Evicted

An excerpt from EVICTED: Poverty and Profit in the American City 

WINNER OF THE 2017 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION 

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Jori and his cousin were cutting up, tossing snowballs at passing cars. From Jori’s street corner on Milwaukee’s near South Side, cars driving on Sixth Street passed squat duplexes with porch steps ending at a sidewalk edged in dandelions. Those heading north approached the Basilica of St. Josaphat, whose crowning dome looked to Jori like a giant overturned plunger. It was January of 2008, and the city was ex­periencing the snowiest winter on record. Every so often, a car turned off Sixth Street to navigate Arthur Avenue, hemmed in by the snow, and that’s when the boys would take aim. Jori packed a tight one and let it fly. The car jerked to a stop, and a man jumped out. The boys ran inside and locked the door to the apartment where Jori lived with his mother, Arleen, and younger brother, Jafaris. The lock was cheap, and the man broke down the door with a few hard-heeled kicks. He left before anything else happened. When the landlord found out about the door, she decided to evict Arleen and her boys. They had been there eight months.

The day Arleen and her boys had to be out was cold. But if she waited any longer, the landlord would summon the sheriff, who would arrive with a gun, a team of boot-footed movers, and a folded judge’s order saying that her house was no longer hers. She would be given two options: truck or curb. “Truck” would mean that her things would be loaded into an eighteen-footer and later checked into bonded storage. She could get everything back after paying $350. Arleen didn’t have $350, so she would have opted for “curb,” which would mean watch­ing the movers pile everything onto the sidewalk. Her mattresses. A floor-model television. Her copy of Don’t Be Afraid to Discipline. Her nice glass dining table and the lace tablecloth that fit just-so. Silk plants. Bibles. The meat cuts in the freezer. The shower curtain. Ja­faris’s asthma machine.

Arleen took her sons—Jori was thirteen, Jafaris was five—to a homeless shelter, which everyone called the Lodge so you could tell your kids, “We’re staying at the Lodge tonight,” like it was a motel. The two-story stucco building could have passed for one, except for all the Salvation Army signs. Arleen stayed in the 120-bed shelter until April, when she found a house on Nineteenth and Hampton, in the predominantly black inner city, on Milwaukee’s North Side, not far from her childhood home. It had thick trim around the windows and doors and was once Kendal green, but the paint had faded and chipped so much over the years that the bare wood siding was now exposed, making the house look camouflaged. At one point some­one had started repainting the house plain white but had given up mid-brushstroke, leaving more than half unfinished. There was often no water in the house, and Jori had to bucket out what was in the toilet. But Arleen loved that it was spacious and set apart from other houses. “It was quiet,” she remembered. “And five-twenty-five for a whole house, two bedrooms upstairs and two bedrooms downstairs. It was my favorite place.”

After a few weeks, the city found Arleen’s favorite place “unfit for human habitation,” removed her, nailed green boards over the win­dows and doors, and issued a fine to her landlord. Arleen moved Jori and Jafaris into a drab apartment complex deeper in the inner city, on Atkinson Avenue, which she soon learned was a haven for drug deal­ers. She feared for her boys, especially Jori—slack-shouldered, with pecan-brown skin and a beautiful smile—who would talk to anyone.

Arleen endured four summer months on Atkinson before moving into a bottom duplex unit on Thirteenth Street and Keefe, a mile away. She and the boys walked their things over. Arleen held her breath and tried the lights, smiling with relief when they came on. She could live off someone else’s electricity bill for a while. There was a fist-sized hole in a living-room window, the front door had to be locked with an ugly wooden plank dropped into metal brackets, and the carpet was filthy and ground in. But the kitchen was spacious and the living room well lit. Arleen stuffed a piece of clothing into the window hole and hung ivory curtains.

The rent was $550 a month, utilities not included, the going rate in 2008 for a two-bedroom unit in one of the worst neighborhoods in America’s fourth-poorest city. Arleen couldn’t find a cheaper place, at least not one fit for human habitation, and most landlords wouldn’t rent her a smaller one on account of her boys. The rent would take 88 percent of Arleen’s $628-a-month welfare check. Maybe she could make it work. Maybe they could at least stay through winter, until crocuses and tulips stabbed through the thawed ground of spring, Ar­leen’s favorite season.

There was a knock at the door. It was the landlord, Sherrena Tarver. Sherrena, a black woman with bobbed hair and fresh nails, was loaded down with groceries. She had spent $40 of her own money and picked up the rest at a food pantry. She knew Arleen needed it.

Arleen thanked Sherrena and closed the door. Things were off to a good start.

Reprinted from EVICTED: POVERTY AND PROFIT IN THE AMERICAN CITY Copyright © 2016 by Matthew Desmond. Published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

"Elderly Food Stamp Enrollment Swells in Minnesota", Star Tribune, January 2017

Chris Serres
Star Tribune
January 13, 2017

The U.S. food-stamp program, created five decades ago to stave off hunger among impoverished families, is undergoing a remarkable resurgence among a generation of older Minnesotans.

