KATRINA EXPOSES AMERICAN POVERTY


By MARTHA MENDOZA, AP National Writer Sat Sep 24,12:26 PM ET




SAN FRANCISCO - "Let me tell you about abandoned people," whispered J.R., his voice rising above the sighs and soft snores of sleepers curled on the church pews around him.

"Those people who were abandoned in New Orleans," he said, "they were abandoned long before that hurricane hit. We all were."

J.R. (he gave no other name) spends his days with 100 others, embraced in the holy warmth of a magnificent edifice, 103-year-old St. Boniface Church. Sunlight streams through stained glass and gilded saints smile down upon them from the domed ceilings; the smells of their sour, acrid clothes and bodies mix with the lingering scent of incense.

This looks like an evacuation center — row after row of desperate people and their sparse belongings, a backpack here, a blanket there.

But this roomful of displaced people is neither an emergency shelter nor a temporary situation.

This is an ongoing, daily, chronic disaster.

Ordinarily the faces of America's poor are as hidden as their stories. But Hurricane Katrina has spotlighted the deep poverty that this country has failed to solve, a world of people who live without Social Security numbers and without running water, people who are too poor to shop at Wal-Mart and whose children go hungry.

Even as the economy strengthened in 2004, Census Bureau figures show 37 million Americans lived under the poverty line, a jump of 1.1 million from 2003. People living in poverty have, in fact, been increasing steadily in this country since 2001.

For years, advocacy groups and researchers have shouted the statistics: 45.8 million people don't have health insurance; 25 percent of American's blacks (and 44 percent of Houston's) live in poverty; 36 million Americans are hungry or at risk of hunger.

But before Katrina, few wanted to hear any of this, says Reese Fayde, head of Living Cities, a New York-based nonprofit group.

"You are made to feel you are detracting from something good, that you're not patriotic, that you're trying to focus on a niche issue," she said. "Poverty didn't happen overnight, but now it's as if someone lifted up a rock and wow, there they are, all those poor people!"

Rev. Cecil Williams, a veteran social activist who leads San Francisco's Glide Memorial Church, said he keeps getting calls from people who say: "'Not only did we not know there was so much poverty, but also that so many of these poor people were black.'"

It's frustrating, said Williams. "We've been there all along."

But in many cases, poverty is "invisible," said Rosemary Cubas, who lives in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. She said that on her block, four or five families share one-bedroom apartments.

"You don't see our poor because we don't let them sleep on park benches or homeless shelters. We just squeeze in, and everyone is overcrowded and underfed."

For those who have been living in poverty, and those who have been trying to fight it, the current air of surprise about this chronic disaster is both frustrating and amusing. For some it's also, perhaps, a glimmer of hope.

"I do wonder whether this is one of those moments where, as this country reflects on its values, there's an opportunity for change, for movement," said Olivia Golden, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington D.C.

The country could put Katrina behind it and move forward as if nothing happened, said Omowale Satterwhite of the Oakland, Calif.-based National Community Development Institute.

"The other possibility is that the soul of the country gets touched and the entire country is in a dialogue, trying to discover a common truth about who we are and who we want to be," he said.

Not that poverty is a new topic of discussion in America.

The first almhouses, or poorhouses, were built by the few prosperous colonialists 300 years ago "to abate the public nuisance" of impoverished early settlers. Periodic reforms were attempted, but they mostly amounted to handouts from both the private and public sector. Poor people became an intractable — and often overlooked — problem.

The Depression brought the problem to the forefront, and underscored the American tendency to look away from the poor. In the 1936 movie "My Man Godfrey," Irene, played by actress Carole Lombard, is engaged in a society scavenger hunt and is looking for "a forgotten man." She finds Godfrey, a bum played by William Powell, living on an ash heap.

Godfrey: "Do you mind telling me just what a scavenger hunt is?"

Irene: "Well, a scavenger hunt is exactly like a treasure hunt, except in a treasure hunt you try to find something you want and in a scavenger hunt, you try to find something that nobody wants."

Godfrey: "Hmmm, like a forgotten man?"

It wasn't until the riots of the 1960s that the nation made it's first real attempt to eradicate the problem. A federal commission tasked with finding the source of the unrest found that "chronic poverty is a breeder of chronic chaos."

In response, President Johnson declared war on poverty.

The government focused on health care, housing and food for seniors, disabled people and children. There was also a national Job Corps and a new Office of Economic Opportunity. The Model Cities program — which later became Community Development Block Grants — streamlined federal funds to community groups providing everything from low-income housing to dental care. Sargent Shriver was named chief of staff for the war against poverty.

"They were trying to get at the root causes of poverty, and the root causes were, as we felt it to be, lack of educational opportunity and lack of job training," said former White House deputy counsel Larry Levinson, who was enlisted in the war on poverty by Johnson in 1964. "All of this was not writing checks to poor people, it was offering them the skills and education."

