but in many parts of the metropolis neither were they terribly good. By the end of 2009 close to 10 percent of the working population was unemployed. For African American men that number stood at 17.9 percent—of whom approximately four out of ten had been unemployed for more than a year; and, high though it was, even that figure masked the true extent of joblessness amongst the city’s African American population. As of year’s end 2009, fewer than half of all African American adults in New York were a part of the labor force, a number far lower than that of any other racial category in the city; hammered by years of high incarceration, by poor school graduation rates, by slightly higher than city-average disability rates,
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and dramatically higher poverty rates for those who were disabled, hundreds
of thousands had simply stopped looking for on-the-books employment.
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At the depth of the recession, only one-quarter of African Americans aged 16 to 24 were working in the city.

Smaller Rust Belt towns, too, such as Gary, Indiana; Flint, Michigan; and Camden, New Jersey, were shorthand for postindustrial mayhem. Defined by stunningly high levels of unemployment, rock-bottom wages for those who did have jobs, growing numbers of functionally illiterate residents, and staggering rates of violent crime, these communities were as broken as the more famous, and notorious, Detroit.

Take Gary: In 1970, its population was 170,000, and good work was to be found in the local steel mills. By 2012, its population had imploded—down to 80,000. Official unemployment even within this reduced populace stood at 9 percent, and the joblessness rate was considerably higher than 20 percent. One in five of its buildings were vacant. In 2011, its main public library was closed. In 2012, it laid off one-quarter of its teachers. And, according to an article by journalist Don Terry, in the
American Prospect
magazine, the town was so broke as a result of its collapsed tax base that it no longer even had a working street sweeper. “At one point,” Terry wrote, “the mayor contemplated dispatching people doing community service into the streets with brooms.”
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In 2010, after a few years’ hiatus, Gary regained the unwanted title of “murder capital” of the United States for a city its size. The fifty-four violent deaths in the city that year made for a homicide rate of 0.51 per thousand residents. Out of all the cities, large and small, in America, only New Orleans, with a rate of 0.52, topped Gary.
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Many rural areas, too, remained mired in a poverty that would have been all too familiar to generations past. These were the landscapes traversed by Michael Harrington a half-century ago during his research for
The Other America
. In all likelihood, were Harrington still alive today, he would have little problem recognizing these areas of urban blight and rural dilapidation.

There are, explained economics professor Jim Ziliak, of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, five geographic hotspots of persistent poverty dotted around America, with “poverty rates in excess of 20 percent in each Decennial Census from 1970”: central Appalachia; the Texas colonias; some Native reservations in the desert west; the Black Belt region of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina; and the Mississippi Delta. In these counties, poverty rates can be in the 30 percent range, and up to half of all kids in these areas live in poverty and survive on food stamps. One could add to Ziliak’s list the Ozarks, too, in southwest Missouri, where the poverty is as stark as anything seen elsewhere in the country.