You can’t assuage your guilt by gawking at the poor.

flickr/Francois Decaillet

A few years ago, when I was researching Indian tour companies online, I came across a banner ad. It had a small graphic with pictures of thin, half-dressed Indian boys with dirt on their faces, and the words “Slum Walks” on top of most of the image. It evoked that ever-frustrating thought of “how is this even a thing?” that just makes you spiral.

I didn’t come back to the idea of slum walks for years, but it stuck in the back of my head and bothered me every time I went back to India to visit my family. And a recent Google search showed me that yes, they’re still a thing.

Just to make it clear, slum walks are exactly what they sound like. You walk around in a slum. I wish there was more depth to it, just to make the idea of it less disgusting, but that’s really it — you pay real money to someone who doesn’t live in a slum, on the sometimes-provided promise that the money will be funnelled back into uplifting the people living in the slum, to walk around a slum and look at impoverished people. If I’m being too blunt, and not acknowledging that some people do this from the good of their hearts, motivated by the desire to help, it’s because I don’t actually believe that people’s motivation is coming from an entirely trustworthy place, nor is that motivation translating into something substantial in terms of social activism.

One of the first results when you Google “slum walks” is for a TripAdvisor page for tours run in Delhi by an organization called Providing Education To Everyone, or PETE. The service has five stars with 290 reviews. It took about 30 seconds into scrolling through the reviews for the slum walks for me to start crying.

“I noticed no visible resentment, just friendly greetings to someone visiting their neighborhood. I’m not suggesting that they like living in these conditions — no one in their right mind would. But to be able to show this level of grace while living under these conditions — pretty humbling,” writes a five-star reviewer. Where there are negative reviews, it’s because the poverty isn’t up to the tourists’ exacting standards. “It was a somehow disappointing, since the REAL slum where we were supposed to go was bulldozered away completely recently. Compared to the Dharavi slum tour in Mumbai, this tour was by far not as interesting,” writes a reviewer who gave them only two stars.

India has unbelievable economic disparity in which people who are “lower” caste, non-Hindu, trans, and/or disabled are disproportionately affected by poverty and homelessness. Though I was born and lived in India for a chunk of my childhood, I’ve never known poverty. I immigrated to Canada with my family where I’ve been afforded, thanks to my parents and to my own social privileges, stable housing and an elite education. My family has made several trips back to India to visit with relatives since we moved to Canada. In many ways, when I return to India, I am a tourist, and while I cannot speak for the Indians who are forced into poverty, I do feel a deep sense of frustration knowing that Indians are reduced to objects, usually by white tourists, in the practice of slum walks.

Slum walks/tours are not a new concept; in the 1830s, wealthy Americans (including Abraham Lincoln) would go “slumming” in the Five Points neighborhood of New York to see how the other half lived. That has evolved into modern “poorism,” as Travel Weekly called it a decade ago, which they defined as “a somewhat derogatory label applied to slum tours or other types of outings that bring visitors into extremely impoverished areas of the world.” Slum tours have expanded to Rio, Nairobi, South Africa, Mexico, and India, among other countries. Much like how slum walks in India exemplify how poverty and homelessness is disproportionately felt by marginalized people, the same is true of slum tours in places like South Africa, where tourists can engage in slum walks of all-Black townships that were most violently affected by Apartheid.

In a 2007 Globe and Mail article, David Fennell, professor of Geography and Tourism Studies at Brock University and author of Tourism Ethics, highlights Western tourists’ sense of entitlement when it comes to travel. “Everest. Antarctica. The Amazon. Wherever,” he says. “If you put your money down, you have a right to go.” But, simply put, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. People living in slums have as much of a right to consent to their interactions and experiences as anyone else. Just because slums are open, walkable, and don’t have “traditional” borders does not mean that we have any right to walk into people’s homes and lives for the benefit of our own education. Not only do tour companies not have people’s consent when they bring in groups of tourists to walk around the slum and investigate people’s houses and living conditions, most tourists who do slum tours will not be able to communicate with the people living in slums.

The Troubling Trendiness Of Poverty Appropriation

Where companies have people’s consent, it is important to question how this consent was obtained, how much about the reality of slum walks was explained to locals, how clear companies are about the payments they are receiving in comparison to how much they are giving back to the people living in poverty, and how much of a choice that consent really is. The removal of people’s agency and their transformation into objects during slum tours is something that doesn’t seem worth the small amount of paternalistic charity that might come their way. But it’s hard to say no if it’s that or nothing.

