Failure is not an option

We shall go on to the end

We will fight with growing confidence

We shall never surrender

— Winston Churchill

Prime Minister Winston Churchill gives the “Victory” sign to crowds in London on Victory in Europe Day. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been asked many times why, when faced with challenge, I don’t just give up.

Fortunately, I’ve never faced sexual assault, chronic or terminal illness, war, famine or poverty. Some of the people who read Broadside have faced these very real traumas, so I don’t begin to suggest my First World problems are terribly compelling, but resilience and tenacity do interest me.

Who cracks and crumples, hysterical, and who soldiers on?

While at university studying Spanish and starting my journalism career, I volunteered as an interpreter for Chileans who had suffered, and/or witnessed, the rape, torture or death of their loved ones, neighbors and fellow citizens, who had fled to Canada and who were claiming refugee status. In that role, I listened carefully to stories so soul-searing I’ve never forgotten them, even when I wanted to. I went to the dentist with one man to see if the X-rays could prove, (which they did not) that his jaw had, in fact, been smashed by a rifle butt. Another told me, in the detail he had to to prove his claim, about watching his wife and daughters raped in front of him.

My personal challenges have included:

– being the only child of a divorced bi-polar alcoholic mother who suffered multiple breakdowns and hospitalizations, some overseas

– her multiple cancer surgeries

– the loss of both grandmothers when I was 18

– putting myself through college, living alone for three years of it

– being attacked by an intruder in my apartment, at 19

– selling my work to national publications, starting at 19

– three recessions since moving to New York in 1989

– moving to, and adapting to, life in Mexico, France and the U.S.

– getting divorced

– becoming the victim of a con artist

– four orthopedic surgeries since 2000, including full left hip replacement in 2012; 18 months’ of pain and exhaustion before the operation

When single, I didn’t give up for practical reasons –  who would have bought the groceries or made the meals? The laundry and dog-walking? Turning to my family for help was rarely an option, for a variety of reasons.

If you fall to bits, who pays the bills?

I’ve always had health insurance — even paying $500/month for it when I lived alone for six years — and with it, access to medical and mental health help when necessary. I know that’s been a huge advantage for me, as has the freedom from the pressing financial and emotional responsibilities of children or grandkids.

Sent to boarding school and summer camp from the age of eight, I learned young to take care of myself, not to ask for help, not to rely on others for aid or comfort. The hardest part has been learning to ask others for help — and being pleasantly surprised and grateful at how willingly some offer it.

At my absolutely lowest points, I still had my health, some savings, a safe, clean home I could  afford. Maybe having lived in Mexico at 14, or having traveled to a number of developing countries, helped me keep a sense of perspective — I was still deeply blessed with what I had, no matter how tough things looked at the time.

And some people still dearly loved me; their faith in me, and their generosity and kindness, helped me keep it together. One woman, after the con man scared the shit out of me and I seriously considered moving back to Toronto, gave me refuge in her home for three weeks there.

The only time I really gave up, and my body made clear I had no choice in the matter, was three days on an IV in March 2007 , hospitalized with pneumonia. I had never just collapsed, (even when I really wanted to), and allowed others to take very good care of me while I rested and recovered.

Here’s a powerful post by tech entrepreneur Brad Feld about his own physical burn-out:

Finally, I do have a full time job and spent the bulk of my time working on that, so all of this other stuff was the extracurricular activity that filled in the cracks around the 60+ hours a week of VC work I was doing during this time.

I had a lot of time to reflect on this last week after I came out of my Vicodin-induced haze. At 47, I realize, more than ever, my mortality. I believe my kidney stone and depression were linked to the way I treated myself physically over the 90 days after my bike accident. While the kidney stone might not have been directly linked to the accident, the culmination of it, the surgery, and my depression was a clear signal to me that I overdid it this time around.

Do you ever just want to give up?

Have you?

What keeps you going?

Here is Winston Churchill, in his own words.

