We are getting by these days on very little – a few editing and writing jobs, a new stint as a virtual assistant, and cat bed sales. I have found most of my clients and customers through word of mouth, or from this blog. This has been a lean month so I’d like to ask loyal readers who have provided so much support and encouragement in the past to spread the word a bit for us. If you don’t need an editor, or a cat bed, perhaps a friend or co-worker does – or knows someone who could use one? We do appreciate the free advertising!
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Living in poverty is hard – perhaps that’s why there are so many words related to hard that can be applied to a life of poverty – hard time, hardship, hardscrabble, hard luck, hard pressed, hard row to hoe, hard-hearted…it’s just hard. Most of us can deal with some hard in our lives – we get going when the going gets tough; we keep our chin up and maintain a stiff upper lip; we shoulder our burden. We retain hope. This is an excellent short term strategy. But over the long term living in poverty gets progressively more difficult.
The ills of poverty are varied and numerous. Some people begin life in poverty and never leave it. They are racially segregated and poorly educated. They work hard at menial labor in unsafe conditions, living from payday to payday at the best of times. They possess little in the way of material goods and live perpetually in debt. Their dwellings are poor and overcrowded. They may be malnourished and probably have physical ills that have never been treated. They might have fallen victim to crime or substance abuse. They reproduce and die young.
Strangely this description of life in the tenements of New York at the turn of the last century can be just as well applied to many Americans at the turn of this century. And with the Great Recession leaving scores of formerly middle class families homeless, without regular income, and without medical insurance, the likelihood is that this description will be aptly applied to even more people.
Poverty in the U.S. grew substantially more common during the last decade, with hardships increasing for millions of people and their families, especially with regard to food, medical care and housing. (Poverty, Hardship and Families: How Many People Are Poor, and What Does Being Poor in America Really Mean?)
Poverty has been associated with numerous physical, mental and social ills in any number of studies. People living in poverty today are more likely to be ‘food insecure’ or have to forego purchasing needed prescription medicines or visit doctors. Children in poverty are more like to suffer abuse. Depression abounds amongst the poor, so much so that studies have questioned which comes first – does depression cause one to fall into an impoverished lifestyle, or does being poor make one depressed?
I daresay some people, depressed to the point of being unable to maintain social ties and good work habits, descend with their depression into poverty. Yet I also believe that the constant ongoing stress of being financially insecure, on the verge of homelessness, and unable to find employment is a clear cause of depression. The strain and anxiety, the insomnia and irritability, the worry and shame, they all eat at one, dragging one down in an increasingly steep spiral, until it requires a near Herculean effort just to get up in the morning.
You might think having children would inoculate you against depression. It doesn’t. It gets you out of bed in the morning but if anything thinking about your children, the material and social advantages that you cannot give them, the insecurities and privations they endure, and your anxiety about their futures, the concern that you may be causing them incalculable harm, merely serves to contribute to your burden and diminish your sense of self-worth. When you are poor you feel very much alone.
Poverty, like smoking, accidents or obesity, has even been found to be a cause of death in America. In an article published in the American Journal of Public Health, researchers found that in the year 2000 poverty caused nearly 300,000 deaths (compared to about 120,000 deaths per year caused by accidents). I suspect that number will only increase.
Yesterday I was scrolling through our local craigslist looking at the job ads and saw this:
We coordinate the securing and cleanup of foreclosed properties and are looking for people to sign up as vendors who have skills and/or experience in the foreclosure industry. You need to have a digital camera, a computer, your own tools, a reliable truck and hopefully a trailer. You need to be able to change locks or rekey locks, remove debris, perform janitorial services & cut lawns.
According to some sources more than one and a half million homes have gone into foreclosure since the beginning of the Great Recession and are owned by banks, or the federal government. More still lurk in the shadow inventory – homes that are stalled in the foreclosure process or inhabited by owners who have given up paying the mortgage on a house worth less than their buying price. Many of the foreclosed homes have not been resold, due to tighter lending policies and bargain hunting buyers waiting for the prices to bottom out.
This means that there are a lot of vacant houses in the U.S. Most are clustered in cities hardest hit by the Great Recession – New York, Las Vegas, Detroit, for example. These houses are a problem. Although legally the responsibility of the mortgage holder, the cost of upkeep (mowing lawns, repairing broken windows, draining pools) and security is frequently falling on the local governments, taxing already overburdened city budgets. Unmaintained vacant houses are an eyesore and a drag on neighborhood property values. As property values fall so do the tax revenues. Vacant buildings attract squatters, youth looking for hangouts, gangs, thieves and vandals. They are frequently broken into and have been destroyed by accidental or intentional fires, requiring the attention of police and fire fighters.
As the housing market continues to be depressed (and some experts do not expect it to rebound for years to come given the continued high unemployment, constrained borrowing power and glut of available homes at low prices) cities and the federal government are looking for ways to deal with the problem. They have taken two different approaches – cities condemning and razing vacant buildings and the federal government selling blocks of homes to investors who enter into an agreement to rent the homes out for a specified number of years. Both of these plans have merit.
According to a GAO report on the nation’s vacant house issue, Detroit, Michigan, has spent more than $20 million since May 2009 to demolish almost 4,000 vacant properties. And in Cleveland, Ohio, where the recession left one-fifth of all houses vacant, more than 1,000 have been razed and as many as 20,000 more are slated for demolition. A recent 60 Minutes news story titled “There goes the neighborhood” documented Cleveland’s effort to deal with the spreading blight of vacant homes. Abandoned houses have fallen victim to thieves who break in to steal fixtures, appliances, copper piping, and even the aluminum siding.
In an effort to rid themselves of near worthless properties banks are also calling in demolition crews and then donating the cleared land back to cities. Not only do they clear their books of a property that costs them to maintain, they can get a tax write off through their donation.
The federal government recently announced a new plan to deal with foreclosed homes – selling properties held by Fannie May and Freddie Mac to investors for use as rental properties. “The federal program is aimed to clear the backlog of distressed properties that has flooded the market and depressed prices, while at the same time meeting the increased demands of renters.” Given that America is becoming a nation of renters, this might be a strategy that banks could use as well to offload some of their inventory of foreclosed homes. The sooner these vacant houses are filled, the sooner home prices will stabilize, property tax revenues will increase, property crimes will drop, and neighborhoods will recover.
Well, now that we have some plans to deal with all these vacant, abandoned houses, maybe we could turn our attention to the plight of the homeless?
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