Slum walks are voyeuristic, and they commodify poverty and homelessness for the benefit of tourists. Yes, slum tours are at best a band-aid solution to the problem of systemic poverty in countries like India and cannot transform people’s living conditions overnight, but there is not much record of what work these companies are actually doing with tourists’ money in terms of activism, or helping those who are the subject of their tours. In a recent NowThis video, Samantha Nutt argues that what locals really need is to be empowered and supported in working on their communities themselves, but this is not in the interest of tour companies because it limits potential revenue.

After all, tour companies are companies first, and charitable organizations second, and if profits were coming from showing people the destitute conditions of people living in slums, would it be in a capitalistic tour company’s best interest to make those conditions better?

The irony is that slum tours could never be the “authentic” experience they advertise themselves as, because they completely center the experience of the visitor, and tokenize the experience of poor locals to appease tourists. This kind of “poverty porn” harms the people who need to be helped. It mischaracterizes poverty in many ways and perpetuates damaging myths that only keep poverty alive. Slum tours don’t teach about the systemic inequalities that create poverty and homelessness; they don’t address how a lot of tourism actually hurts locals. Instead, they weaponize tourists’ guilt at facing poverty on such a grand scale, and serve to make tourists feel better about themselves for using their vacation time to see “real” hardship.

If profits were coming from showing people the destitute conditions of people living in slums, would it be in a capitalistic tour company’s best interest to make those conditions better?

It’s irresponsible to ignore poverty when you travel, and slum tours promote themselves as transformative learning experiences precisely because they know it’ll attract tourists who are trying to be compassionate and thoughtful. But engaging in things like slum tours doesn’t actually help the subjects of the tours.

There are small ways you can travel ethically, such as supporting family- or independently-owned restaurants that use local ingredients, locally-based organizations with worthwhile ongoing projects that are bettering their communities, and independently owned stores and other businesses. If you want to learn more about historical, systemic inequalities in the places you are visiting, do this by reading about it and having conversations with people who may be interested in sharing their knowledge with you. With the internet at your disposal, you can access this information in advance and make meaningful choices while you’re travelling instead of taking part in exploitative, unhelpful things like slum tours. Because while they may sell themselves that way, gawking at poverty will never be charitable.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/slum-walks-aren-t-educational-they-re-glorifying-poverty-for-profit-2d0ae50b0b07/ Tue, 24 Apr 2018 15:34:41 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1825 Read more]]> You can’t assuage your guilt by gawking at the poor.

A few years ago, when I was researching Indian tour companies online, I came across a banner ad. It had a small graphic with pictures of thin, half-dressed Indian boys with dirt on their faces, and the words “Slum Walks” on top of most of the image. It evoked that ever-frustrating thought of “how is this even a thing?” that just makes you spiral.

I didn’t come back to the idea of slum walks for years, but it stuck in the back of my head and bothered me every time I went back to India to visit my family. And a recent Google search showed me that yes, they’re still a thing.

Just to make it clear, slum walks are exactly what they sound like. You walk around in a slum. I wish there was more depth to it, just to make the idea of it less disgusting, but that’s really it — you pay real money to someone who doesn’t live in a slum, on the sometimes-provided promise that the money will be funnelled back into uplifting the people living in the slum, to walk around a slum and look at impoverished people. If I’m being too blunt, and not acknowledging that some people do this from the good of their hearts, motivated by the desire to help, it’s because I don’t actually believe that people’s motivation is coming from an entirely trustworthy place, nor is that motivation translating into something substantial in terms of social activism.

One of the first results when you Google “slum walks” is for a TripAdvisor page for tours run in Delhi by an organization called Providing Education To Everyone, or PETE. The service has five stars with 290 reviews. It took about 30 seconds into scrolling through the reviews for the slum walks for me to start crying.

“I noticed no visible resentment, just friendly greetings to someone visiting their neighborhood. I’m not suggesting that they like living in these conditions — no one in their right mind would. But to be able to show this level of grace while living under these conditions — pretty humbling,” writes a five-star reviewer. Where there are negative reviews, it’s because the poverty isn’t up to the tourists’ exacting standards. “It was a somehow disappointing, since the REAL slum where we were supposed to go was bulldozered away completely recently. Compared to the Dharavi slum tour in Mumbai, this tour was by far not as interesting,” writes a reviewer who gave them only two stars.

India has unbelievable economic disparity in which people who are “lower” caste, non-Hindu, trans, and/or disabled are disproportionately affected by poverty and homelessness. Though I was born and lived in India for a chunk of my childhood, I’ve never known poverty. I immigrated to Canada with my family where I’ve been afforded, thanks to my parents and to my own social privileges, stable housing and an elite education. My family has made several trips back to India to visit with relatives since we moved to Canada. In many ways, when I return to India, I am a tourist, and while I cannot speak for the Indians who are forced into poverty, I do feel a deep sense of frustration knowing that Indians are reduced to objects, usually by white tourists, in the practice of slum walks.