Hating the poor will not make you rich

Stained glass at St John the Baptist’s Anglican Church http://www.stjohnsashfield.org.au, Ashfield, New South Wales. Illustrates Jesus’ description of himself “I am the Good Shepherd” (from the Gospel of John, chapter 10, verse 11). This version of the image shows the detail of his face. The memorial window is also captioned: “To the Glory of God and in Loving Memory of William Wright. Died 6th November, 1932. Aged 70 Yrs.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are several strains in the American worldview I find, even after 24 years living here, confusing and wearying.

There is the persistent narrative that government is bad, that self-reliance is good and that no one who needs government help — other than victims of natural disasters — really deserves it. If they were just smarter/harder-working/thriftier/better educated, they’d be fine.

The self-righteousness is pervasive and ugly.

I get it. My first book, which looked at guns in American women’s lives, included interviews with many women who own guns, some of which they use for hunting, for sport and for self-protection. In speaking with 104 men, women and teens of every income level from 29 states, I came away with a much clearer understanding why 45 percent (then “only” 30 percent) of American homes contain a firearm.

This is a nation predicated on the belief that everyone is responsible for themselves.

This is, (and this is the confusing bit), also one of the most overtly religious nations on earth — the percentage of those “churched” is much higher than England or my native Canada. This is a nation where some people proudly, loudly and routinely boast that they are God-fearing Christians, while sneering at the poor and weak, something Christ would have difficulty with.

Here’s an interesting link discussing seven current trends in American church-going.

I’ve seen extreme wealth and extreme poverty here.

Yet, in today’s deeply divided nation, as Romney and his supporters lick their wounds and Obama and his staff prepare for his second term, the rich rarely — if ever — encounter the poor. They remain some weird, distant abstraction, nothing they or their children will ever encounter or experience.

Until its fury erupts within their circle, like the New York City nanny who recently slit the throats of two of the three children she was caring for, commuting from her difficult life in the Bronx. She was, she told police, tired of being told what to do and wanted to earn more money.

The middle class, however you define it, is terrified of falling into poverty. It’s so much easier to hate the poor and struggling than face the reality you are them or soon to be.

The middle class has been told, from birth, that if you just work really hard and go to college and get a degree, and then get another, and maybe another, you too can become wealthy. For some, yes. For many others, who can’t even find any job right now, that ever-receding horizon is starting to look unattainable.

So much easier to look down in terror and disdain than cease gazing up at the private-jet set with awe and envy.

I recently watched a new documentary, “Set For Life” that’s making the rounds of film festivals in the U.S., about workers over the age of 50 out of work, and the struggles they face in this recession. It is sobering, and depressing, made by a recent Columbia University grad named Susan Sipprelle.

I have mixed feelings about this intractable divide, one that is only growing.

I was a Big Sister in the late 90s for 18 months, mentoring a 13-year-old girl living a 10-minute drive east of me in my suburban New York county. I had never, in the U.S., confronted poverty firsthand or known someone personally in its grip.

My time with C was instructive, and ultimately left me less reflexively liberal. I liked her, and admired her grit and humor. She was fun and a loving, affectionate girl. But her family’s behaviors, attitudes and expectations — even with four tax-payer supported workers helping them — horrified me and I struggled to make sense of them. Her mother had simply disappeared for five years, and showed up a week after C and I were matched. I’d feed C fresh vegetables at my apartment, or take her to the library, while her mother — a decade younger than I — watched TV in the basement night and day.

I tried, writing a five-page single-space letter pleading her case, to get C a scholarship to a local private school, where if she boarded, would have offered her a respite from the shouting, filth, junk food and three-generation welfare dependency of her family.

She never showed up for her tryout day at school. I never heard from her, her family or Big Sisters again. I still wonder how she is doing.

