The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (26 page)

For an increasing number of Americans, what the political leadership was just cottoning on to was something that they had been living in the shadow of for years. For homeowners in California cities such as Stockton or Modesto, or in Arizona or Nevada suburbs, for unemployed construction workers, or social workers in hard-hit deindustrialized regions, poverty was just a part of the landscape by 2008. Omnipresent. Ugly. Too often soul-destroying.

In April 2010, a group of educators and organizers from around California walked hundreds of miles up the Central Valley, from Bakersfield to the state capital of Sacramento, protesting education cuts and holding rallies and meetings with residents along the way. One of them was a middle-aged English teacher named Jim Miller, a tall man with a ponytail, who taught at a community college in downtown San Diego.

The marchers walked along dusty back roads, through communities that had been hammered economically over the previous several years. New poverty layered atop old. Broadly, they followed the route taken by farm workers’ organizer Cesar Chavez in his fabled march for economic justice decades earlier, passing shanty towns, tent cities, campgrounds now lived in by foreclosed-on ex-homeowners. Sometimes trade unions gathered their members to join them for stretches of the walk, other times students came out to walk with them. Evenings, they slept in campgrounds, in union halls, in churches.

“It wasn’t just educators on the march. There were also people who were working in homecare services, people working as nurses, in other kinds of public safety areas. We wanted the march to say it’s
not just about our interests as teachers, but everybody—about California’s future as a whole,” Jim explained.

You can read in the paper that a quarter of the people who live in the Central Valley live in poverty and one-third of the people in the Central Valley are on some form of public aid. But when you’re walking through communities you really see this in a visceral way. So we would be camping somewhere near Delano with farm workers, and you’d have a man whose daughter was just laid off from working in a cafeteria in a public school, drive out and knock on the door of the motor home where we were staying and say “thank you.” Simple things.

After a while, it became quite overwhelming, day after day after day of taking in the stories people told you along the way. When you think about the landscape you’re going through, you viscerally saw the foreclosure crisis; you’d walk through streets in small towns on the edge, where you’d have blocks of boarded-up houses. We’d stay in trailer parks. Some of them were kind of small towns constructed by people who’d lost their houses and didn’t have anywhere to stay but their trailer. All the way up the Valley we found this. You’re in the bathroom in the morning shaving, getting ready to march, and you see someone putting on their clothes, getting ready to go to work, because that’s where they live now. You’re near Fresno and you see something exactly like a Hooverville from the 1930s. It was quite moving, and something you can only get your head around if you’re not whizzing past those communities at eighty miles an hour on the I-5.

The walkers wound their way through communities such as Stockton, blighted by vast, impersonal, economic forces. Areas where construction projects had suddenly ground to a halt, leaving half-built ghost towns, and where city services like policing and street lighting had been massively cut back as tax revenues plummeted.

They encountered stories similar to that told by Michael Joseph, the sheet-metal worker with the devalued Stockton home, whom we first encountered in this book’s prologue. “I work in an industry that has been hit hard. I’m a steelworker. What happens is, one day all of us get called into a room. There’s a hundred of us; two hundred of us. All of a sudden they say, “In two weeks you’re losing your job.” How am I going to survive? How am I going to go home and tell my wife?” Joseph wanted to know. “Something’s happening to my stature. How am I going to make my house payment? How am I going to support my children?”

For Joseph, his community had become a tapestry woven out of heartache.

In the last few years all you see is people losing their houses. There is no jobs. When you start seeing people even having to turn off their water, and their lawns are getting brown, all of a sudden you see houses falling apart; you could see on the outside what was the hurting part on the inside of each and every one of my neighbors. I have never ever in my life seen more neighbors during the day than I was seeing. Never. I’d go to the mailbox; I noticed there was a ton of people out. I’d never seen so many garage doors open. There was no work. I’d look around and I’d say, “What happened to you?” My neighbor across the street lost his job at the Numi plant where they was building cars. The neighbor next door to me was in the computer business; he lost his job. The neighbors down the street had to move out and move in with their parents and rent their house. I’ve never seen so many neighbors in my life. When you were younger, you saw your dad go to work, you saw your dad come home. I thought, “How is it I can go out and all my neighbors are out?” None of us are working. You’d see garage sales—things being sold that they didn’t want to sell, their most valued possessions. Almost every three houses there was a garage sale, all days of the week. They were selling things just to be able to make ends meet. We had more and more people going through our garbage cans looking for recycles.
You have scrappers coming in large trucks looking for metal. They’d go into houses and strip out the wire, pull it out through the ceilings. They take every last single thing you could think of. Leaving the houses with holes, basically nothing inside there. Every last thing down to the light bulbs. We’re talking toilets, every fixture you can think of, the lamps, the microwaves.

In Tucson, Arizona, the housing crisis was taking down owners and renters alike. Homeowners unable to pay the monthly bills were losing their homes; renters in foreclosed homes were being evicted. And others, not in foreclosed homes, were losing their jobs, falling behind on their monthly payments and also ending up without roofs over their heads.