Squeezed by rising living costs and depleted retirement funds, people who are 65 and older now represent the fastest-growing segment of food stamp recipients in Minnesota. Their numbers have nearly doubled since the Great Recession ended in 2009, forcing the state to explore new ways to reach an often isolated population of seniors.

The surge in enrollment among older people also reflects a major shift in attitudes toward the federal benefit, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Once derided as “welfare,” food stamps no longer carry the same stigma, particularly among the growing numbers of baby boomers entering retirement. The benefit has become so popular that, in some Twin Cities senior complexes, it is almost as ubiquitous as Social Security and Medicare benefits, social workers say.

A decade ago, only one-third of Minnesota seniors who qualified for food stamps actually received the benefit — the lowest participation rate of any age group. But years of outreach in low-income senior housing projects and statewide reforms that streamlined the application process have dramatically increased enrollment. Applicants can now sign up online and be interviewed by phone. Within days, they can receive an electronic benefits card in the mail that can be swiped to buy groceries.

Fatal beating rattles Anoka, prompts safety forum for elderly residents
Last year, a record 58 percent of eligible seniors in Minnesota were enrolled in the program — more than 50,000 people — state figures show.

“Times have changed, and we have gotten a lot smarter about doing the outreach,” said James Koppel, assistant commissioner for the state Department of Human Services, which oversees the SNAP program in Minnesota. “The idea that ‘to be on food stamps is to be on welfare’ is no longer as common.”

But shifting attitudes are only part of the explanation. Minnesota nonprofits that serve poor communities also report growing economic distress among seniors hit by a potent mix of soaring health care premiums, high rents and dwindling retirement savings. Although the poverty rate among Minnesotans older than 65 is just 6.9 percent, below the overall state rate of 10.2 percent, that still adds up to nearly 54,000 elderly people living under the poverty line.

Across the state, visits by seniors to food shelves have soared by 49 percent since 2012 — far outpacing any other age category, according to Hunger Solutions Minnesota, a statewide relief group. All told, Minnesota seniors made nearly 53,000 more visits to food shelves in the first half of 2016 than over the corresponding period four years earlier.

Organizations that serve low-income seniors say they are struggling to keep pace with a surge in need. Last spring, First Lutheran Church in the Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood of St. Paul began serving a hot meal once a month for poor and isolated seniors, expecting a few dozen people to attend. Instead, nearly 150 people, mostly from the surrounding neighborhood, pour into the cafeteria each month.

On a recent Thursday, seniors began arriving at First Lutheran an hour before the noon meal, which included generous servings of lobster rolls, tomato basil soup, strawberries and cupcakes. After the meal, seniors left the cafeteria clutching bags of food and pamphlets on how to apply for SNAP and other benefits.

“For many people here, this may be the only hot meal they get for days,” said Janet Golden, executive director of East Side Elders, a St. Paul nonprofit that helps seniors stay in their homes and organizes the meal.

For Rhonda Wood, 61, of St. Paul, the search for fresh, affordable food is a challenge. Wood depends on Social Security for most of her income and said she has struggled to put food on the table since her landlord raised the rent by $100 a month and her health insurance deductible tripled — forcing her to pay more for her anti-migraine medications.

Once a month, she visits a local food shelf to stock up on bulk food items such as canned meat and pasta, but she still relies on her $58-a-month SNAP benefits to buy fresh vegetables and fruit.

Her one guilty pleasure is fresh grapes, which would be out of the question were it not for the SNAP program, she said. Once a week, she can toss a bundle of grapes into her grocery cart, along with some fresh vegetables.

“It sounds silly, but I really look forward to those grapes,” she said. “Food stamps are the difference between eating canned chicken and beans every day and having some actual fresh food. It’s super meaningful.”

Like thousands of other Minnesotans, Wood is a beneficiary of a statewide outreach effort to poor seniors. About five years ago, the state and nearly two-dozen agencies joined forces to bolster participation in SNAP. Social workers hosted seminars in senior apartment buildings, including the complex where Wood now lives, on how to cook nutritious meals and how to apply for SNAP. In 2013, the state introduced a simple, one-page application for seniors, replacing a cumbersome 32-page packet. It also allowed people to recertify for benefits every two years, eliminating the need to visit a county office every year.

Agencies also debunked some myths — the perception that people on Social Security could not qualify for SNAP, or that the benefits were too modest to justify filling out the application. In reality, elderly individuals living alone and enrolled in SNAP last year received $108 a month in benefits, according to federal data.

“For people on very fixed incomes, even $15 [a month] can make a difference in buying fruits and vegetables,” Kevin Concannon, undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said in a recent interview.

Vicki Parchman, 58, of Brooklyn Park, said she has witnessed firsthand the changing attitudes toward food stamps. In 1999, when she first started receiving the benefit, Parchman recalls feeling embarrassed when she would pull out the little coupons to pay for groceries. She could hear people whispering in the checkout line.

“People would judge you and say, ‘Look at what she’s buying with those stamps,’ like you’re a criminal,” she said. Now, with the electronic debit card, she can swipe for groceries without attracting attention. A volunteer at a local food shelf, she now helps educate others.