In my retail job, I served some of the nation’s wealthiest men and women, in their triple-ply cashmere and five-carat diamond rings. The one word they never hear, the one that makes them recoil in shock and disbelief? “No.” It took me a while to realize that money buys you a lot of agreement: your nanny/au pair/personal trainer/driver/SAT tutor/assistant(s)/maids/staff/employees are unlikely to ever argue with you or deny you your every whim.

Their world is a shiny, pretty, insular one, where material success safely brands you as a winner, a member of the tribe.

They often spoke to us low-wage, part-time, no-benefit hourly workers slowly in words of one syllable. They leaned over the counter as we entered their addresses, certain we couldn’t possibly know how to spell. One man (not in our store) threw a quarter behind him as he left, sneering: “Go to college!”

Everyone in our staff of 15 had. Two were military veterans.

Several different Americas went into the voting booth this week, their mutual incomprehension unmitigated by billions of dollars spent on attack ads, “informed” by Fox News or NPR, but rarely both.

The side that lost is apoplectic, crying foul, red-faced with rage. Romney cut off his workers’ credit cards immediately.

Obama, speaking to his campaign workers, wept openly with pride and gratitude.

Want to flee poverty? Don’t be American

Gini_Coefficient_World_Human_Development_Report_2007-2008 (Photo credit: jiruan)

Depressing, lucid and infuriating, this recent piece in Bloomberg Businessweek lays out a stark analysis of American income inequality, now at its worst level in decades:

A recent finding nicknamed the Great Gatsby Curve may be the most controversial of all. With it, University of Ottawa economist Miles Corak makes the strongest case yet that inequality and mobility are intertwined—the more unequal a society is, the greater the likelihood that children will remain in the same economic standing as their parents. His research comes as the country—and the presidential candidates—debate inequality and what, if anything, government should do to slow or reverse its trajectory. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project, Americans believe more ardently than their global counterparts that “people are rewarded for intelligence and skill.” And yet, according to Corak, it’s as simple as this: “More inequality means less opportunity.”

The reporter only had to travel an hour out of New York City, where the magazine is published, to find extraordinary wealth — Greewnwich, Darien, New Canaan, Connecticut, home to billionaires — right next to grinding poverty, in towns like Bridgeport.

If the region were a country, it’d be the world’s 12th-most unequal, ranking just below Guatemala. Economists measure income disparity using the Gini coefficient: A measure of 0 means all money is evenly distributed; 1 means one person has it all. The U.S. had a Gini of .467 in 2010, up 2 percent since 2000, census data show. (With the exception of Chile and Mexico, it has the highest level of disparity of the 34 countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.) The Bridgeport region’s Gini grew 17 percent during this time, to .537, making this 625-square-mile swath home to the biggest income divide of any metropolitan area in the U.S.

I live a 20-minute drive from these towns, so I see these disparities in my own life.

They are increasingly common here, and increasingly intractable.

– If you can prepare sufficiently to get into college, can you handle the work and graduate?

-- Can you even afford college? How?

– Can you get a job that pays your bills and your student loans?

– Can you save any money?

– Can you afford to acquire, if necessary, even further educational credentials?

– Do you have the requisite social skill and emotional intelligence to take advantage  of — and create for yourself — every possible connection and opportunity?

The leap from poverty to even relative affluence seems unimaginably large now for too many.

My husband grew up in a moderate-income family, his father a Baptist minister of a very small congregation in a small city. Thanks to his father’s service, Jose was able to attend college on full scholarship and graduate debt-free.

Armed with talent and drive, my husband won a secure job at The New York Times in his mid-20s. Today, I wonder how many could replicate that leap.

I came to the U.S. from Canada in June 1989, seeking better work opportunities. I had several clear advantages: no children; serious savings; a demanding liberal arts education and college degree, no debt; fluent English; competence in two other foreign languages.

Plus, perhaps most crucially, confidence in my abilities and the (ugh) willingness to cold-call more than 150 strangers to land my first New York City job.

