Martin Luther King famously said, “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.” Many find this idea as popular as rutabagas. The idea that through governmental activism in tax reform, educational innovation, social safety nets, subsidized higher education, more efficient and more accessible healthcare, etc., we can as a society greatly reduce poverty in this country runs counter to the “bootstraps” theory of individualism and personal responsibility. (I’ve often said that grit is highly over-rated—more on this another time.) And I’m not naïve enough to think that Conservatives will read my points below and send me manifestations (though there are still naming opportunities for just-conceived Institute for Social Justice—don’t get me wrong) of their appreciation for changing their long-held beliefs about poverty and mobility opportunities. I’ll take what I can get.
First, who is even in poverty in the United States? Well, the 45M people in America living in poverty cut across all races, religions, and ages. As a professor at the Kennedy School of Public Policy at Harvard pointed out, “If they could somehow join hands and form a line, it would stretch all the way from New York City to Los Angeles and then back again.” And, as you probably know, minorities have a poverty rate twice that of whites. But here’s the kicker for me. Children comprise a huge number of our citizens living in poverty. As one writer put it, “Roughly one in five American children live in poverty, most of them in a single-parent family headed by the mother.” Rugged individualism is not the panacea for moving children into the social and economic societal mainstream. This takes political will, and yes, government activism.
People do what they have to in order to survive. This is how people survive in the Syrian desert, in refugee camps, in subsistence environments all over the globe. But in the United States, can’t we do better when it comes to dealing with poverty? The poverty dialectics are full of misunderstanding, myths, ignorance, and—far worse—willful misrepresentation. Yes, there were Reagan’s welfare queen, Bush’s Willie Horton, etc., but these barely register in the typhoons of misdirection we deal with today. Discussions of poverty these days don’t even achieve a quorum in public policy venues (and alas, I include colleges and universities and churches here), much less reach the degree of engagement needed to drive positive change.
So here’s where I’m starting from in writing what I hope will be a series of articles about poverty. I’ve got this deep-seated and long-held belief that most Americans in the societal mainstream (those who endorse political memes and show pictures of last night’s Mexican combo dinner on Facebook) don’t know who Americans living in poverty are! There’s no face to the issue. And when there’s no face, its easy to make generalizations and characteristics that marginalize and even demonize an entire and largely invisible segment of our population. Maybe this is a quixotic quest, but I have been wanting to publish for some time a series of profiles of real people living at the lowest of the low economic strata in our country and tell their stories. When you don’t know any poor people and their stories, it’s easy to dismiss them as lazy and irrelevant—if you think of them at all. And not thinking of them at all is the easiest pathway there is—the Occam’s razor of public policy.
Fortunately for me, I found two sociologists who did exactly the kind of profiling I was interested in when I came across a book about people living in deep, deep poverty, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Edin and Shaefer. Most of the people profiled in the book receive virtually nothing from the government, contrary to what many would expect. But what these people and their families really had in common was that they lived in households where each family member fought to survive in America on less than $2 a day. In other words, these households represented essentially a cash-less environment.
I’ll start with the Edin and Shaefer profile of Susan Brown. Obviously, the authors used a fictitious name to provide some modicum of privacy. But make no mistake. Susan Brown is a real person. From Edin and Shaefer:
Deep on the south side of Chicago, far from the ever-evolving steel skyline of America’s third-largest city, sits a small, story-and-a-half white clapboard house clad in peeling paint. That’s where Susan Brown lives with her husband, Devin, and their eight-month-old daughter, Lauren, Susan’s grandmother, step-grandfather, and alcoholic uncle.
Wooden steps lead up to the age-worn threshold of an enclosed front porch, which slumps noticeably to the left. To enter the house, visitors must sidestep a warped, mold-stained plywood board that covers a large hole in the porch floor. The front porch opens into a small, dark room furnished with a worn couch, a shaky wooden coffee table, and a leatherette easy chair with stuffing escaping from the left arm. Up and to the left, you can see a dark patch where the wall meets the ceiling. It seems like the spot is at best damp and at worst crumbling.
The air is dense. It is well above ninety degrees outside, but it feels even hotter inside the house. None of the windows open, although gaps between the frames and their casings let in a little bit of air. The carpeting in the front room has been discolored by footsteps and spills, and its matted surface feels a bit sticky. Where the carpet has worn away, there are the crumbling remains of black-and-white linoleum. Where the linoleum has work through, there are the vestiges of once-fine hardwood floors.
At the back of the house, a giant 1980s-era refrigerator dominates a small kitchen outfitted with open shelving and a porcelain sink that may well be a century old. Inside the refrigerator, there are just a few bottles of baby formula that Susan has gotten from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, called WIC. She says of baby Lauren, “She gets WIC, but it don’t last…They give her, like, seven cans, but it’s like the little cans.” Otherwise, she says with a shrug, “we don’t have no food in the freezer right now.” The fridge groans as it works to keep its mostly empty shelves cold.
