I Know What I Saw

It goes back to the question asked of then Florida Governor Lawton Chiles by a radio reporter. Twyla told me she'd asked the governor, "Why is there poverty?" He never answered her.

The reporter, who has since gone on to change her name to an African one, and additionally changed her career---which is the media's loss-- asked the million dollar question. There is only one answer to that question: there is poverty because there is immense wealth concentrated in the hands of relatively few. An extreme example is the diamond drenched wedding attire of Myanmar general Than Schwe's daughter, while the majority of the Burmese people can barely afford to buy food. Don't think for a New York minute I'm advocating a communist redistribution of wealth. I've heard too many horror stories from people who've fled those countries. A competitive economy is a good thing. It fosters innovation and improvement. Real competition, that is.

I started writing this blog a little over a year ago. Its broad theme was poverty. If poverty was a river, its tributaries would be homelessness, low wage jobs, poor health and unaffordable/inadequate health care. The blog became a journey. I traveled and blogged about what I saw and people I met. I'm not a statistician. There are agencies that collect data and spit out numbers and pie charts. I was interested in the human faces of homelessness, so I focused on a couple of people, real people. I spent some nights in homeless shelters, and some days sitting on sidewalks and in parks, and riding subways. I lived in the cheapest possible accomodations I could find in New York City, a place where I was bitten by bed bugs, and shared bathrooms and showers with ten or more other women, a place where you have no kitchen, no refrigerator, and no microwave. Living this way in the capital of the world is a lot more common than you might think. When New Yorkers are burned out of their homes, and they lose everything, a room in the YMCA is often where the lucky ones wind up--for months, if not years.

There was a delay in the beginning of this journey. Overly long, it seemed to me at the time. In retrospect that delay may have been benevolently intended. Or maybe unintended. The questions-- posed at the beginning, and now answered at the end--I had to find my own answers to. Some people, maybe knowing the answers or sensing the outcome, tried to divert the journey. One was a mentor, I realize now. A mentor who didn't give me any fish but sorta taught me how to fish. By throwing me into the ocean with the right bait.

Write about us, said the women in the Manhattan homeless shelter. The world needs to know. After meeting these women, I knew I had to write about them. Read about them in Refugees of America, In the Chairs, Gimme Shelter, and Ladies and Gentlemen...

I laid this blog to rest in May, one year after its birth. I've made some improvements since then, but with the exception of a few things I get fired up about--most notably the incarceration of Aung San Suu Kyi by the criminals in control of her country--this blog was over in May '07. It was then I understood with no doubt whatsover that home is where you hang your heart. Home is not a geographic location, or even necessarily the place where you were born.

In the past year, I've hung up my coat in many places: in closets, lockers, on the backs of chairs, and on hooks screwed into the wall. A few times, I even slept in my coat. I went back to a city that was my home in the 1970's. It was where I lived, worked, gave birth to my son, and freed myself from a self destructive habit. In our last apartment, on 93rd Street and Second Avenue, we stepped through our front door every morning and passed a disheveled man sleeping on the stoop next door. It was the same man every day, sleeping off a drunk. It was remarkable and memorable because he was the only one. In a city bursting with heroin addicts and methadone clinics, drug dealers, and taverns, I saw very few people sleeping on the streets. I never heard about homeless shelters then. This was New York City in the late 1970's.
In 1979 my lease was up. The landlord sent over his new lease, raising the $170 rent on our studio apartment to more than $400. I had an opportunity to move upstate, when I still had family living there. With my child, we left NYC.
I came back throughout the 1980's to visit a good friend. Her rent, on East 116th Street was $425. She had one bedroom, in a 5th floor walk up. The bathtub in the kitchen with a hinged board covering it, doubled as a kitchen sink. The toilet was in a closet size room with a chain pull flusher. Heat was often nonexistent. It was better than her previous apartment, she said, where two dead bodies had been found in the building. Still, she wouldn't let her two children play outside, where drug dealers sold heroin and crack on the front stoop.
(A side thought: why are so many kids overweight? Maybe because they can't play outdoors as kids used to do.)

Each time I visited NYC through the eighties, I noticed more and more people at subway stations or around parks asking for change, a little help, apparently homeless. It was in the 1980's that I first saw the so-called "bag ladies;" women pushing their worldly goods around the city in shopping carts, or trudging through the streets of New York loaded down with plastic shopping bags. This did not exist on such a scale prior to the eighties. So what happened?