Today, full-time freelance, earning about that same staff salary 24 years ago, I probably look like a downwardly-mobile failure, which is pretty ironic, given my initial ambitions for immigrating. But I still have short and long-term savings, thanks to a combination of extreme frugality, a lucky lawsuit settlement and a husband with a decent, union-protected income.

A low-wage job, part-time with no health insurance, is no way out out of poverty. In the United States, in 2012, the word “job” is now about as meaningless as the word ‘blue” to describe the sky. 

Millions of working-class and middle-class Americans are being totally knee-capped by crappy wages, part-time work, no union protection, (7 percent unioized in the private sector, 12 percent in the public), chronic unemployment or underemployment — and no one who really gives a damn whether things get better for them.

Yesterday, The New York Times ran a story about how many older Americans are now losing their homes, even those who lived frugally. The cost of living here is crazily rising while many home values have plummeted:

Once viewed as the most fiscally stable age group, older people are flailing…while people under 50 are the group most likely to face foreclosure, the risk of “serious delinquency” on mortgages has grown fastest for people over 50…

Among people over 75, the foreclosure rate grew more than eightfold from 2007 to 2011, to 3 percent of that group of homeowners…

Older Americans are losing their homes because of pension cuts, rising medical costs, shrinking stock portfolios and falling property values, according to Debra Whitman, AARP’s executive vice president for policy. They are also not saving enough money.

Half of households whose head is between 65 and 74 have no money in retirement accounts, according to the Federal Reserve.

I’ve put that last sentence in boldface because it is so deeply shocking and depressing. Fifty percent of Americans facing the traditional age for retirement have no money at all beyond their Social Security benefits?

So, even if you flee poverty in your teens or early adulthood, you’ve got a 50 percent chance of hitting the skids in your golden years?

Nice.

Do you fear falling (further) into poverty?

Any thoughts on how to fix this mess?

The Third Rail Of American Discourse

My new book about working for 27 months as a retail sales associate has been out for two months, and the 40+ amazon reviews are insane — love it, hate it, love it, loathe it.

I’ve been called a princess, racist, slummer, bitter, pretentious, “lazy, lazy, lazy”, elitist and accused, falsely, of despising the very people — my retail co-workers — I say clearly how much I admired.

It’s been an exhausting rollercoaster, with a pendulum of opinion swinging so widely, and wildly, it’s hard to believe.

It took a fellow writer to calm me down, pointing out that “Nickeled and Dimed“, a best-seller from 2001 by Barbara Ehrenreich (to which my book has been compared) is equally provocative and divisive.

Both books are similar in one key respect: middle-class, educated white women — with economic freedom to leave the jobs we described — worked for minimum wage in thankless, difficult, demanding low-status jobs.

Our crime in so doing? Poverty tourism. Slumming it for a book deal, as one WNYC listener commented. We weren’t destitute.

Why did we need to be?

Would this have altered our observations or the accuracy of what we saw and heard?

We’re writers and our goals were the same: find and tell powerful stories that had not been told. The people living these lives, working these jobs, do not have the time, skill or freedom from the shackles of their jobs to tell it as it really is.

I’ve also received extraordinarily personal and heartfelt emails almost every single day since” Malled” appeared:

“Have you been sitting on my shoulder for 23 years?”

“I feel bolstered by your book!”

“I got a raise last year….of 10 cents an hour.”

The filthy secret of American life is economic disparity, the great myth that we are all equal and racing one another along a smooth and level playing field to the equally-accessible goodies of income/home/education/raises/promotions/career success.

Go to college! Work hard! Suck up to your boss! That’ll do it.

Nope.

The reality is that there is no level playing field. It looks more like a greasy pole, the rich at the top, the poor at the bottom and many of us now, four years into a recession filled with record corporate profits and sluggish hiring, scrambling desperately in between.

Here’s a sobering piece in Mother Jones on how much dough corporations are raking in, and how workers aren’t getting the benefit of their labor.

I think speaking truth to power, despite its putative appeal, makes Americans deeply queasy. What if I somehow wrecked your chances, or your kids’, by being rude to the Guys With The Money?