William Julius Wilson, who directs the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program at Harvard University, said Johnson's war "was the first major initiative to address poverty, and the last. There hasn't been anything like that since."

Initially, poverty declined and programs flourished. But each new administration dismantled pieces of Johnson's vision, which soon was criticized for costing too much and doing too little.

By the 1980s, the 'War on Poverty' was seen, by some, as a joke.

President Reagan drew laughter at his 1988 State of the Union address when he said: "My friends, some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won."

He went on to decry 59 major welfare programs and the $100 billion a year spent on them.

"What has all this money done? Well, too often it has only made poverty harder to escape. Federal welfare programs have created a massive social problem. With the best of intentions, government created a poverty trap that wreaks havoc on the very support system the poor need most to lift themselves out of poverty."

Reagan's idea was to spend welfare funds on education and training. President Clinton, who led a "poverty tour" from Hazard, Ky., to Watts in Los Angeles, revamped welfare programs; as the economy soared, poverty levels decreased during each of his years in office to a 26-year low.

Since George W. Bush took office, poverty — and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands — has steadily increased.

"In the quiet of American conscience, we know that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation's promise," Bush said, in his first inaugural address.

After Hurricane Katrina, Bush made the same point, this time noting the racial consequences.

"As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well," he said. "And that poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

So far, he has proposed action only in the area hit by Katrina, calling for a Gulf Opportunity Zone to provide tax breaks for companies that offer jobs, and a lottery-based homesteading program to help poor families own, rather than rent, their homes.

Alexander Keyssar, who teaches the history of poverty at Harvard University, said this country is no longer even trying to solve the larger problems.

"Thirty years ago, there was still a belief in this country that you could eradicate poverty," he said. "I think any sense of optimism or confidence that we can solve the problem has eroded."

That said, his courses are still popular, and his students are determined.

"Students approach poverty out of impulse, goodwill and a desire to do something," he said.

There's certainly plenty to do.

The raw, inner city poverty of New Orleans can be found in most major cities, from New York's Harlem — where a one-in-50 infant-mortality rate is comparable to Sri Lanka's — to southern Dallas, where crime rates are twice as high as the rest of the city.

Rural poverty is less obvious but just as intractable.

In the colonias of southern Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, you'll find tarpaper shacks, dirt roads, outhouses, unbathed school children.

People live like this not by the thousands but by the hundreds of thousands, supporting families on $5,000 a year in homes four times as crowded as the national average. Almost all of the residents are Hispanic, and most — 85 percent, federal officials say — are U.S. citizens.

State and federal authorities have warned that many colonias, built in unprotected flood plains, would be washed away in a major deluge.

"I hope Katrina is drawing awareness to our situation," said Meggan Snedden at the Colonias Development Council in Las Cruces, N.M. "In an emergency, our people don't have a way to leave the community and nowhere to go to. There are no options. People are living here day to day, with no contingency plans."

In Appalachia, a region where poverty is so entrenched, so intractable and so pervasive it is almost a cliche, many residents still live in century-old coal camp box houses, built to be temporary out of flimsy boards and battens.

The poverty in this region has been "discovered" again and again, and promises to pull residents out of poverty have been made for more than a century. During the Civil War, when thousands of Appalachians were driven from their homes in the mountains, President Lincoln promised he would come to their aid.

"The folks we work with don't really see they have a future, and as a consequence they live day by day," said John David, who directs the Southern Appalachia Labor School in Kincaid, W.Va.

Some Appalachian residents have continuous yard sales, their only hope of making money lies in selling one of their possessions. Many more spend the entire year paying off their winter heating bills, which top $500 a month because their homes lack insulation.

"I think the normal person would be shocked at what our daily existence is like," said Norman DePover, 50, who spends his days sleeping in the San Francisco church. "Just trying to find a bathroom, something to eat, to get a shower and stay warm, those are my problems."

Denita Jacox, a social worker at the Lessie Bates Neighborhood House in impoverished East St. Louis, said the general public has no idea what her clients are up against.

"This is a depressed community. Our families can't afford to shop at Wal-Mart. In the winter they can't pay their utility bills and they are very, very cold."

Nancy Cantor of Scottsdale, Ariz., who lives on about $12,000 a year, said rationing food is a way of life.

"Peanut butter and jelly is good. A can of soup. At the end of the month you cross your fingers and hold your breath," she said.

"We hurried up and made room in the shelters for all of the people who were made homeless by Katrina, yet we have people in this country who have lived for years, not knowing if they are going to survive the heat and cold."

At St. Boniface Church, J.R. pulled a knit blanket tight around his shoulders and considered his role in this country. Is he hidden? How did he get here? Why does he stay?

"This is a capitalist society," he said with all of the pedantic patience of a social scientist. "Capitalism means some people get richer and some people get poorer. In order for this system to work, for there to be really wealthy folks, you've got to have me at the bottom."

He pulled a knit blanket onto his lap and prepares to curl back up on his pew.

"This abandoning," he said, looking around the quiet church, "it was planned from the beginning."