“Everything’s changed,” Wood said. “The seniors that I know who aren’t getting SNAP, they don’t think, ‘Oh, what’s she doing on food stamps?’ Instead it’s more like, ‘I really wish I could get that, too.”

Chris Serres • 612-673-4308    Twitter: @chrisserres

Food stamps in Minn.  50,986 Minnesotans age 65 and older enrolled in the food stamp* program, in 2015.   $108 The average monthly benefit for seniors, nationwide.  $610 million The federal expenditures on food stamp benefits in Minnesota, FY 2015.  

*Formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

Living on $2 a Day

Jessica Compton’s family of four would have no income if she didn’t donate plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna, in Chicago, have gone for days with nothing to eat other than spoiled milk.

After two decades of groundbreaking research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen before — households surviving on virtually no cash income. Edin, whose deep examination of her subjects’ lives has “turned sociology upside down” (Mother Jones), teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on surveys of the incomes of the poor. The two made a surprising discovery: the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to one and a half million American households, including about three million children. 

But the fuller story remained to be told. Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor? What do they do to survive? In search of answers, Edin and Shaefer traveled across the country to speak with families living in this extreme poverty. Through the book’s many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America’s extreme poor. Not just a powerful exposé, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality.

US Teens Trading Sex Work for Food, The Guardian, September, 2016

David Smith
The Guardian
September 12, 2016

Teenagers in America are resorting to sex work because they cannot afford food, according to a study that suggests widespread hunger in the world’s wealthiest country.

Focus groups in all 10 communities analysed by the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank, described girls “selling their body” or “sex for money” as a strategy to make ends meet. Boys desperate for food were said to go to extremes such as shoplifting and selling drugs.

The findings raise questions over the legacy of Bill Clinton’s landmark welfare-reform legislation 20 years ago as well as the spending priorities of Congress and the impact of slow wage growth. Evidence of teenage girls turning to “transactional dating” with older men is likely to cause particular alarm.

“I’ve been doing research in low-income communities for a long time, and I’ve written extensively about the experiences of women in high poverty communities and the risk of sexual exploitation, but this was new,” said Susan Popkin, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and lead author of the report, Impossible Choices.

“Even for me, who has been paying attention to this and has heard women tell their stories for a long time, the extent to which we were hearing about food being related to this vulnerability was new and shocking to me, and the level of desperation that it implies was really shocking to me. It’s a situation I think is just getting worse over time.”

The qualitative study, carried out in partnership with the food banks network Feeding America, created two focus groups – one male, one female – in each of 10 poor communities across the US. The locations included big cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington and rural North Carolina and eastern Oregon. A total of 193 participants aged 13 to 18 took part and were allowed to remain anonymous.

Their testimony paints a picture of teenagers – often overlooked by policymakers focused on children aged zero to five – missing meals, making sacrifices and going hungry, with worrying long-term consequences.

Popkin said: “We heard the same story everywhere, a really disturbing picture about hunger and food insecurity affecting the well being of some of the most vulnerable young people. The fact that we heard it everywhere from kids in the same way tells us there’s a problem out there that we should be paying attention to.”

The consistency of the findings across gender, race and geography was a surprise.  “I wasn’t sure we would see it,” Popkin said. “Kids knew about all these strategies: hanging around your friend’s house and see if they’ll feed you, going hungry so that their younger brothers and sisters could eat, saving their school lunch so they could eat it at night so they could sleep at night.

“Everybody knew where you get the cheapest food and how you keep some emergency stuff in your house. It was just very matter-of-fact and very common, in the richest country in the world.”

In every community, and in 13 of the 20 focus groups, there were accounts of sexual exploitation, often related with distaste. A girl in Portland, Oregon told researchers: “It’s really like selling yourself. Like you’ll do whatever you need to do to get money or eat.”

Another comment from Portland: “You’re not even dating … they’ll be like … ‘I don’t really love him, but I’m going to do what I have to do.’”

Many prefer to rationalize what they are doing as dating of sorts. A boy in rural North Carolina said: “When you’re selling your body, it’s more in disguise. Like if I had sex with you, you have to buy me dinner tonight … that’s how girls deal with the struggle … That’s better than taking money because if they take money, they will be labeled a prostitute.”

In seven of the 10 communities, teenagers told stories of girls exchanging sexual favors with strangers or stripping for money in abandoned houses, at flea markets and on the street. A girl in San Diego, California, said: “Someone I knew dropped out of high school to make money for the family. She felt the need to step up. She started selling herself.”

Another girl in Chicago told researchers of an 11-year-old girl who dropped out of sixth grade to work in the sex trade, while boys in Los Angeles described how middle school girls put up flyers in public places to advertise their services.

In the communities with the highest poverty rates, both girls and boys steal food and other basics from local stores for themselves or their families. A male teenager in Chicago said: “I ain’t talking about robbing nobody. I’m just talking like going there and get what you need, just hurry up and walk out, which I do … They didn’t even know. If you need to do that, that’s what you got to do, that’s what you got to do.”