Bowing and scraping to anyone with a payroll is the new black.

I worked for The North Face, owned by the VF Corporation; in January 2009, our hours were cut because the company could not afford them…then sitting on $382 million in cash. (They just spent it to buy Timberland.)

Look at the WalMart class action lawsuit, thrown out this week, screwing thousands of hardworking women employees out of the hope of justice. Of working a full-time job and not needing food stamps to supplement their wages.

Which is worse — ignoring these behaviors and letting business reporters keep fawning over eight-figure-earning CEOs?

Or have people like me or Ehrenreich try our best to open the door to the creepy, greedy, nasty behaviors that drive so much of this economy?

Either way, millions of workers are being screwed.

FiredoverFifty.com: It’s Time!

Image via Wikipedia

If you’ve been fired and you’re over 50, you’re screwed.

So says the front page of The New York Times:

Since the economic collapse, there are not enough jobs being created for the population as a whole, much less for those in the twilight of their careers.

Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group — 7.3 percent — is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession.

After other recent downturns, older people who lost jobs fretted about how long it would take to return to the work force and worried that they might never recover their former incomes. But today, because it will take years to absorb the giant pool of unemployed at the economy’s recent pace, many of these older people may simply age out of the labor force before their luck changes.

In my new book, “Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail”, I include the depressing, terrifying stories of two women, both in their 50s and single, who have plunged from middle-class incomes, hopes and expectations, to frustration and poverty. One, formerly earning $35,000 working for (wait for it) Habitat for Humanity, now makes $7.25 an hour as a retail clerk at a southern department store.

She is furious, and ashamed that she must rely on her 81-year-old mother for financial help every month.

What I don’t get is this — age discrimination is, technically, illegal. Yet, as usual, anyone who’s played that shave-the-resume/dye-their-hair game knows it’s happening every single day in every single state in the nation.

The U.S. is a country predicated on the mythology of the individual who does it all by themselves. Bootstrap city!

As if.

Many forces are shoving 50-somethings to the economic margins, in the very years they are hardest-hit by the trifecta of their own need to save for retirement, the increasing needs of their aging/ill/distant parents and their own college-age or young adult children — the ones saddled with educational debt who are returning to the family nest, wanted or not.

It is an unmitigated disaster.

And interest rates are now so absurdly low that retirees can’t live on their savings — and many are now seeking jobs to supplement their paltry incomes from hard-won, carefully-saved investments. More competition for fewer jobs!

If the Tea Partiers can get it together, why not these millions of fired 50-somethings?

Is there no collective political will that might conjoin them into concerted action?

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• Older and jobless: Struggling in the U.S. (theglobeandmail.com)

One In Seven Americans Is Poor: The Frog And The Scorpion

Image by Monroe’s Dragonfly via Flickr

Nice statistic that.

The Census Bureau reports that one in seven American is now living in poverty. Millions can’t find work,  are losing their homes, living in their cars, bunking — when they can — with relatives. Millions are reaching for the thin, weak strained social safety net of food stamps and homeless shelters.

The shocking part?

That this should surprise anyone.

Recall the old joke, the friendship between the frog and the scorpion; as the frog swims across a river with the scorpion on its back, stung and dying. betrayed, he asks why. “I’m a scorpion. That’s what I do.”

In a nation where CEOs now crow with glee that they earn 300 times that of their lowest-paid workers, why would anyone find the growing chasm between the happy haves and the terrified have-nots unexpected?

The U.S. is a nation of laissez-faire capitalism. It’s a system as brutal and impersonal as a combustion engine. If you can find a way to accommodate its needs, you’re set. If not, you’re toast.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. But no one, anywhere, should gasp in shock at the ruin so many people now face. They played “by the rules”.

There weren’t any.

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She's 17, Broke, Scared, Determined — A New Film Heroine in 'Winter's Bone'

Debra Granik winning the Grand Jury prize for her film. Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Go see this film!