Slum walks/tours are not a new concept; in the 1830s, wealthy Americans (including Abraham Lincoln) would go “slumming” in the Five Points neighborhood of New York to see how the other half lived. That has evolved into modern “poorism,” as Travel Weekly called it a decade ago, which they defined as “a somewhat derogatory label applied to slum tours or other types of outings that bring visitors into extremely impoverished areas of the world.” Slum tours have expanded to Rio, Nairobi, South Africa, Mexico, and India, among other countries. Much like how slum walks in India exemplify how poverty and homelessness is disproportionately felt by marginalized people, the same is true of slum tours in places like South Africa, where tourists can engage in slum walks of all-Black townships that were most violently affected by Apartheid.

In a 2007 Globe and Mail article, David Fennell, professor of Geography and Tourism Studies at Brock University and author of Tourism Ethics, highlights Western tourists’ sense of entitlement when it comes to travel. “Everest. Antarctica. The Amazon. Wherever,” he says. “If you put your money down, you have a right to go.” But, simply put, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. People living in slums have as much of a right to consent to their interactions and experiences as anyone else. Just because slums are open, walkable, and don’t have “traditional” borders does not mean that we have any right to walk into people’s homes and lives for the benefit of our own education. Not only do tour companies not have people’s consent when they bring in groups of tourists to walk around the slum and investigate people’s houses and living conditions, most tourists who do slum tours will not be able to communicate with the people living in slums.

The Troubling Trendiness Of Poverty Appropriation
theestablishment.co

Where companies have people’s consent, it is important to question how this consent was obtained, how much about the reality of slum walks was explained to locals, how clear companies are about the payments they are receiving in comparison to how much they are giving back to the people living in poverty, and how much of a choice that consent really is. The removal of people’s agency and their transformation into objects during slum tours is something that doesn’t seem worth the small amount of paternalistic charity that might come their way. But it’s hard to say no if it’s that or nothing.

Slum walks are voyeuristic, and they commodify poverty and homelessness for the benefit of tourists. Yes, slum tours are at best a band-aid solution to the problem of systemic poverty in countries like India and cannot transform people’s living conditions overnight, but there is not much record of what work these companies are actually doing with tourists’ money in terms of activism, or helping those who are the subject of their tours. In a recent NowThis video, Samantha Nutt argues that what locals really need is to be empowered and supported in working on their communities themselves, but this is not in the interest of tour companies because it limits potential revenue.

After all, tour companies are companies first, and charitable organizations second, and if profits were coming from showing people the destitute conditions of people living in slums, would it be in a capitalistic tour company’s best interest to make those conditions better?

The irony is that slum tours could never be the “authentic” experience they advertise themselves as, because they completely center the experience of the visitor, and tokenize the experience of poor locals to appease tourists. This kind of “poverty porn” harms the people who need to be helped. It mischaracterizes poverty in many ways and perpetuates damaging myths that only keep poverty alive. Slum tours don’t teach about the systemic inequalities that create poverty and homelessness; they don’t address how a lot of tourism actually hurts locals. Instead, they weaponize tourists’ guilt at facing poverty on such a grand scale, and serve to make tourists feel better about themselves for using their vacation time to see “real” hardship.

If profits were coming from showing people the destitute conditions of people living in slums, would it be in a capitalistic tour company’s best interest to make those conditions better?
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It’s irresponsible to ignore poverty when you travel, and slum tours promote themselves as transformative learning experiences precisely because they know it’ll attract tourists who are trying to be compassionate and thoughtful. But engaging in things like slum tours doesn’t actually help the subjects of the tours.

There are small ways you can travel ethically, such as supporting family- or independently-owned restaurants that use local ingredients, locally-based organizations with worthwhile ongoing projects that are bettering their communities, and independently owned stores and other businesses. If you want to learn more about historical, systemic inequalities in the places you are visiting, do this by reading about it and having conversations with people who may be interested in sharing their knowledge with you. With the internet at your disposal, you can access this information in advance and make meaningful choices while you’re travelling instead of taking part in exploitative, unhelpful things like slum tours. Because while they may sell themselves that way, gawking at poverty will never be charitable.

By Katelyn Burns

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

The cycle of systemic poverty and homelessness is nearly impossible for anyone to break out of. The combination of not having enough funds for everyday necessities under capitalism and a lack of a suitable shelter under which to sleep can be crushing to the human spirit.

Under structural transphobia, trans people are at increased risk for unemployment and homelessness, with trans women of color — who are three times as likely as the general population to be unemployed — bearing the brunt of this oppression.