Some children begin stealing at the age of seven or eight, according to the focus groups. Boys mainly take items such as phones, shoes, jewelry and bikes. Selling drugs is also common. One in Los Angeles said: “A lot of kids at a young age will sell drugs to get money for their families. People think it’s good but it messes you up.”

Popkin, who has been researching distressed public housing communities for more than 25 years, explained: “With the boys there was a lot of hustling and shoplifting or maybe stealing a car stereo or something small they could sell. Getting pushed into drug dealing, sometimes getting pulled into gangs.

“I find it particularly disturbing that all the kids in almost every focus group were aware about what was happening to the girls – they knew the story about girls dating older guys or being exploited. The stories we heard were mostly about girls dating older men in order to get them to provide money for them for rent, for food, for clothes. They’re just very vulnerable.”

She added: “It’s a sexual exploitation. You hear about homeless teenagers engaging in transactional sex, you hear it about refugees. To hear it from stably housed kids in the United States is shocking and even if it’s only a handful of kids, it should be something that we’re paying attention to, that there are kids that desperate.”

Other key findings in the report include:

Teens feel a sense of shame around hunger and hide it. Many refuse to accept food or assistance in public settings or from people outside a trusted circle of friends and family.
Food-insecure teens think about how to mitigate their hunger and make food last longer for the whole family. They go to friends’ or relatives’ houses to eat and save their school lunch for the weekend.

Parents try to protect teens from hunger and from bearing responsibility for providing for themselves or others. However, teens routinely take on this role, going hungry so younger siblings can eat or finding ways to bring in food and money.
Teens would overwhelmingly prefer to earn money through a formal job but prospects for youth employment are extremely limited.
In a few communities, teens talked about going to jail or failing school as strategies for ensuring regular meals.
The report is not an attempt to provide national statistics but does cite research that estimates 6.8 million individuals aged 10 to 17 are in food-insecure households, including 2.9 million with very low food security.

The Urban Institute’s recommendations include improving the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; expanding access to school-based meals for teens in summer months and after classes; creating more and better youth job opportunities; establishing community projects, such as one that has proved successful in Portland; and helping rather than punishing girls who are sexually exploited.

Popkin said: “I think one of the things we see, particularly around girls, is that if they get caught up in the criminal justice system, they get treated as status offenders, so they get arrested and they get put in the system instead of receiving the help and support they should be having for being exploited.

“One of the policy changes we advocate for in the report is a real shift in the perspective and getting kids help and support instead of a criminal record.”

"Food banks take on big contributor to diabetes: Themselves," Science Times, June 2016

Food banks take on big contributor to diabetes: Themselves
Catherine Saint Louis
Science Times
June 24, 2016

HOUSTON – Lola Lathon couldn’t afford to buy the leafy greens or lean meat displayed so alluringly at the grocery store. Instead, she ate cheap staples like white rice and potatoes, and occasionally went hungry for days before her next paycheck because she needed gas money to get to work.

It was not an ideal diet for a woman who is 5 feet 2 inches tall and 224 pounds, with Type 2 diabetes. And there was no reason to think it would improve when she and her daughter turned to an emergency pantry at the Houston Food Bank.

“We were just scraping by,” said Lathon, 56, who works full time as a technician for the Harris County Health Department.

Not long ago, the mission of food banks was to relieve hunger with whatever was at hand, including salty canned goods or even potato chips.

But what she found at the food bank was a surprise: yellow tomatoes, butter lettuce, diced cactus. An employee checked her blood sugar and found it was sky-high.

After that, “I changed everything,” Lathon said.

Many who depend on food pantries are not underfed, but are, like Lathon, obese and diabetic, experts have found. In 2014, one-third of the 15.5 million households served by Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief organization, reported that a household member had diabetes.

Inconsistent access to food worsens the disease, and so can the offerings at the pantries many low-income people must rely on. Now researchers have begun pursuing innovative new methods to address Type 2 diabetes among people who rely on food banks.

More than $1 out of every $10 spent on health care nationwide goes directly to treating diabetes and its consequences, according to the American Diabetes Association. Blindness, amputations and other complications are all too frequent.

“If there is one thing you need as a person with diabetes in order to control your blood sugar well, it’s stable access to food,” said Dr. Hilary Seligman, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

In 2014, 17.4 million households were “food insecure,” or lacking enough to feed the whole family, according to the Department of Agriculture. Many of them rely on food banks at least part time to feed their families.

Food insecurity usually means access to food is sporadic: Waiting for a paycheck, for example, parents may coast on a meal a day so their children can eat two. Hunger isn’t necessarily a constant in these households.

Research links food insecurity to uncontrolled diabetes. Diet is partly to blame: The inexpensive food favored by people stretching their dollars is often low in fiber and rich in carbohydrates, which contribute to obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

Even when food bank patrons are aware they have diabetes — and many do know — they are not in a position to turn down free fare.

In addition, some medications to control diabetes must be taken with food. But how can someone do that without being certain where the next meal will come from?

End-of-the-month hospital visits

Low-income people are admitted to the hospital with low blood sugar more often than people with higher incomes near the end of the month, when food budgets are commonly exhausted, researchers in California have found.

