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January 29 - February 14, 2025
As late as 1960, rent in major cities was higher for blacks than for whites in similar accommodations.11 The poor did not crowd into slums because of cheap housing. They were there—and this was especially true of the black poor—simply because they were allowed to be.
“My momma, she strong,” Natasha said. “And she’s got us out of way worse situations than this. I mean, from shelters, livin’ on the street, churches, cars. I got a lot of faith in my momma. Yeah, we’ve been on the street a few times, but my momma, she always had it.”
Especially in the inner city, strangers brushed up against one another constantly—on the street, at job centers, in the welfare building—and found ways to ask for and offer help.
No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.
people who lived in distressed neighborhoods were more likely to help their neighbors pay bills, buy groceries, fix their car, or lend a hand in other ways, compared to their peers in better-off areas.
These exchanges helped people on the receiving end meet basic material needs; and they helped those on the delivering end feel more fully human.
At 8:10 a.m., a woman wearing gold earrings and a silk blouse opened the door and announced that they could take five people today. A man emerged with a clipboard. “Number 1. Number 2,” he began counting. The line stood and tightened. Scott stepped toward the elevator and pushed the Down button. He could have tried again the next day, but he went on a three-day bender instead.
Your situation, it’s to make you. It’s to build you….I
It was once said that the poor are “constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.”
“I can feel my body getting better,” he said, “but when you have years and years and years of not feeling anything from drinking and dope, then it kind of hits you.”
As the initial high of sobriety wore off, Scott began to sour on AA in general. This post-honeymoon sensation was so common that AA had a phrase for it: “falling off your pink cloud.” “Ambivalence has turned into animosity,” Scott said. It embarrassed him, spending nights in folding-chair semicircles with washed-up drunks and cokeheads, drinking Folgers out of styrofoam cups and swapping horror stories. Scott grew to hate the rituals, the stranger’s hand on his shoulder, the hoary sayings—“But by the Grace of God,” “Let go and let God”—not to mention the Serenity Club crowd’s belief that
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Sometimes, when he remembered those days and all he had lost, he would leave his apartment and wind his way through the Majestic’s narrow, dimly lit hallways and come to a door. He’d open it and emerge in the middle of the Grand Avenue mall, as if stepping through a secret passageway. Walking the mall’s floors, Scott would take in the lights, music, food smells, and people and remember how he used to feel, years ago, when the city was still full of wonder and promise.
Arleen smiled at Jori. “I wish my life were different,” she said. “I wish that when I be an old lady, I can sit back and look at my kids. And they be grown. And they, you know, become something. Something more than me. And we’ll all be together, and be laughing. We be remembering stuff like this and be laughing at it.”
Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions.6
Establishing publicly funded legal services for low-income families in housing court would be a cost-effective measure that would prevent homelessness, decrease evictions, and give poor families a fair shake.