Rent happened. I considered moving back to New York in early 1981. I went down to the city, bought a newspaper, looked at the rents and took about two days to decide the bridge had collapsed, washed away in the current, and there was no way to go back. Conventional wisdom is that the homeless are homeless because they are: lazy, mentally ill, drug addicts, drunks. Let me explode a few myths.

Homelessness is not for the lazy. It take tremendous energy and resourcefulness to live as a homeless person. Try it sometime: dragging your essential belongings around all day, including important papers; keeping yourself--and your clothes--clean, avoiding robbery, avoiding arrest, charging your cell phone--if you have one, getting adequate sleep. Read "In the Chairs," August 2006.

There are mentally ill people among the homeless, but with affordable rent, and community based clinics, the mentally ill wouldn't have to be living on the streets. Poor drug addicts live on the streets. Rich drug addicts live in their own homes. Some people become drug addicts after they become homeless. And "drunks:" I'll never forget the young people living on the streets of Gainesville, Florida who said they drank rum to keep warm at night. Which came first: sleeping outdoors or drinking?

If you are interested in the stories of people who are invisible to the celebrity obsessed mainstream media (msm) but are literally right in your face, and under your nose, scroll back. Read Dawn. Addicts, alcoholics, and sick people have always lived in New York City and in every other city and town in America. The difference is that in the 70's a low wage worker, a retiree or a disabled worker, and that includes veterans--did they not work for all of us?--all could afford a home even if only in a rooming house. Now, even middle class workers like cops, firefighters and teachers have to live in outer boroughs or in New Jersey because only celebrities and millionaires can afford Manhattan rent. Like post-Katrina New Orleans, Manhattan is closed to us commoners. Our tourism dollars are still welcome, however.

Corporate America is not going to raise the pay of American workers to keep pace with skyrocketing rents and mortgages. Does our government have the will to create more subsidized housing --maybe built by unemployed workers who could learn construction trade skills at the same time--so that America's lowest paid workers, disabled workers, homeless vets, and low income retirees can have homes?

Stay tuned.

Home Is

In 2001 I fell through a hole in the safety net and kept falling. There really wasn't any safety net. Home became my car. Health care became the emergency room. I listened, enviously, as a woman talked about sweeping her porch at home. At home. I wished I had a porch to sweep, or a garden to tend. I had no home, and for a couple of frantic weeks, neither did my poor dog.

The experience will haunt me forever. Probably, I need professional help to recover from this. I did not use drugs or alcohol to numb the pain, and homelessness is painful. It shakes you to the core of your being. The common "wisdom" is that the homeless are mentally ill, or drug addicted, or alcoholic. Go to a shelter and talk to some of the persons living there. Stereotypes are too easy, too convenient. People are homeless because they have no home. It's often a question of affordability and availability.

I've known plenty of mentally ill people who had homes, and so have you. Plenty of alcoholics have homes--some own their homes. You know it and I know it. Drug addicts have homes too. Ask Rush Limbaugh if his drug habit made him homeless...fat chance.

People are homeless because they can't afford housing. Monthly net income for low income worker = $1500 after taxes. Monthly rent in Brooklyn or Queens or Bronx or (less likely) some parts of Manhattan for typical studio or 1 bedroom = $1200-$1500, if you look really hard. (Duh?) Nothing from nothing = nothing.

Another no brainer: people get AIDS and Hep C from dirty needles because they used dirty needles! (See: Needle Exchange Programs and the fascists that oppose them) How much would it cost to provide clean needles to addicts through a needle exchange program that could be largely staffed by volunteers? "Follow the money trail," said one woman. Who benefits financially from the expensive drugs used to treat AIDS and Hep C?

And who benefits from the skyscraper high rents?
In New York, for example, for about $900 a month you can get a room (in some Y's), approximately 12 by 20 feet, a shared bathroom that may or may not be on the same floor, no kitchen, no sink, no fridge. ("Like Robinson Carusoe, it's primitive as can be...") And you might find yourself sharing the room with a mouse or bedbugs. If you get stuck with an inner room, you won't get cell phone access, so tell your family and friends to call you during the day when you're out on the street.

Speaking of affordable housing and real estate. Today's DailyNews brought us the story of a real estate mogul who had a computer full of baby porn. His business is selling luxury homes to the well heeled and exploiting the abuse of small children. Words almost fail me at this point. Except that I hope he soon finds himself housed in the best American jail his money can't buy.

Ladies and Gentlemen..

Ladies and gentlemen of New York, this is Dawn. She is twenty something, or so she appears. She could actually be younger; living out in the open, in the cold roughens up your skin, reddens it, makes it tough to stick to a beauty routine. People who've lived on the street for awhile tend to look older than they are.