When I began my own transition, of course, homelessness lingered as a fear in the back of my mind. I’d watched too many trans women be run out of their jobs under suspicious circumstances and subsequently struggle to find another job to believe I was entirely immune to the possibility.

Housing insecurity is a major issue for the trans community and already sparse shelter resources could potentially be a hostile environment for a trans woman, myself included.

As a trans woman, I have a natural fear of cis-operated spaces, as the potential for transphobia is ever present. For example, the Salvation Army has been accused several times of harassing or even banning trans women from their shelters. I wouldn’t even risk availing myself of their services.

Taking into account that a great many shelters and anti-poverty charities are affiliated with or operated by churches, I would be leery of seeking the same help as a homeless cis person.

Housing insecurity is a major issue for the trans community.

And with trans people making up just 0.6% of the population, it’s especially difficult for organizations to provide appropriate local trans-specific resources and a welcoming support system in order to help folks breakout of the systemic poverty cycle.

In order to figure out the best ways to help trans people breakout of systemic homelessness, I turned to the trans-run organization Hypatia Software Org.

According to President/CEO, Lisa-Marie Maginnis, Hypatia’s mission is “to end homelessness and the disenfranchisement of people who experience transmisogyny through peer mentorship, emergency cash relief, and community building.”

Here are 4 ways they say we can help get trans people out of poverty now:

1. Let trans people who have been homeless take the lead

The centerpiece of Hypatia’s approach is their peer mentorship program which recruits trans people who have struggled with extreme poverty to mentor trainees as they work through a year-long course in software development.

Says Maginnis, “The idea is that if you see a peer who has gone through a similar experience as you but is not currently experiencing homelessness, you’ll feel like it’s now attainable and it’s not an impossible proposition to change your life experience.”

The program is a unique boon for a population that has always struggled with extreme poverty and pays homage to the cultural idea of paying it forward that sometimes runs strongly through the trans community at large.

Our community’s prospects have been raised by previous generations, and it’s up to each successive generation to leave the world a better and safer place for those that come out after us.

Maginnis continues, “Hypatia is founded on the very idea that together we can raise each other up out of homelessness and into the IT world.”

2. Share decision-making responsibilities among the whole group

According to Maginnis, every major decision that HSO makes is voted on by both the students and volunteers, all of whom are trans themselves.

“It’s a formal consensus process where any member if they have an idea, we wait seven days and debate it, and if we all agree, the proposal becomes part of Hypatia’s mission… This enables the very people your organization is supposed to serve to have power and run their own community as opposed to being told what to do.”

This dynamic has manifested itself in several positive ways.

If You’ve Never Lived In Poverty, Stop Telling Poor People What To Do

Hypatia itself began as a loosely organized effort with a mission to help homeless experiencers of transmisogyny break out of the poverty cycle. Most people within the trans community define transmisogyny as the unique intersection between misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia exclusively experienced by trans women, and so, at first, Hypatia only assisted trans women.

However, a vote within the membership at large ended up changing the internal definition of transmisogyny to include anyone who identifies as experiencing transmisogyny, including those who may not be trans women.

As a result, Hypatia is now open to any homeless trans person, not just trans women. It’s just one example of why letting those who the program is meant to help make the major decisions can turn out with positive results.

3. Help trans folks find employment in trans-friendly industries

Trans people are marginalized in a number of unique ways within employment settings, and employment law has not yet fully caught up with the fairly recent growth of out trans people across the US.

As a result, employers willing to allow trans people to thrive are vital in helping them build a stable enough employment history to break free of the bonds of poverty.

While there are very few industries that are specifically supportive of trans employees, Hypatia believes that the tech history has proven to be particularly welcoming.

Employment law has not yet fully caught up with the fairly recent growth of out trans people across the US.

“We push for technology jobs because we find the tech industry, while still problematic, to be one of the more friendly industries for trans people. There seem to be more trans people successfully employed in the IT world than there are other industries, visibility-wise.” Said Maginnis.

By focusing on the tech sector, Hypatia can offer their training program nationwide online in an accessible setting.

When students graduate from Hypatia’s year-long training program, they’ll be certified Python developers, a valuable qualification that is very marketable to potential IT employers.

Historically, the tech industry, with heavy ties to the San Francisco Bay Area, has a long history of support for the gay and lesbian community, and that history has translated into a relatively supportive environment for trans tech workers.

4. Support initiatives that provide sudden cash infusions for trans folks

When you’re homeless, every day is a financial crisis and most of Hypatia’s fundraising efforts go towards assisting students with enough cash to be able to keep attending classes. Enter Hypatia’s emergency cash relief fund.