For the first time, new treatment guidelines by the American Diabetes Association urge clinicians to ask patients about food insecurity and to propose solutions.

Among diabetics, “stress is constant, and it can wear on you,” said Margaret Powers, president of health care and education at the association. “If we want to save health care money, we need to get more education to people who are food insecure.”

Some food pantries are set up like grocery stores; clients choose what they’ll eat. The offerings at the pantry attached to the cavernous Houston Food Bank are typical: gallons of milk and sweet tea, almost-expired breads, canned goods, frozen meats.

But Seligman and colleagues at UCSF and Feeding America have begun a randomized trial here and at two other sites to help patrons gain control of both their diets and Type 2 diabetes.

Researchers sitting at rickety tables outside the pantry asked patrons if they wanted their blood sugar checked and, if it was high, whether they wanted to enroll in a six-month program to lower it. (A control group was told to wait six months to begin.)

For those who enrolled, a staff member hand-picked appropriate food from the bank’s shelves, saying no to prepackaged junk, yes to asparagus and peanut butter. Participants pick up bags of selected food twice a month. They also receive referrals to a primary care physician, classes about diabetes management, and regular blood sugar checks.

Promising pilot study

The initial results have been promising. In a pilot study of nearly 700 food pantry visitors in Texas, California and Ohio, published in Health Affairs in November, participants with the worst blood sugar readings saw modest improvements in a relatively short time.

But for many with low incomes, the challenges never end.

Three months into the Houston program, Lathon had lost 20 pounds, and her blood sugar was dropping. But she needed emergency surgery to remove her appendix, and then suffered severe burns on her arm when a pot of boiling water overturned at a crawfish festival.

Her blood sugar has risen significantly, as is often the case when people with diabetes experience stress or illness. And she has finished the experimental diabetes program at the Houston Food Bank.

She isn’t sure what’s next.

“I loved that nutritious program; that’s what kept me going,” she said.

"As low-income housing disappears, Hopkins gets good news," Star Tribune, April 2016

As low-income housing disappears, Hopkins gets good news

Units will stay affordable, and developer plans to add a nearby complex. 

John Reinan
Star Tribune
April 22, 2016

At a time when low-income housing is disappearing throughout the metro area, one building owner is spending $6 million to preserve a high rise for low-income seniors in Hopkins.

And that’s not all: The same nonprofit developer doing that work also is planning to build “workforce housing” next door for middle-income workers.

The low-income high rise, Hopkins Village, houses several hundred seniors in 161 apartments in the heart of the city’s downtown district. Most pay about 30 percent of their income for rent.

Some residents were alarmed recently when they heard that the building was set for a multimillion-dollar makeover that included new windows, a complete overhaul of the mechanical and electrical systems, and dramatic changes to the common areas.

They feared their home was going to be renovated and marketed to younger, upscale and higher-income residents, a scenario that’s played out at dozens of affordable apartment buildings throughout the Twin Cities in recent years.

But the owner of Hopkins Village — Minneapolis-based Community Housing Development Corp. (CHDC) — said the changes are being made to benefit existing residents.

“Everybody’s staying,” said Elizabeth Flannery, president of the nonprofit CHDC. “We’re doing physical improvements that are long overdue.”

CHDC also plans to build a new, low-rise apartment building of four to five stories on what’s now the Hopkins Village parking lot. That project, expected in the next two to three years, will be targeted at moderate-income workers like teachers, police and firefighters.

Hopkins officials were delighted by the unexpected addition.

“It was really exciting to have them come to us with this,” said Kersten Elverum, the city’s director of planning and economic development. “It wasn’t really on our radar. The opportunity to do an infill development is a really exciting outcome to this scenario.”

At 11 stories, Hopkins Village is the tallest building in town, a landmark towering over Hopkins’ Mainstreet. It was built in 1971 specifically for low-income seniors and has always served that population. That won’t change, Flannery said.

Money for the renovation is coming from a partnership linking CHDC, U.S. Bank and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. U.S. Bank gets a tax credit, and the building is guaranteed to remain low-income housing for at least 20 years.

“We love to get a really active front on Mainstreet,” Elverum said. “It kind of fills in a missing tooth in that smile.”

"The Eviction Economy," New York Times, March 2016

The Eviction Economy
Matthew Desmond
New York Times
March 5, 2016

I FIRST met Larraine when we both lived in a trailer park on the far South Side of Milwaukee. Fifty-four, with silvering brown hair, Larraine loved mystery novels, “So You Think You Can Dance” and doting on her grandson. Even though she lived in a mobile home park with so many code violations that city inspectors called it an “environmental biohazard,” she kept a tidy trailer and used a hand steamer on the curtains. But Larraine spent more than 70 percent of her income on housing — just as one in four of all renting families who live below the poverty line do. After paying the rent, she was left with $5 a day.

Under conditions like these, evictions have become routine. Larraine (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) was evicted after she borrowed from her rent money to cover part of her gas bill. The eviction movers took her stuff to their storage unit; after Larraine was unable to make payments, they took it to the dump.