In the heart of all the chaos that is inevitable when six people share a cramped, worn three-bedroom home, there is a small dining area sandwiched between the front room and the empty fridge in the back. In it sits a round dining table covered with a pristine white linen tablecloth, intricately embroidered around the edges. Four place settings are outfitted with gold-rimmed china and the same embroidery as the tablecloth have been carefully folded and placed in large crystal goblets. It is hard to imagine a more elegant table at which to share a meal. Yet here it sits—never used, never disturbed—accompanied by a single chair.
This table harks back to a different era, a better time in the life of Susan’s family, when owning this house in this part of Chicago signaled the achievement of middle-class African American respectability. Before the economic anchors of this far South Side neighborhood closed down—the steel yards in the 1960s, the historic Pullman railway company in the early 1980s, and the mammoth Sherwin-Williams paint factory in 1995—Roseland was a community with decent-paying, stable jobs. It was a good place to raise your kids.
As the jobs left, the drugs arrived. “It got worse, it’s changed,” Susan says. There’s “too much violence…unnecessary violence at that.” Given what her family has been through, this is more than a bit of an understatement. Susan’s brother was shot in broad daylight just one block away. Her great-grandmother, in whose house they are living, has fled for a meager retirement out west. Susan’s family would like nothing more than to find another place to live, safer streets and a home that isn’t crumbling around them. Yet despite all of its ills, this house is the only thing keeping Susan, Devin, and Lauren off the streets. They have spent the past few months surviving on cash income so low that it adds up to less than $2 per person, per day. With hardly a cent to their names, they have nowhere else to go.
Devin has a high school diploma. A clean record. Some work history. He spent most of the past year working construction gigs off the books for an uncle, until he got a temp job up in the northern suburbs. But that job lasted only a few months, and now he’s gone half a year without finding another. After two months at home following the birth of baby Lauren, Susan began a frantic search for work, but it hasn’t been going well. “I’ve been looking for jobs for forever,” she says, clearly demoralized. “It’s gonna drive me crazy!” Before she became pregnant with Lauren, Susan earned her GED and spent more than a year in community college, completing the remedial courses that would allow her to finally begin earning credits toward a certificate in early childhood education. Yet she can’t afford to return to college right now. Somebody has to find work.
Devin speaks with more confidence than Susan. He believes that any day now, things are bound to turn around. On his way to apply for a position at the Save-A-Lot grocery nearby, his blue jeans are clean and crisp, his short-sleeved button-down shirt pressed. He has heard that there is an opening for part-time work in the produce department, paying $8.50 an hour. At only twenty hours a week, it won’t get his family above the poverty line, but it’s a start. Now if only Susan can find something. At least child care isn’t a worry. Susan’s grandmother has had to leave her job to care for her husband, just home after a long hospitalization. She says that while she’s nursing him at home, she can babysit Lauren if Susan finds a job.
Susan is sick of going hungry, sick of eating instant noodles morning, noon, and night. She’s tired of falling further and further behind on her bills, tired of being a freeloader in her own home. With no cash coming in, the whole family is in hock to Susan’s absentee landlord, her great-grandmother, who charges each of her tenants a modest rent to cover the property taxes and supplement her Social Security check. Susan’s uncle has been scraping together just enough to pay the utilities with his slim earnings from the occasional side job fixing cars in the backyard. The whole household depends on Susan and Devin’s food stamp benefits in order to eat. So as Susan goes about the work of caring for her baby and searching for a job, she is also learning another skill—the art of surviving on virtually nothing.
Asked if she plans to apply for welfare, Susan recoils a bit, shaking her head emphatically, as if to say, Of course not. When pressed to explain her reluctance, she explains, “I just don’t want to get rejected again.” Every time she gets turned down by a prospective employer, she cries uncontrollably. Why open herself up to certain failure by applying for welfare. Furthermore, although eligible for welfare, she thought they just weren’t giving it out anymore.
Susan Brown’s search for work was a constant source of worry during the summer of 2012. When especially stressed, she would nervously pass her refurbished iPhone from one hand to the other, over and over again. The phone was a gift (purchased for $30) from her husband, Devin, during a time when he had steady work and was in the doghouse after disappearing for several days without explanation. This phone was Susan’s most important asset as she hunted for a job. Without a computer and with no other way to access the Internet, she had managed to submit fifty job applications online via her iPhone’s tiny touch screen in the past few months. While these applications had generated some interviews, they had not resulted in a single job offer.
“A lot of things don’t go my way,” says Susan with a hesitant smile. “My luck sucks.”