“It’s used for food, transportation and access to medicine for students who would drop out of the program otherwise,” says Maginnis of the thought process behind the fund. “By stabilizing them, we allow them to complete the program, by completing the program, they’re left with their first open source project for their portfolio.”

While there are social media hashtags like #transcrowdfund (created by black transfemme J Skyler) and organizations like the Jim Collins Foundation which helps fund gender affirming surgeries for trans people in need, that can help with these emergency funds, Hypatia takes it one step further and becomes a one-stop shop for both valuable employment training and dispersal of direct assistance cash.

Often students in the HSO program have no access to a laptop, and so must raise enough funds to grab a bus to the library to complete their one hour/week program. Because of this, Hypatia is rolling out extensive fundraising efforts for 2018.

The fact is: there’s no easy answer to systemic poverty within the trans community. It will take several generations to deconstruct the social attitudes that make employers less likely to hire and retain trans employees, so in the meantime, it’s survival mode for us.

Key to that survival are organizations, such as Hypatia Software, that continue doing the real work.

The thing about poetry is that it’s kaleidoscopic, protean, malleable. It’s an art form often very open to projection; what one wants to see is often what one might see. Unlike prose — which, arguably, is exponentially more interested in conveying a clear idea or image — poetry is delightfully layered and fractured, inviting interpretation like a beautifully wanton stare.

This is not to imply that the poet doesn’t have a crystalline agenda, a maybe-convoluted but meticulously rendered journey that they’ve honed and polished with the maniacally deft precision of a master watchmaker.

This is all to say that one doesn’t typically get to float their interpretations to the poet-wizard behind the curtain; usually us logo-philic peons are left wandering the shoals of a poet’s brilliant wordscapes, never quite knowing just what they meant.

It’s a blissful ignorance, but an ignorance nonetheless.

But 2018 has already granted me a tremendous gift; I’ve been able to read a tremendous collection of poetry — behold the glory that is July Westhale’s Trailer Trash — and converse with the aforementioned poet-wizard about all my quandaries, all my grief, all my admiration.

When pressed to talk about how this book came about, July insists that “art is very clever — it happens unconsciously, writing does.” She says that she was actually writing a very different collection about historical figures — Virginia Woolf primarily — when she received a fellowship in 2015 at the Vermont Studio Center.

She sat herself down on the floor, fanned the pages and pages of poems around her, and began indexing everything.

Suddenly she realized, “this was not a book about Virginia Woolf, it was a book about ’80s and ’90s Southern California chemical warfare and poverty. I had spent three years on this manuscript before that, but once I realized what it was really about, it took me a month to finish. I knew exactly what to do with it.”

Trailer Trash is distinctly July’s story — a harrowing tale of grief, childhood, and loss. But it’s also about America, God, and poverty; the collection nimbly toggles, with the grace of a feral cat, between the “I” and the Universal. “You want your readers to be asking questions,” July told me.

And we are.

What can poetry do for a memory that prose can’t? For me, I have always been obsessed with rendering the truth as beautifully as I can — meaning there are decided boundaries that I have to operate in. I need those boundaries. With poetry, storytelling seems boundary-less in that, to me, when you are Telling a Story or Describing a Memory you can render it exquisitely in so many ways. How on earth do you decide how to tell it…

JULY:

I would argue that poetry — at least in its inception — was actually the most boundaried art form. The fundamental difference between poetry and prose is the white space.

One of the things about canonical poetry — although it’s primarily old white men — is that it teaches you how to break all the old rules.

This book has a lot of religious existential crisis. I grew up in the southern baptist church tradition. Hymns are written in ballad forms. Rhyme and meter create hypnosis in the body. What I love is understanding rhyme and meter and poetic forms as they traditionally exist…but using radically different content. Write a sonnet about fisting someone — that juxtaposition.

Image has always been my greatest strength and my greatest weakness — my mentor in grad school use to call me a metaphor making machine. It’s poetically useful in that I think a lot about the world in the ways one thing represents something else. But if you just have something that’s made up of images there’s no there there.

The thing about poetry too is that it’s very economical. You have to figure out how to go a long way with very little. Everything is extremely intentional. Words aren’t there by accident.

‘Poets are really amazing liars.’
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Are you a dogged 3-hour-a-day writer/thinker or do you dash things off on napkins and notebooks as they come to you? Or are you somewhere in the middle…do particular feelings or stories gnaw gnaw gnaw at you to be told? Is poetry a purging?

I do journal a lot…and I do believe in a pretty well-worn path of getting the junk out of your brain. And I go through periods of hyper-productivity — intense reading and then intense writing. I do write a lot. I am prolific. The vast majority might not be good, but that’s not the point.