Those of us who don’t live in trailer parks or inner cities might think low-income families typically benefit from public housing or some other kind of government assistance. But the opposite is true. Three-quarters of families who qualify for housing assistance don’t get it because there simply isn’t enough to go around. This arrangement would be unthinkable with other social services that cover basic needs. What if food stamps only covered one in four families?

America stands alone among wealthy democracies in the depth and expanse of its poverty. Ask most politicians what we should do about this, and they will answer by calling for more and better jobs. Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker of the House, thinks we need to do more to “incentivize work.” Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, thinks we should raise the minimum wage. But jobs are only part of the solution because poverty is not just a product of joblessness and low wages. It is also a product of exploitation.

Throughout our history, wage gains won by workers through organized protest were quickly absorbed by rising rents. As industrial capitalists tried to put down the strikes, landlords cheered workers on. It is no different today. When incomes rise, the housing market takes its cut, which is why a two-bedroom apartment in the oil boomtown Williston, N.D., was going last year for $2,800 a month and why entire capital-rich cities like San Francisco are becoming unaffordable to the middle class. If rents rise alongside incomes, what progress is made?

Poverty is no accident, an unintended consequence from which no one benefits. Larraine’s rent money went to Tobin (also a pseudonym). A second-generation landlord, Tobin was 71, unsmiling and fit. His tenants waited tables at diners or worked as nursing assistants. Some received disability like Larraine or other forms of welfare, sometimes supplementing their checks by collecting aluminum cans.

Running one of the poorest trailer parks in the city had its challenges, like dealing with mental illness, addiction and domestic violence. Every so often, tenants wrecked their trailer the night before being evicted. Tobin had a way of dealing with that. He’d pay one of his tenants $20 to clean up the mess, then offer prospective new families the “Handyman Special,” a free mobile home as long as they paid “lot rent.” Lot rent was the same amount as rent, except the new “owners” would be responsible for maintenance. A family could move their trailer elsewhere, but in reality no one could afford to. When families fell behind in lot rent and were evicted, they inevitably left their trailer behind. Tobin would reclaim it as “abandoned property” and give it to someone else.

Tobin bought the mobile home park, 131 trailers parked on asphalt, for $2.1 million in 1995, paying off the mortgage nine years later. After reviewing Tobin’s books and expenses (property taxes, utility bills, missed payments), I estimated that he netted roughly $447,000 a year. Some of Tobin’s tenants called him “greedy,” but others called him “fair” and “a good man,” especially those he had spared from homelessness when they fell on hard times. He bailed tenants out of jail, lent money for funerals and let some missed payments slide. In a year, he also made 30 times what his tenants getting minimum wage earned.

Landlords like Tobin aren’t making money in trailer parks or ghettos in spite of their poverty but because of it. Depressed property values offer lower mortgage payments and tax bills. In poor areas of the cities, rents are lower, too — but not by much. In 2010, the average monthly rent in Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods was only $50 less than the citywide median.

Landlords renting to poor families can charge slightly reduced rents but, owing to far lower expenses, still command handsome profits. As a landlord with 114 inner-city units once told me, speaking of an affluent suburb near Milwaukee: “In Brookfield, I lost money. But if you do low-income, you get a steady monthly income.”

Poor families are stuck. Because they are already at the bottom of the market, they can’t get cheaper housing unless they uproot their lives, quit their jobs and leave the city. Those with eviction records are pushed into substandard private housing in high-crime neighborhoods because many landlords and public housing authorities turn them away. When poor families finally find a new place to rent, they often start off owing their landlord because they simply can’t pay the first and last month’s rent and a security deposit.

When tenants are behind, protections designed to keep housing safe and decent dissolve. Tenants in arrears tempt eviction if they report housing problems. It’s not that low-income renters don’t know their rights. They know that exercising those rights could cost them. So many go on paying most of what they have to live with lead paint, exposed wires and broken plumbing. Saving and stability become wishes, and some days children go hungry because the rent eats first.

Expanding our current housing voucher program to cover all low-income families would rebalance landlords’ desire to make a living and tenants’ desire to have a home. Eligible families would dedicate 30 percent of their income to rent, allowing them to pursue education, start a savings account and buy enough food.

When families finally receive housing vouchers after years on the waiting list, the first place many take their freed-up income is to the grocery store. Their children become healthier in the process.

A universal housing voucher program would fundamentally change the face of poverty in the United States. Evictions would plummet, and so would the other social problems they cause, like family and community instability, homelessness, job loss and depression. Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010. A universal housing voucher program would help reverse this disturbing trend.

Exploitation is not confined to the housing sector alone. It thrives when it comes to other essentials, like food. Inner-city bodegas take advantage of families’ lack of transportation to increase grocery prices, effectively reducing the value of food stamps. The payday lending industry exploits poor people’s lack of access to credit by offering high-interest loans and collecting over $7 billion a year in fees.

Most Americans who take out high-interest payday loans do so not to buy luxury items or cover unexpected expenses but to meet regular bills like rent or gas. When James Baldwin observed how “expensive it is to be poor,” this is what he meant.

Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques — from overdraft fees to student loans subsidizing for-profit colleges — specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor. This problem generally goes unrecognized by policy makers. But until we confront the fact that people make a lot of money off the poor, our efforts to reduce inequality will always come up short.

WE can start with housing, the sturdiest of footholds for economic mobility. A national affordable housing program would be an anti-poverty effort, human capital investment, community improvement plan and public health initiative all rolled into one. It would especially benefit mothers and children, the face of today’s eviction epidemic.

This solution is not as expensive as we might think. If we did nothing to make the voucher program more cost-effective — and there is much we could do on this score — expanding housing vouchers to all renting families below the 30th percentile in median income for their area would likely require an additional $22.5 billion a year. The actual figure is likely to be somewhat less, as this estimate does not account for potential savings in the form of reducing homelessness, lowering health care costs and curbing other costly consequences of the affordable-housing crisis.

We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. In 2008, the year Larraine was evicted, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled more than $40 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion, a figure equivalent to the budgets for the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Justice and Agriculture combined.

If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent — at least when it comes to housing — we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the canard about this rich country being unable to afford more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.

Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.”

"Why Poor People Stay Poor," Slate, December 2014

Daily annoyances for most people are catastrophic for poor people.

Linda Tirado
Slate.com
December 5, 2014

Saving money costs money. Period. 

The author lost a truck to an impound lot like this because she couldn’t pay the storage fees.

Excerpted from Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado. Out now from Putnam.

I once lost a whole truck over a few hundred bucks. It had been towed, and when I called the company they told me they’d need a few hundred dollars for the fee. I didn’t have a few hundred dollars. So I told them when I got paid next and that I’d call back then.

It was a huge pain in the ass for those days. It was the rainy season, and I wound up walking to work, adding another six miles or so a day to my imaginary pedometer. It was my own fault that I’d been towed, really, and I spent more than a couple hours ruing myself. I finally made it to payday, and when I went to get the truck, they told me that I now owed over a thousand dollars, nearly triple my paycheck. They charged a couple hundred dollars a day in storage fees. I explained that I didn’t have that kind of money, couldn’t even get it. They told me that I had some few months to get it together, including the storage for however long it took me to get it back, or that they’d simply sell it. They would, of course, give me any money above and beyond their fees if they recovered that much.

I was working two jobs at the time. Both were part time. Neither paid a hundred bucks a day, much less two.

Anything can make you lose your apartment, because any unexpected problem can set off that Rube Goldberg device.

I wound up losing my jobs. So did my husband. We couldn’t get from point A to point B quickly enough, and we showed up to work, late, either soaked to the skin or sweating like pigs one too many times. And with no work, we wound up losing our apartment.

It’s amazing what things that are absolute crises for me are simple annoyances for people with money. Anything can make you lose your apartment, because any unexpected problem that pops up, like they do, can set off that Rube Goldberg device.

One time I lost an apartment because my roommate got a horrible flu that we suspected was maybe something worse because it stayed forever--she missed work, and I couldn’t cover her rent. Once it was because my car broke down and I missed work. Once it was because I got a week’s unpaid leave when the company wanted to cut payroll for the rest of the month. Once my fridge broke and I couldn’t get the landlord to fix it, so I just left. Same goes for the time that the gas bill wasn’t paid in a utilities-included apartment for a week, resulting in frigid showers and no stove. That’s why we move so much. Stuff like that happens.

Because our lives seem so unstable, poor people are often seen as being basically incompetent at managing their lives. That is, it’s assumed that we’re not unstable because we’re poor, we’re poor because we’re unstable. So let’s just talk about how impossible it is to keep your life from spiraling out of control when you have no financial cushion whatsoever. And let’s also talk about the ways in which money advice is geared only toward people who actually have money in the first place.

I once read a book for people in poverty, written by someone in the middle class, containing real-life tips for saving pennies and such. It’s all fantastic advice: buy in bulk, buy a lot when there’s a sale on, hand-wash everything you can, make sure you keep up on vehicle and indoor filter maintenance.

Of course, very little of it was actually practicable. Bulk buying in general is cheaper, but you have to have a lot of money to spend on stuff you don’t actually need yet. Hand-washing saves on the utilities, but nobody actually has time for that. If I could afford to replace stuff before it was worn out, vehicle maintenance wouldn’t be much of an issue, but you really can’t rinse the cheap filters and again—quality costs money up front. In the long term, it makes way more sense to buy a good toaster. But if the good toaster is 30 bucks right now, and the crappiest toaster of them all is 10, it doesn’t matter how many times I have to replace it. Ten bucks it is, because I don’t have any extra tens.

It actually costs money to save money.

It is impossible to be good with money when you don’t have any. Full stop. If I’m saving my spare five bucks a week, in the best-case scenario I will have saved $260 a year. For those of you that think in quarters: $65 per quarter in savings. If you deny yourself even small luxuries, that’s the fortune you’ll amass. Of course you will never manage to actually save it; you’ll get sick at least one day and miss work and dip into it for rent. Gas will spike and you’ll need it to get to work. You’ll get a tear in your work pants that you can’t patch. Something, I guarantee you, will happen in three months.

