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.

Draw Bad Cards (props to Bob Marley)

In a six month period in New York City I immersed myself in a new world, a world of the urban homeless. What better place to research the roots of homelessness than in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country?

It's a great sacrifice people make for the privilege of living in the city known as the "Capital of the World." With a population of 8 million, NYC draws talented artists, writers, performers and gifted people from every part of the world. Some stay, finding the trade offs worth it. Others don't.

To live here is to struggle. People go to great creative lengths to devise shelter. Some sleep in renovated bread trucks. Some sleep in the subway stations, or in parks. Some pay $800 or more a month for a room, with a shared bathroom and kitchen, if there is a kitchen at all. Some long term shelter dwellers pay rent on storage units where they keep their stuff.

In Manhattan, $1,200 for a one bedroom apartment is cheap rent, if you can find it. Would be renters pay real estate brokers a non refundable finder's fee equal to one month's rent for an apartment, and they're happy to do it. That's in addition to the standard first month's rent, last month's rent, and security deposit.

Here, on the street you can find all kinds of designer leather bags, shoes, clothes, and accessories for sale for pennies on the dollar. It's the necessities of life that are expensive. Housing is number one. It's scarce and it's costly. Necessity number two is food. Food here is expensive: restaurant food, grocery store food. A jar of peanut butter that costs $1.69 at WalMart is $3 here. Bottled water, 64 cents at WalMart versus more than $1 in New York grocery stores. New York pizza is possibly the best in the world. If you have to live on street food, pizza is the way to go, at $2-$4 a slice. Health food grocery/delis like Whole Foods are just too pricey to seriously consider. There are many supermarkets with take out buffets, but take out adds up. If you don't have a desk/office you work out of, you eat your lunch in the park, whatever the weather. A lot of freelancers carry their laptops around the city, connecting to the internet in a library branch to type their stories, do their work. A surprisingly high number of jobs involve working outside: street vendors, canvassers for political and charitable organizations, leafleteers, doormen, street cleaners, subway maintenance workers, messengers. Better to cook at home if you can, and brown bag your lunch.

The question of how and why people become homeless has haunted me since I became homeless in 2001 after I was sacked from my job for health reasons. It was a low wage job, and I was living paycheck to paycheck, so there was nothing to cushion the fall. I hit the ground almost immediately, and like hourly employees everywhere I had no golden parachute, just two week's vacation pay and an unemployment check. During this time, a lot of people gave me a place to sleep and shower, which kept me off the street at night. Some for a small rent, some for free.

In August, with my latest lease at an end and my apartment building up for sale, I went to NYC, the Big Apple, the high rent leader, to see what I could learn; and I did learn.

In the shelter and in the drop in center, on the street, and in the parks, I talked to homeless people. Older people, young people, white people, people of color, men and women. Some used drugs, or lived in the bottle. Some did not. Some were forced out by new landlords who jacked up the rents, some were chased out by abusive spouses, or thrown out by parents. One women, whose longtime trucker boyfriend died suddenly from a heart attack, was locked out of the apartment they'd shared by his relatives who grabbed everything, including all her personal belongings. A year later, still mourning the loss of a man she obviously loved deeply, she continues to struggle to rebuild her life.

Nobody in the shelters wanted to be there. Some, who stayed outside said they preferred the street to shelter life. Dawn stayed outside because her dog Tabitha was not allowed in any shelter, and she wouldn't abandon the nine-year old Boxer to the pound and probable death.

If there's any common thread here that explains the cause of homelessness it's this: the long term homeless, for whatever reason, have no family or close ties willing or able to help them. Whether that's because their family members are so mired in their own problems they have nothing left to give, or because family just doesn't care. In the matter of familial relations, the long term homeless very often drew bad cards.

There was a time when section 8 subsidized rent was available, after a period of waiting, for virtually any low income person or family, young or senior, working or disabled. That all began to change with the Reagan Revolution. At the same time, in the early 1980's rents started to explode in New York City. The rest of the country followed New York's lead. With the changes begun by Reagan and continued by George W. Bush, no longer could those without strong family ties or close friends look to their government for help.

In contrast, a CEO who mismanages a company badly enough to be canned, is cut loose with a million plus compensation package. I guess that's what people mean when they say the private sector pays better. It sure does--if you're a CEO.

For the rest of you working stiffs, and disabled poor: if you make wrong moves, if you draw bad cards, you lose.

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.