I will say, I’m a neurotic person — everything has to be just so. Down to the pencil. Right now I am in a period of intense writing. This last year was amazing in terms of publications, but it was so focused on editorial, marketing, tour planning — it didn’t leave a lot of bandwidth to create new stuff. I don’t know what’s coming next. I guess I’ll just start writing now and then I’ll know in a couple years what it will be about…

I’m always curious when folks write memoir — and indeed “Trailer Trash” feels like a deeply personal and familial collection. How much restraint do we “owe” to those in our life that we write about? When are our stories our own to tell?

This is an issue I will have to sit down with when I write memoir. These poems are autobiographical, but they’re still poetic representations of it…they’re still translations of experiences.

Even though I write a lot about people in my life that are living, like my sister…a lot of people I am writing about are not living. Honestly this is a bigass book about my mom. And she’s not living. A lot of these memories exist through the dishonesty of hindsight. I also experience some privilege in that the people in my family don’t really read. They’re just not readers. So there’s a lot of privacy for me — that is both exciting and a bit heartbreaking.

Richard Hugo says in Triggering Town, “you owe your emotions everything and the truth nothing.” You’re not writing a news report. But don’t be an asshole.

Our stories are always our own to tell. Folks who are marginalized already have enough people telling them not to speak or erasing their words. I don’t want to live in a world where people are telling other people not to tell their stories…

I mean, christ, me either, but I still kind of lose sleep about it.

So…how much time does this collection represent? What was the most difficult and wonderful thing about this book of poems? How do you know when you’re “done”?

The whole collection in total took about three years. The most difficult thing about this book was actually the editorial process with the editor — Ann Dernier — who is an amazing women. When the manuscript was accepted she said, “I’m going to work with you”…and she really pushed me in a couple of poems to expand into broader meanings.

A lot of the poems were more finished than others, which is an arbitrary allocation but…the ones she was pushing me to edit were the ones that were the most emotionally difficult for me, which makes sense right? When you’re close to something you can’t write it in the same surgical way — it’s nothing that’s imagined or distanced.

Retelling the story of when I heard my mother had died [in the poem “Dead Mom,” or “How News Travels in a Small Town”] was excruciating for me. I was trying to write a la Szymborska’s poem “Identification.” Ann kept pushing me and pushing me and the result is great, but it’s not a poem I’ll read at readings. I don’t think I’ll ever read it again. It’s the one poem I’ve ever written that feels like too much.

And the best part….?

The best thing about the book for me is that it’s a book about class. Poetry is often considered to be an academic sport. An elitist sport. Something that belongs to people with privilege even though in America we have an amazing canon of poets who write about work. Like Philip Levine. I feel extremely proud and excited that my first full-length collection is all about a very specific kind of wrecked and ravaged agriculture — a kind of poverty that exists in abundance in this country.

What kind of child were you? I know a bit from reading your essays, but did reading play a role in escaping what seems to be a goddamn difficult childhood? I think for myself, escaping, or immersing in books, felt very different than realizing I could write myself. And in truth, writing is the opposite of escaping for me. It’s delving. When did you know you wanted to write? What’s your relationship to words?

I was a strange child. Dreamy and very much in my own head. The white space around me was filled with grief. There was very little I did or could do to alleviate that. I had imaginary horses and I would charge people to ride them. I was six. My [adoptive] mother made me give the money back but…I think there was an aura around orphans which was driven by the media at the time. A lot of the mainstream characters in ’80s and ’90s literature were orphans…which isn’t so anymore.

No one wants to hang out with [orphans]…but they’re also powerful. My mother died in 1991. Time marches forward. I was like one of those plants that grows around the cement instead of smashing through it.

I got my love of reading from my birth mom…I think that because I had a really rough childhood, especially my early childhood, I was expected to be an adult a lot of the time — the adults were not doing a great job of being adults. Reading was absolutely an escape.

Reading became a thing that was mine — it was a hangover from my life with my birth mom that I brought to California with me.

I would love to talk about specific moments and themes in some of the poems themselves…

The opening poem — “Ars Poetica” — is just gut-wrenching…it’s one of my favorites in the collection.

It feels so beautifully loaded, all wrapped up in this gauze of the Fairytale. Love has betrayal baked into its guts I suppose. I also feel as though one self is murdering another self? Which is perhaps something we all do, but maybe without that seemingly cruel level of calm. How much do you think about the first poem setting the tone for the entire book?

Excerpt from “Ars Poetica”

One would like to see oneself walking through the forest as two girls/ along a creek, the golden carp under the ice like blurred poppies.
The tall, hooded girl will extend a basket, offering bread and water, a kindly/ face and a thick cloak…

We can assume systemically — not anecdotally — that all choices in a book are intentional. This is a kind of poetry manifesto. The poem is about two girls walking in the woods. They both share some of the same resources — it’s a beautiful setting, and then…that’s the way the poetry process works. Things work until they don’t.