A black woman in her early twenties, Susan got pregnant during her senior year of high school, and perhaps some of her pessimism can be traced back to that time. She left school before graduation when the pregnancy became high risk, and she found herself trekking across the South Side every week for doctor’s appointments, fearing the loss of her baby. When she and Devin went in for her first ultrasound, she remembers, “I could tell by the way the doctor was acting that something was wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me.” After seeking answers at three different clinics, a doctor finally told her that the baby had a major developmental defect. At eight months, Susan delivered a stillborn child.
Susan swore off further pregnancies. “I kept saying I was never gonna get pregnant again. I was scared.” Determined to get ahead, she enrolled in community college and completed her GED, with the goal of eventually earning an associate’s degree in early childhood education. After a year of remedial course work to make up for the poor quality of her high school education, she was almost ready to advance to the for-credit classes that would begin to count toward her degree. But soon after she and Devin were married, Susan got pregnant again. Antibiotics she had been prescribed had apparently neutralized her birth control. “They told me, ‘You have to read the packets.’ But who reads the packets?”
Because of the prior stillbirth, Susan’s pregnancy was considered high risk. Constant trips to the doctor made it difficult for her to keep up with a full class schedule, and so, once again, she dropped out of school. Happily, the pregnancy was uneventful, and Lauren turned out to be just fine—more than fine, in fact. It’s hard to imagine a more alert, curious, and beautiful little girl. Lots of hair, clustered in tiny braids capped off with plastic barrettes, adding a cascade of color around her tiny face. Bright eyes darting this way and that, contrasting with her smooth dark skin. When Susan, Devin, and their daughter go shopping at Target or board the bus, Lauren turns heads. She plays it up, too, giggling, clapping her hands together, making sly eye contact, and bursting into a one-toothed smile after holding an admirer’s attention just long enough. Being with Lauren is like walking around with a celebrity.
Susan would tell you that these days the first step in applying for most low-wage jobs is an online application that might take as long as two hours to complete (probably longer on an iPhone). Take the online application for Walmart, which Susan filled out in the summer of 2012. By the end of the first few screens, you have provided your name, date of birth, Social Security number, and home address; have agreed to submit to a drug test during the hiring process; and have indicated that you are willing to undergo unscheduled drug tests at any point during your employment. You have also indicated your race and ethnicity and have answered questions about whether you’ve ever been on TANF, SNAP, or Supplemental Security Income (SSI), although the screen assures you that the answers to these questions will not affect your chances of being hired.
While there’s not much focus on the skills you would bring to your job, in multiple places you must indicate your availability for work. A screen early on informs you that “at Walmart, customer service is our priority. We must ensure that we have trained Associates available when our customer traffic is the heaviest, which includes evening and weekend hours.” This is combined with a warning that if “your hours of availability do not align with the customer traffic demands for positions in which you are expressing interest, this may impact whether or not you will be considered for these positions.” The application continues by asking you to list your available hours for each day of the week. You might, reasonably, find yourself thinking that every hour you block off as unavailable will reduce your chances of getting hired. To drive the point home, another screen asks whether you are able to work evening, weekend, and night shifts.
What Susan hates most about applying for jobs is the “test” such applications almost always require. Even talking about these tests seems to raise her already high anxiety level. Her streak of strikeouts has led her to question her instincts. Take, for example, Walmart’s “assessment.” If presented with the statement “I frequently change the way I approach job activities,” should you answer “strongly disagree” to show consistency, or “strongly agree” to show that you are open to feedback? And what about the statement “When your opinion about how to solve a problem has differed from your supervisor’s,” are you supposed to say that you have typically “talked through the problem with your supervisor to reach a compromise”? Or should you say that you have “combined your ideas with your supervisor’s to come up with a solution jointly”? Maybe the right answer is that you have “modified your opinion to satisfy the preferences of your supervisor.”
Human resources representatives might say that candidates shouldn’t try to answer these questions strategically, but rather should be as truthful as possible. But when living on less than $2 a day, you can’t afford NOT to be strategic. Even if you were to take the test simply at face value, you might begin to question your instincts after forty or fifty failed attempts to find a job online. Desperate for help, Susan sought counsel from family members but often gets conflicting advice. Where her aunt says she should answer “very true” to show character, her grandmother advises that the right answer is “not at all true”—that shows realism, she says. There is a lot of folk wisdom exchanged across the South Side of Chicago about how to take these tests, much of it contradictory. Susan, who doesn’t know whom to believe, is a nervous wreck every time she logs on to take another one. Devin has offered to take the test for her next time.