She is street smart; likes to "write" as in tagging, and likes skateboarding. She is punky, with silver jewelry piercing her face, and she is loyal--to Tabitha, the large brown and white Boxer; the dog that sits quietly and watchfully beside her, wearing a heavy vest and snuggled under the jumble of blankets and other belongings gathered around the two of them on the sidewalk.

Dawn is from San Francisco and she plays flute and piccolo. As a kid, she says she "only" made it to second chair in the San Francisco junior symphony, downplaying her accomplishments. First chair is best, she explained. So second is really not bad, I suggested. Not bad at all.

She didn't say what prompted her to hop freight trains and travel across the country, and I didn't ask. She said she has no family to go back to, and again I didn't press the point. She had a brother who didn't make it out of Iraq alive, and she is angry that the government would not pay to fly his body back home. She says she does have friends in San Francisco she can stay with, and she's ready to go back. Her dog Tabitha must go with her, as will her boyfriend, and the only way is by plane. For lack of a pair of airline tickets from New York City to San Francisco and about $50 for Tabitha's ticket they stay here, on the sidewalks of New York.

She had been traveling with a friend before she landed here, and as she puts it: her girl got deported back to Montreal, and it wasn't (her friend's) fault, but it left Dawn and Tabitha alone in the world. Or more specifically, alone in Michigan, a place she didn't much like; and so she made her way here to New York.

So here they are now: Dawn and Tabitha, for too many days sitting on a cold hard sidewalk in Union Square as when I first talked with her. She is always cold, she says. In the summer, unable to shake off the cold, she still wears hooded sweatshirts.

It's February. Today Dawn had her head down, face hidden, maybe to keep warm or maybe because she is tired of looking at the world, and all the people swirling around her. And this time, I don't start a conversation. I just put a couple dollars in her empty coffee cup and go into the subway.

She told me she needs a sleeping bag and a backpack. I told her I'd write about her on my blog and maybe somebody would read it and help. She can't stay in a shelter because Tabitha can't go, and she won't leave her dog.

It seems there are a lot of Dawns in this fair city, and maybe not as many Tabithas, but certainly a few. I don't know why this one captured my attention--maybe because of her neatly printed cardboard sign, its message more detailed than most, its words "SHOW SOME COMPASSION," both a plea and an admonishment.

Homelessness is everywhere. It's in the sundrenched, stardusted streets of L.A., and it's in the steamy, dusty, jungle rot roadsides of the South, but here--like no place else--it's right in your face. Not swept away under a highway overpass, or tucked behind a stand of scrubby palms; here in New York City the homeless are truly in our midst. They sit on the subway stairs where teachers and construction workers and lawyers and students and nurses and retail workers race up and down, completing the cycle of their daily commutes. They sleep on hot air sidewalk grates, (which are getting harder to find) and on the benches and chairs of our parks; they rest against the walls of million dollar real estate. They can't be ignored--not here--and they're not. They're written about every day, in the news dailies, and the news weeklies; the long term homeless, the recently made homeless, and the housed threatened with imminent homelessness. Despite the public vows of Mayor Bloomberg to reduce and eventually eliminate homelessness in New York, their numbers have risen.

Against all odds, sometimes, through the efforts of dedicated social workers, housing activists, politicians who remember what public service means, and probably more than a few lawyers--some of the homeless get moved into homes.

It's like standing in the ocean, trying to push back the tide with your hands. You're going to get soaked, and if you can't swim, you might even drown. Once an activist, I believed I could fight for social and economic justice and make a difference. Until I lost my job for health reasons, and became homeless myself, and found more and more of my energy diverted into basic, barebones survival. I told Dawn: I'm not that far from where you are now.

Where I "live" is temporary. It's on shaky ground, thin ice. There are no pets here; no kitchens, no refrigerators, and bathrooms are shared. It's life out of a suitcase, eating take out. It's day to day survival, and it's not uncommon in New York. The welcome mat is out only as long as your money holds out, and only for 28 days. Still, as Dawn pointed out, "It's better than nothing,"
which is certainly true. But is better than nothing the best we can hope for? Is better than nothing our highest aspiration?

Where a lot of New Yorkers live is temporary because real estate here is more precious than gold, and just as surely as New York winters are cold, the apartment or room someone lives in today could be sold tomorrow, converted into condominiums, or destroyed in a fire. This life--the nomadic life--probably agress with some people but for others, it wearies the mind, runs down health. If you think about it, it's a good way to keep the rabble down; keep them moving--from apartment to apartment, from SRO to SRO, from street to shelter to cheap hotel and back again; the profiteers of real estate snapping at your heels.

In Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where does shelter come in? What energy does one have left for chasing higher goals (self actualization) after fighting for the basics day after day? Organizers, activists, political leaders, Nobel prize winners--how many do you see among the ranks of the homeless?

There's a commonly held view of the homeless, that most are mentally ill. Which came first: the homelessness or the mental instability? Try this yourself--spend a few nights in a shelter, and watch yourself begin to unravel.

When I told my son, a travel agent, about the cost of rent in Manhattan, he said he thinks only celebrities live there. Manhattan--playground for movie stars? This is where my son, now in his twenties, was born. We moved away when he was a toddler. He won't be moving back anytime soon. He said he'd like to visit sometime.

Out of curiousity, I took a train uptown to the neighborhood where we lived for two years: east 93rd Street and Second Avenue. Key Food market is still there. Metropolitan Hospital is still there, looking more run down than I remember it, with cops and security guards stationed at every corridor, and the playground, still on the corner of 96th Street, seems much smaller than before, but nothing else looks the same. Most of the people I talked to on the street were pleasant and helpful; a Latina, a Muslim woman. But the white American seemed fearful when I asked her if she knew what apartments were renting for on this, my old block. She answered quickly: "I don't know; I live in a co-op," and hurried away. The Puerto Rican woman working in the hospital doing janitorial work was friendly, but said, in a resigned way, "They steal everything. As soon as I put soap in there, five minutes later, it's gone."
And in the men's room she told me, they even steal the toilet paper.

The street vendor selling fresh strawberries, bananas, oranges, and other fresh fruit from his
cart somehow talked me into buying a container of perfect strawberries, an orange, and two bananas--all for $3, when I'd stopped to buy one banana. He's a born salesman, this one. He wanted to go home soon, he explained, and he needed to sell as much as he could before leaving. I had a bad cold. It's as if he sensed what I needed--this fresh fruit, with its vitamin C. After a couple days eating this food, I began to feel better.

Where does Dawn eat, I wonder. Her dog can't go inside most stores and restaurants. How does she buy food? Maybe she has a partner--a friend who helps her with this. I offered her one of my cookies--vegan, I explained, in case she doesn't eat animal products. "My teeth are really bad," she said, declining the cookie, and who can blame her?

I doubt I'd accept a cookie from a stranger. I know I wouldn't.

You can't save the world, somebody (a lot of somebodies) said.

"When you try to help people, they think you're stupid," somebody else, a former co worker, said to the idealistic union steward.

"They don't want you to help them," a boss told me once, when I was that idealistic union steward.

Maybe the best you can do, the best you can hope for is to save yourself? (So you don't add yourself to the sum total of human misery in the world) And maybe those are the most cynical words ever written; but I think the truth is somewhere in between, maybe in the Middle Path or Middle Way I read about somewhere--I think in a book about Buddhism. Whatever it is, this path, we seem to have lost the way.

If you read this and can help Dawn get to San Francisco, go to Union Square.

Gimme A Dollah

It's all about the money, honey. At least with ads, it is-- and so I've decided to cancel my adsense banners because they weren't working for me. That is to say, they weren't paying the rent. Not that I didn't find some of the ads that showed up on my site ve-r-r-ry interesting. And speaking of the advertising game (and rent) reminds me of Nancy. I met her in a New York City homeless shelter for women. Without elaborating much, she told me she used to work in advertising, right here in the Big Apple.

Nancy's appearance would never tell you she's homeless. She's petite, vivacious, with dark expressive eyes; medium length dark hair cut sylishly in layers. Ever the stoic, she drags her luggage on wheels around with her, looks like a business traveler. She chats with shelter clients, while juggling appointments with her lawyer, fighting a long running war with her landlord.

It's not hard to imagine her excelling in advertising, as she has a way with words easily translatable into a talent for writing copy. Her conversational style--lightning fast like that of most New Yorkers--delivers fragments of information heavy with meaning, liberally salted with brilliant one liners that make you laugh. "Gimme a dollah"-- an obscure reference to something said by another homeless person, in a context half forgotten, is one of her memorable lines. "You have to," she says, of the joking. There's nothing frivolous about this laughter. It's a survival skill.

"How did you get here?" is another of Nancy's lines. One might ask the same of her. She doesn't look the part, doesn't fit the "bag lady"stereotype. She makes a vague reference to "decisions" she made, and blames no one for her homelessness. Meanwhile, the battle with her former landlord rages on-- for access to her possessions, her furniture, that he seized when she couldn't pay her rent, and he locked her out.