I guess that writing and brutality go hand in hand in ways that we don’t want to admit. This poem is almost like a legend — it’s not a disclaimer and it’s not apologizing, but it’s a way to read this book.

Excerpt from “Tomato”

… “Once I was a hothouse gone to seed
in a trailer park in Blythe, the sky
vermillion in airlessness, in suffocating
sunsets of dust and pesticides,
our food dead and gone. The dinner table
was the color of a beetle trapped in sap.”

Can you talk a bit about the evolving role of religion and faith in your life…there is a tremendous amount of religious wrestling and imagery in this collection.

Excerpt from “Crop Dusters”

…Our melon fields have been blessed by the Lord.
We and our canals are filth waiting to be turned to loaves.

The role of religion is one that is complicated, but complicated in the same way that it’s complicated for anyone who is raised religiously. I feel grateful to the church for rhyme and meter and reverence and music and sound.

I’m not a religious person myself, but I think the presence of it in this book is actually more about the ways in which religion and poverty go hand in hand. We live in Christian country and many poor agricultural rural parts of this country are extremely religious.

In rurality, everything is amplified.

Violence in these rural plains settings — like the brutality and anguish of the murder of Brandon Teena [the young trans man who inspired the film Boys Don’t Cry] in Nebraska — affect us in a way that it wouldn’t have set against the skyscrapers in New York City. We assume there will be violence in a city. It’s not that we’re desensitized…but. We have a false sense of security.

I am trying to parallel this idea of faith and whatever God is…and say it’s more resonant and more omnipotent in rural places because of the amount of actual space that faith can take up. But also in the fact that rural places mean poverty and poverty comes with an assumed sense of devote-ness. The world isn’t giving you anything…so that must be the lord’s way.

I want to show how religion and poverty inform and touch upon one another in a way that is so starkly American.

This poem feels like a kind of forgiveness, which again, feels like a return to a kind of faith, to a kind of religiosity. This idea of people formally and publicly receiving forgiveness for their sins…

Excerpt from “Saguaros”

Blythe rises in welts.
It pinches California and my mother,
the menstruating horizon between the two….

For truth, I say I remember
this mother, the mother of my nights
bringing home a jackrabbit,
pulling a tooth trap from its pelage to slit
the pregnant belly, knowing
the body to be a stasis and the desert a hell,
and the knife the only bridge between the two.

This entire book takes place in the desert. If we’re talking about the ways that landscape can highlight emotion…the desert is a place where you live or die. You better be prepared to inhabit this entirely uninhabitable place for humans.

And that’s a helluva thing to be brought into. But I still feel at home in the desert.

The desert is really volatile. It can change temperatures radically in just a few hours. It can be completely clear and full of light…and then suddenly pouring. Nobody does thunderstorms like the desert.

When insects sing in the desert it takes up everything. Frogs and crickets and coyote in the desert — just the sheer volume of it. There is so much out there that is able to yell that you haven’t seen! It’s not insignificant that the relationship between the speaker and mother is all about survival.

The odds are against your survival.

This collection is chock full of menses and menstruation. Why/how does all this uteral lining play such a poignant role in this collection? How does it — besides literally — dovetail with motherhood? With your own potentiality as Mother?

Excerpt from “Etiquette”

My granddaddy is a man of God.
He drove a busted truck, the color
of menses, through Death Valley.

As for menstruation…I think that these are visceral things we’re talking about and they deserve something visceral. There is unrealized potential in periods.

My mother was bedridden the entire 9 months and gave birth alone. It’s incredible to me. She wasn’t with my stepdad and my family didn’t even know that she was pregnant. She was very estranged from my maternal family. They were very WASPy and didn’t talk about things and I have the feeling that my mother was someone who DID talk about things…

Men. Holy moly. WHAT DO WE SAY ABOUT THE MEN IN OUR LIFE DEAR JULY. But this poem felt tender to me. It also felt like a kind of forgiveness in the way he was willing to try and make Blythe, California beautiful when you both knew full well it was a lie…

Excerpt from ‘Wake’

The Colorado River is getting big
in the britches, stepping on Blythe
like that. All wild goose and border.
Some country, hey kiddo?
The lie uplifts us. Our cotton
hasn’t been watered all year, and our towns
are blossoms of mosquitos.

I like American literature a good deal because of its spareness. The things we can say about it and the country in the voice of the public…the poems come out kind of plain, but that feels intuitive.

You are driving along…then suddenly the water is up to your door handle. You can’t do anything else. You just wait. You go to this place that is exceptionally dry — in front and behind, you think you see water. A flash flood waiting to wash you out.