As much as these tests are an understandable focus of Susan’s anxiety, she does get called for interviews. Clearly, the tests aren’t the only thing keeping her from getting a job. In late July 2012, in fact, she scored an interview for a part-time position at a secondhand shop about twenty blocks north. Given her lack of cash, she had no option but to walk. So on the day of the interview, she started off well ahead of schedule, trudging along in her heavy black polyester pants and stretch white T-shirt—her dressiest outfit—in the sweltering July sun, headed toward the store’s address, which she had typed into her iPhone maps program. When she arrived, it was apparent she was in the wrong place , and she called for directions. Another twenty blocks later, she arrived at the interview, flustered and drenched in sweat. The people she talked with were nice enough, commending her perseverance in getting to the interview, even if late. But as of a week later, she hadn’t heard anything back. Then she saw that the job had been re-advertised. She applied online once again. Not surprisingly, she isn’t holding out much hope.
Fortunately, near the end of July, Devin finally landed a job at a nearby grocer, promising $8.50 per hour and thirty hours a week. He would be paid weekly, and he guessed that he’d be bringing home a paycheck of about $250, minus taxes, in about a week’s time. When asked how they planned to spend it, they replied, in unison, “Pay bills!” That first paycheck wasn’t going to put much of a dent in the debts that had piled up, but something was clearly better than nothing. Susan and Devin waxed hopefully about a good job paying $12 an hour with at least thirty hours a week guaranteed. By pooling their earnings, they believed, they would “be on the right path.” To them, the American dream would be in sight.
In the meantime, even given the new job, Devin still couldn’t come close to raising his family of three above the poverty line. With each dollar earned, the family lost roughly 30 cents in SNAP. Health insurance didn’t come with the job. They still couldn’t afford a place of their own. Devin couldn’t even afford to maintain his cell phone, though he continued to pay the bill on Susan’s phone. Despite the job, struggle remained their daily fare as Susan continued to search doggedly for employment.
So just to be clear, Susan Brown and her family receive SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) for food, but no other government assistance. And your SNAP (operating like a debit card at grocery stores for eligible food purchases) is not legally convertible to cash. This would, in fact, be illegal, constituting fraud with severe federal and state penalties. So SNAP is an available source of food while Susan and Devon struggle to find employment, but they still need cash for rent and utilities. This was available before 1996 in the form of cash payments to those families with demonstrable need. But in 1996 Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law a new welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which comes with work requirements and lifetime limits. The Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC), passed during the Bush administration, has been a godsend for the working poor, but have no value for people like Susan and Devon when they’re not able to find work. It’s critical that we note that Susan and Devon want the dignity of a job. That’s all. They aren’t looking for government charity. They view themselves as workers, with contributions to make to the world they inhabit.
Kathryn Edin has spent more than thirty years chronicling the conditions of America’s poorest families. The lives of many of the poor she examined represented a synthesis of bad breaks, systemic barriers, ingenuity, and survival instincts. But she has noticed an alarming characteristic of the very poor: “These families didn’t just have too little cash to survive on, as was true for the welfare recipients Edin and Lein had met in the 1990s. They often had no cash at all. And the absence of cash permeated every aspect of their lives. It seemed as though not only cash was missing but hope as well.” Edin and Shaefer endeavored to answer a number of poignant questions that take us beneath the statistics:
- What had caused the rise in $2-a-day poverty among households with children?
- Was the landmark welfare reform of 1996 partly to blame?
- Were these families completely detached from the world of work?
- Or were they enmeshed in a low-wage labor market that was itself somehow prompting spells of extreme destitution?
- How was it even possible to live without cash in modern America?
- What were families in $2-a-day poverty doing to survive?
- And were these strategies different from those poor families had been using prior to welfare reform, when AFDC still offered such families a cash cushion against extreme destitution?
- What was so indispensable about cash—as opposed to in-kind resources such as SNAP—for families trying to survive in twenty-first-century America?
When we have a conversation around the office or dinner table about welfare, we are still starting from the residual assumptions about assistance from the 1970, 80s, and 90s. There is virtually NO WELFARE like that still around. As I stated earlier, this changed with the Clinton administration in 1996, and is pretty much extinct today. The image of lazy welfare lifers sitting around drawing generous government checks is not in play today. If this is what you think, I feel sorry for you, and sorrier still for this country. Today’s welfare is employment based. So the quest before us now is to look for ways to get Susan Brown into a job without having to fill out fifty applications on an outdated cell phone in a house that is falling down around her. To quote Edin and Shaefer one last time, our current system of intervention for the very poor “is built on the assumption of fulltime, stable employment at a living wage combined with a low-wage labor market that fails to deliver on any of the above. It is this toxic alchemy, we argue, that is spurring the increasing numbers of $2-a-day poor in America.”
I have plans to publish more profiles and comments on the very poor in America soon. And when I’m finished, my hope is that you will know, really know, these very real individuals and their families, what life in this country looks like for them. But more importantly, I want these profiles to change what life looks like in this country for you.