It is not cute or fun or charming. It does not have singing penguins.

The squirrels in it are shot and skinned and fried for the family’s food.

The film is “Winter’s Bone” which every reviewer is (fairly) calling the best film of the year. It’s the story of 17-year-old Ree, whose Mom is mentally ill and medicated and useless and her 12-year-old brother and 6-year-old sister. Her Dad who “cooks crank” for a living, has disappeared and they will lose their Ozarks home and land if Ree can’t find him and get him to meet his court date.

She heads off to beg from a variety of friends and neighbors and relatives for help. What she encounters is a world filled with darkness. Here is a kind of poverty and desperation so deep and so bitter and so hopeless it’s almost unbearable to watch, moderated only by her kindly neighbor who takes in their horse and brings them left-over venison.

Ree is amazing. She soldiers through a life that would break most of us and there are scenes that are so sad and so horrifying they will sear you.

The women are cracked and worn with deep wrinkles in their faces and wear little make-up. The clothes are the uniform of many rural poor — hoodies and camo and thick black sneakers. There is almost no music, no soundtrack to soften or prettify this tale. The only singing is from the locals singing early folk songs.

Go anyway and admire this extraordinary young woman and the film’s female director Debra Granik and the book’s writer.

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Rockefeller's helicopter, $1400/month tutors and my little sister: What income inequality looks like

Image via Wikipedia

I took a wrong road last week and, seeing a particular corner I used to turn left at for 18 months 10 years ago, my heart hurt.

It was the street that once took me to a battered, crowded house whose tiny front yard was always bare dirt. Sometimes there was a bike lying in the dirt, usually broken. It was a small house filled with people who yelled at one another as normal behavior.

A house jammed with an ill grand-mother, a morbidly obese daughter and her live-in boyfriend, a nine-year-old boy and his 13-year-old sister — a girl who was, for a while, my “little sister”, paired with me through the Big Sister program. Her mother, ten years younger than I, had simply disappeared years earlier. She showed up, out of the blue, a month after her daughter and I were matched. But we rarely spoke. She was usually in the basement, playing video games and watching television.

I had never before encountered poverty, and such family dysfunction, in the U.S. so intimately; I had lived in Mexico and traveled to many developing nations, where huge income inequality remains endemic.

Here, a 15-minute drive across 287? That was a shock. No longer.

My “little sister” would now be 23 or 24. Is she alive? Healthy? Did she — as her grandmother kept asking her in front of me, poking at her belly — become a teenage mother instead? Dare I drive back to their house and knock on the door and ask to see her again?

Our relationship, initially warm and mutually enjoyable and something we both deeply valued, ended abruptly, with deception on her part and deep disappointment on mine. It was an instructive experience. I had brought to it absurdly idealistic notions of what was possible, of what she might achieve, of what I might be able to give to her to help even the score between her world and mine, to help her level a playing field so tilted it’s a wonder any one of us can get up each day and walk across it.

Growing up in Canada, where the very best university, my alma mater, University of Toronto, still only costs $5,000 a year, I could not conceive of a place where she was simply, very likely, to be left behind. Without an enormous boost — from whom? how often? from her family? — it would not be a reasonable hope, no matter how desireable, that she flee a chaotic life of junk food, all-night videos and tightly curbed notions of what is possible.

College, for my little sister — and we talked about it — was some gauzy fantasy, a glimmering, glittering theme park sort of like DisneyWorld, a place she’d heard of and wanted to go to. But had no idea how to get there. I doubt she ever did. I had tried to get her into a local private school, $25k a year, on a full scholarship. Schools like that love to add a few underprivileged kids to their mix of lawyers’ daughters.

She never showed up for her appointed day and that was our last contact. Yet I still think of her, often.