She has "been through hell," but doesn't dwell there. Instead, she praises the woman lawyer who has helped her. She is moving forward, one step at a time and at long last, a corner has been turned, and Nancy says she can get her stuff, but some things, she doesn't want anymore. For one thing, she doesn't want the couch. "Too many memories," she explains, "of the past, of people who sat on that couch..."

A question is raised, about homeless people. Why they are homeless, how they got that way.
Nancy suggests that the homeless are "rebels," and in many ways this statement nails it.
Adds Audrey: "There's a little bit of independence here, in every one of these people. We don't fit into this scheme of things."

Nancy herself has alluded to her own "choice" not to continue to live the way she was living. Cynthia came here from Atlanta to chase her dream of singing professionally. A born activist, she stood up for the most vulnerable shelter clients during her stay here. Catherine, a devout Christian, rails against greed and skewed priorities. She believes Jesus will come soon to avenge these wrongs.

Here in "Homeless Lane," as Cynthia called it, nobody has any illusions about the system or the ways it works against them. The homeless are often victims of blatant social and economic injustice themselves, both before they become homeless and afterwards. But here there are no self proclaimed victims. Here in this shelter I could not find one who blamed anyone for her homeless status. Instead, they refer to choices they made. Rather than victims, they are seekers.

There was a school of thought, popularized during the Reagan administration, that said you can't throw money at social problems and make them go away. But I don't accept that. If you put enough money into the right places at the right times, you will solve many a social ill. Too many social ills are caused or worsened by poverty, and I've seen the success stories.

As Catherine so eloquently put it: "People are starving, and the government is studying the mating habits of cockroaches."

World Wide Genocide

There is no safe place when you're poor. I used to think this was only in America, where spending on social programs has been demolished by design, but the blog of Wandering Scribe has made me understand this "trend" is worldwide. A world wide genocide against the poor (apologies to Pearl Jam for the World Wide Suicide rip off).

The pain in my head is most likely caused by a long ago car accident in which I was hit from behind, and that resulted in almost immediate head and neck pain. I know from experience that a chiropractor can make the pain disappear, sometimes for weeks at a time. But I have no health insurance, and no money to pay the medical bills. I canceled my health insurance, because I couldn't afford to pay the premiums, but it doesn't matter because when I was working, the employer provided insurance "coverage" didn't pay for chiropractic treatment either. Or acupuncture. And since throwing boxes all night aggravated the injuries, continuous pain was guaranteed. Today's headache came with a bonus: numb feet and nausea. I don't know if they're connected. I just know I was too sick to do anything, including write in this blog. I thought for awhile about maybe having to go to the emergency room, and I thought about the huge bills I'd never be able to pay, so I concluded death would be preferable. Having no health "benefits" doesn't make me feel less safe. It makes no difference at all.

I remembered a news story I read about a "free clinic" run by Muslim doctors, but I didn't save the article. I called a family member who works in the health care field and asked her to try to find out where this clinic is. I might need it someday. Still, I have my doubts.

There's very little that's "free" these days. Everything comes with conditions, with a price. Only your mother's love is free and unconditional. And those very rare--and very few, friends. When you become too sick to function even on a basic level, and know there's no help available to you without money, that's terror. Health care terrorism.

When you try for nine months to find a job, and you are homeless and have one more unemployment check and the job you're offered pays about $250 after taxes--working full time--that's terror: economic terrorism. After nine months of unemployment, and 16 months of homelessness, I finally found an apartment I could afford. It was a studio, very small, but OK. The rent was cheap, and so was my paycheck, but I made it for a year. Then a new landlord bought the building, and all the tenants fled. In terror. Housing terrorism.

New tenants moved in--with bigger incomes or rich parents. I wanted to flee too, but could find no apartment where my 11 year-old dog could live too, so I stayed, and paid the $200 a month rent increase, until all my savings ran out, and my in-laws said then: we'll take the dog in. So my dog moved, and soon after I found another apartment. And meanwhile, my dog died, and I wasn't even with him at the end. When you're poor, even your dog gets terrorized. Pet terrorism.

When you're poor, you get moved around a lot, because the rents are always rising, and the apartments are always going condo, and poor people can't buy their apartments. In Florida, even middle class people can't buy their apartments, never mind a house. So where is this state going to house all the low wage workers they so desperately need to keep the service economy running? Maybe they'll build company dormitories, like they do in China. But unlike China, they'll charge us rent for our bunk beds.

When you move a lot, it's hard to put down roots, be part of a community. It's especially hard in Florida. Everything can take root and grow here; everything except humans.