When I have a few extra dollars to spend, I can’t afford to think about next month—my present day situation is generally too tight to allow me that luxury. I’ve got kids who are interested in their quality of life right now, not 10 years from now.  

Here’s the thing: we know the value of money. We work for ours. If we’re at 10 bucks an hour, we earn 83 cents, before taxes, every five minutes. We know exactly what a dollar’s worth; it’s counted in how many more times you have to duck and bend sideways out the drive through window. Or how many floors you can vacuum, or how many boxes you can fill.

It’s impossible to win, unless you are very lucky. For you to start to do better, something has to go right—and stay that way for long enough for you to get on your feet. I’ve done well in years that I had a job I didn’t mind terribly and that paid me well enough to get into an apartment that met all the basic standards. I’ve done less well in years where I didn’t have steady work. The trouble’s been that my luck simply hasn’t held out for long enough; it seems like just when I’ve caught up, something happens to set me back again. I’ve been fortunate enough that it’s rarely compounded, and I’ve stayed at under sea level for short periods instead of long-term. But I’ve stared long-term in the face long enough to have accepted it as a real possibility. It’s only an accident and a period of unemployment away.

Reprinted from Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America America by Linda Tirado by arrangement with Putnam, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, Copyright © 2014 by Linda Tirado.

"Nickel and Dimed", Barbara Ehrenreich

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is a book written by Barbara Ehrenreich. Written from her perspective as an undercover journalist, it sets out to investigate the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States.

The events related in the book took place between spring 1998 and summer 2000. The book was first published in 2001 by Metropolitan Books. An earlier version appeared as an article in the January 1999 issue of Harper's magazine. Ehrenreich later wrote a companion book, Bait and Switch (published September 2005), which discusses her attempt to find a white-collar job.

Ehrenreich investigates many of the difficulties low wage workers face, including the hidden costs involved in such necessities as shelter (the poor often have to spend much more on daily hotel costs than they would pay to rent an apartment if they could afford the security deposit and first-and-last month fees) and food (e.g., the poor have to buy food that is both more expensive and less healthy than they would if they had access to refrigeration and appliances needed to cook).

Foremost, Ehrenreich attacks the notion that low-wage jobs require only unskilled labor. A journalist with a Ph.D. in cell biology, she found that manual labor required incredible feats of stamina, focus, memory, quick thinking, and fast learning. Constant and repeated movement creates a risk of repetitive stress injury; pain must often be worked through to hold a job in a market with constant turnover; and the days are filled with degrading and uninteresting tasks (e.g. toilet-cleaning and mopping). She also details several individuals in management roles who served mainly to interfere with worker productivity, to force employees to undertake pointless tasks, and to make the entire low-wage work experience even more miserable. Additionally, she describes her managers changing her shift schedule from week to week without notifying her.

Ehrenreich describes personality tests, questionnaires designed to weed out incompatible potential employees, and urine drug tests, increasingly common in the low wage market, arguing that they deter potential applicants and violate liberties while having little tangible positive effect on work performance. She also comments that she believes they are a way for an employer to relay to an employee what is expected of them conduct wise.

She argues that 'help needed' signs do not necessarily indicate a job opening; more often their purpose is to sustain a pool of applicants in fields that have notorious rapid turnover of employees. She also posits that one low-wage job is often not enough to support one person (let alone a family); with inflating housing prices and stagnant wages, this practice increasingly becomes difficult to maintain. Many of the workers encountered in the book survive by living with relatives or other persons in the same position, or even in their vehicles.

Ehrenreich concludes with the argument that all low-wage workers, recipients of government or charitable services like welfare, food, and health care, are not simply living off the generosity of others. Instead, she suggests, we live off their generosity:

When someone works for less pay than she can live on ... she has made a great sacrifice for you .... The "working poor" ... are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone. (p. 221)
The author concludes that someday, low-wage workers will rise up and demand to be treated fairly, and when that day comes everyone will be better off.

Response and criticism
Barbara Ehrenreich states in her book that her goal is to "see whether or not I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day." "Nickel and Dimed" has been criticized as an inaccurate portrayal of the working poor. Ehrenreich began her study with money already in her pocket and a post-graduate education, which typically is not the case for the working class poor. One critic of Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Tremoglie, wrote, "According to the Commerce Department the poverty rate for a single person younger than 65 in 1999 was $8,700 per year. Barbara was earning 170 percent of that. Even the liberal Economics Policy Institute states a living wage is 130 percent of the poverty standard."

In response to Nickel and Dimed and its critiques, two men undertook similar projects to Ehrenreich. Adam Shepard's Scratch Beginnings tells of starting homeless in a new state with only $25 in his pocket. In the ten months, Shephard was able to land a job which paid well enough to buy a pickup truck and rent his own apartment. Similarly, Charles Platt, an author and former senior editor at Wired Magazine, took an entry-level job at a Wal-Mart store and recounted his experience on the blog Boing Boing. His account reaffirmed some of Ehrenreich's experience, including the low pay and tedious nature of the job, but Platt also reported positive experiences with supervisors, safety training incentives, and employee autonomy and treatment.