I live in Westchester County, north of Manhattan — a county of 1 million people that stretches from the Hudson River to Long Island Sound on its eastern edge. Within it lies a microcosm of the U.S. in 2010, with staggering, Third World-ish income disparities. It contains elegant, manicured towns like Bedford, Scarsdale, Chappaqua, Bronxville and Armonk, where a house easily costs $5m or more, up to $20 million. This is where wealthy and powerful people like Martha Stewart and the Clintons live, on enormous estates with wooden rails and paddocks and stables for their horses.

David Rockefeller, now 90, lives a 10-minute drive from my home — and every morning I am reminded of his wealth and power as his private helicopter clatters just above my top-floor balcony on his way to Manhattan. Our apartment building, constructed in 1960, was re-designed because — in its original tall, narrow form — it would have impeded his view; it is a wide, flat, six-story version instead.

I read in this month’s issue of Westchester magazine an interview with an SAT tutor who charges $175/hour, with most of her students coming twice a week. That’s a cool $1,400 a month, $16,800 a year, to prep your kid(s) for the Ivies. The nation’s most expensive college, Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, is now $54K a year; I have a book on my desk right now borrowed from their library through our county’s great inter-library loan program. I get to keep it for a month.

I have lived in this county since 1989, when I moved to New York and bought an apartment. I was, then, married to a doctor, and assumed we’d have a Westchester life — a house, maybe a bigger house, nice car(s.) Whatever. But the marriage was brief and he remarried; he and his wife now earn $500,000 between them, an amount so staggering I can’t even picture bringing in $30,000 a month. A man in my church wrote a personal check for $250,000, which bought a beautiful new organ.

I sometimes feel like I live in a foreign country. I don’t recognize a place where such wealth exists beside such struggle.

And, in this county, are poor and working-class towns — Mt. Vernon, Yonkers, Ossining, Port Chester — where affordable housing is a constant battle. Anyone earning even $40,000 would find it difficult to obtain safe, clean housing, let alone afford a reliable vehicle and its insurance. You don’t know how bad a bus can be until you need it; I tried to get to my church in Irvington, NY by bus once when our car was being repaired and I did not want to pay $12 cabfare to get there. There is no bus service there on Sundays.

What an invisibly effective way to keep poor(er) people out of our parish.

From an editorial in The New York Times:

When one thinks about segregation, the suburbs of New York’s Westchester County don’t immediately come to mind. Unless, of course, you’re a minority resident searching in vain for an affordable place to live.

Westchester County has now announced an agreement to spend more than $50 million to build or acquire 750 affordable housing units — 630 in towns and villages where the black population is 3 percent or less, and the Latino population is less than 7 percent.

The agreement, which needs to be ratified by the county Board of Legislators, settles a 3-year-old federal lawsuit, filed by the Anti-Discrimination Center, accusing the county of taking tens of millions of dollars in federal housing grants while falsely certifying that it was living up to its legal requirement to provide affordable housing without reinforcing racial segregation.

At the time, the county called those accusations “garbage,” and said it was powerless to force communities to integrate. But in February, Judge Denise L. Cote ruled that between 2000 and 2006 the county had, indeed, misrepresented its actions and had made little or no effort to place affordable homes in overwhelmingly white communities where residents objected.

Those objections have been fierce. And we fear the battles are far from over. In the 1980s, Yonkers nearly bankrupted itself trying to fight a federal judge’s order to integrate public housing. There are currently 120,000 acres of land in Westchester where integration is lagging, including in Bedford, Bronxville, Eastchester, Hastings-on-Hudson, Harrison, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, New Castle, Pelham Manor and Scarsdale.

Do you see this in your life? How does it make you feel?

Earning $85,000 Last Year, Homeless Today

Image by DC Public Library Commons via Flickr

If you still have a job, even a crummy one you dislike, and a home — messy, crowded, expensive, too-small, needing repairs — read this Washington Post story and thank God it’s not about you, yet. It’s a great piece that really examines who we are, or think we are, when we slip terrifyingly — temporarily? — down the socioeconomic ladder.

One family’s slide from $85,000 a year to homelessness.