Air force veteran Mark Williams, his wife Theresa, and their three young kids were one of these families falling behind. When Mark lost his job, the family could not keep up with the rent; they were evicted, and ended up bouncing from one shelter to the next, looking for a home that felt safe. In one shelter, there were twenty-eight people living in a small house. Several of the residents were on hard drugs. The Williams’s daughters got into their first-ever fistfight. In another, they worried that one of the residents was a child molester.

When I met them, the Williams family was crammed into one small room in an emergency shelter run out of the Oasis Motel, a small inn on the edge of town. There were palm trees in the parking lot, and a rather weathered neon sign rising up into the desert-blue sky from atop the office. It was the sort of temporary stopping point one sees all across the country—anonymous, bare-bones, the kind of place one beds down in for a few hours, showers, and then leaves behind. Except for the Williamses it was now their home, the place from which the kids left for school each morning, the place they returned to each night to do their homework. The family’s life’s possessions were stacked on the floor and in the closet, toys were strewn on
the few square feet of floor space, there were recyclables kept in bags in the bathroom, ready to be exchanged for cash later on. For food, they relied on food stamps—Theresa heated the food in a small microwave; for medical care, the kids were on Medicaid and Mark received care through the VA. “We’re getting by,” said Mark, “but it’s hard the way it is right now. I used to get hired anytime I asked for a job. Now, it’s not happening. I worry about it a lot. I try my best, try to worry about what I can do and not what I can’t. It’s day-to-day living. I see light at the end of the tunnel, but I don’t know where the light’s coming from. I see glimmers of hope, but it’s hard to see where it’s coming from.” Theresa added, “It makes me feel crumpled living here. There’s days, I sit and cry on the bed. Hopefully one day we’ll have a place to call our own apartment. Not a motel.”

BUBBLES AND BUSTS

For 56-year-old Gail Sacco, a onetime restaurateur and longtime volunteer with Las Vegas’s growing homeless population, the web of stories that the people whom she worked with brought to the table were endlessly fascinating: returning veterans who couldn’t navigate civilian life; addicts and the mentally ill who bounced from one overstrapped agency to the next; families down on their luck and living off of Sin City’s scraps. Partly, the stories were deeply personal; partly, they intersected with broader economic trends.

Sacco and her husband frequently drove to Las Vegas’s skid row, in Alphabet City, a grid of lettered streets north of the Strip. They ministered to the residents of some of the meanest, rattiest-looking shantytowns anywhere in America, cardboard-and-metal improvised shelters under freeway on-ramps, places where violence was rife and communicable diseases such as tuberculosis incubated.

There’s a lot of issues surrounding homelessness: Some are homeless because of a loss of a job; or because of an illness—medical bills;
foreclosures. Sometimes alcohol and drugs have a lot to do with it. Sometimes people get out of prison and they can’t get a job. You can’t get food stamps or government help without a state ID. To be able to get a state ID you need a birth certificate. And before you can get a birth certificate you need a state ID. So there’s a lot of issues that make it very difficult for the homeless to get off the streets. Some people become homeless and they’re not dysfunctional; and once you’re on the street two or three months it’s enough to make anyone dysfunctional. We have so many veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevada is the biggest foreclosure state in the country. We have homeless families. We have homeless children.

I have a second house I bought specifically to put troubled homeless in. We bought the house in 2007. We’ve helped a lot of homeless people, in and out of the house. We’ve helped the homeless get in touch with family they hadn’t seen in ten, fifteen years. We’ve had a couple people die of cancer at the house.

When I talked with Sacco, the home, worth less than half what it was when she and her husband purchased it, was teetering on the edge of foreclosure.

These were stories familiar also to Artensia Barry, the onetime food pantry worker and anti-poverty activist in California’s Bay Area who had taken sick and moved to Las Vegas to live with, and be cared for by, some close friends—a woman, whom she considered to be like her sister, who was a medical assistant; and the woman’s husband, who worked at Denny’s.

Barry had seen poverty from the perspective of a volunteer—talking with hungry children, providing food to the homeless and so on. Now, living on a few hundred dollars a month in disability
payments, she was experiencing it firsthand. Her friends’ home, a spacious house with a small pool out back, in a cozy-looking suburb a few miles outside the metropolitan center, was being foreclosed on, after the higher mortgage interest rates that followed the low initial teaser rate kicked in and left the occupants unable to pay their housing bills, and Barry herself was sinking ever deeper into hardship.

We’ve been squatting for some time. It hurts. I’ve had it hard before, but this is the hardest I’ve ever had it. In August I had to leave, because our air conditioner broke down, and it was going to cost $8,000 to get it replaced. There was no way we could do that. This winter we’ll just have to bundle up, because we don’t have no heat. We just barely have enough money with the tips he gets from his job at Denny’s, we just barely have enough money to eat on. This is what’s going on all over Vegas. We’re not an exception to the rule. On this block alone, a majority of these homes are being rented; they’ve been foreclosed on. My neighbor across the street, he’s squatting too. He’s got a child. Sometimes I sit here and I cry. I know there’s a need out there, but there’s no way I can help myself let alone help anyone else. And it just breaks my heart.