We were trying so hard not to talk about it. About her.

So many of these poems tackle poverty and the potent (non)presence of food. I loved this powerful and tangled conflation of momentarily communing with God, accepting one’s fate while also ascending/transcending your being somehow…

Excerpt from “Cootie Catcher”

We ate the carp, carp is poor
folks’ food. We take communion
regularly. This is no different.

Riddle me this world. If God is the main farmer here…and he’s heading up agricultural production, which in turn is the machine that creates food…I guess then we turn that food back into his body and we eat it? But in this idea that the meek/poor inherit the earth…we end up eating ourselves.

My uncle was found dead where we went fishing. I became obsessed with this idea of something that seems harmless, but isn’t. We ate fish from those canals all the time…there is a cyclical nature of depending on God for food. Which may or not may come, but when it does we turn it into communion….

Memory, memory, memory. How deceptive, how haunting, how lovely and terrible it is to hold all of these stories behind our eyelids…

I often look at young beautiful photographs of my parents, and think, why why why couldn’t I have known you then? Look! You’re joyous. You’re light, buoyant — you are yet to be what I know you will become. The photographs just about break my fucking heart.

How much did you talk to family, look at photographs, revisit your old haunts to be haunted in writing this book….?

Excerpt from “Meditation on a Lost Photo Booth Picture”

…Though I am not there, I feel the center/ of there, of theirs. As if they knew,
preemptively, that they would not be able/ to see me in this unfamiliar place, at the desk of
my life,/ and thought to take this picture so that they, too, might participate. I know this/ is
self-indulgent. I know this is arrogant. I know/ these are stories I tell myself as I fall asleep,
fearing death or impermanence./…

In 2012 I gained access to this storage unit that had all of my mom’s belongings in it…when she died in 1999, my grieving stepdad just put all her things in there and locked it up.

I went out there during Thanksgiving 2012 and went through all these belongings and it was a profound experience of agony for me. Having lost her at such a young age there were so many ways in which I didn’t feel like I knew her. And in this way, I got to know — acutely — everything I had lost in losing her. It was devastating, but also an amazing gift. I had baby pictures. My mother was also a writer — she wrote me letters. And photos. And these things of her — I didn’t get too much but what I did get are my most prized possessions.

I had complex PTSD from childhood trauma…this book was written with the research of memory and experience. People in my family don’t know what happened — she was so estranged at the time.

I was looking at a photo when I wrote that poem.

Even though these poems are based in autobiography, they are actually about things much larger than me. My hope is that people who have been othered or don’t have class privilege or find a lot of solace in poetry or songs or hymns…people who have experienced trauma or not…that wide gamut of people will find themselves reflected in the work.

Ultimately it’s a book about triumph. It’s not a book about grief. It’s about the ways in which people triumph in the the things they are asked to do. By God. Or by society. In thinking about it, this isn’t so much my memoir or my story but one way of thinking about these very complex identity questions in relation to the impoverished American landscape.

What’s next on your radar…what are you keen to write or do next?

A book of micro essays, something similar to Ann Carson’s Short Talks.
I think people poo-poo prose poems…not out-loud, but…

Why is that you think?

I think because there’s this erroneous idea that it doesn’t make use of the one thing that poetry has uniquely going for it — i.e. white space. Efficiency. If you’re talking about prose poetry, how are you delineating — literally — between prose and poetry. The answer is, you don’t have to.

In the current media climate, writers often must rely on government assistance.

Wikimedia Commons

Erica Langston went on food stamps after finishing a yearlong teaching fellowship in spring 2014. Twenty hours a week working at a ranch — and 15 hours writing — couldn’t pay the bills for the full-time grad student. Langston, a freelance journalist who was previously a fellow at Audubon and Mother Jones, says she couldn’t have focused on writing without government assistance.

“That upsets a lot of people,” she tells me. “The ability for me to step back and say, ‘I’m going to focus on writing. I’m going to continue to pursue writing.’ I don’t know that I would have been able to do that without food stamps.”

Until fall 2015, Langston was among the handful of freelance writers across the country relying on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). While statistics on writers specifically are hard to find, an estimated 12% of freelancers in the Freelancers Union, a national labor organization, used public assistance in 2010. Langston, meanwhile, estimates that a quarter of writers in her circle have used or applied for SNAP.

And these numbers don’t even fully reveal the extent of the situation. Some freelancers are eligible for food stamps, but don’t use the benefits. Others are just a few steps away from qualifying.

The need for public assistance reveals how society fails to value professional writers and their economic struggles. As outlets ask freelancers to write for cheap or free and struggle to pay them on time, some are forced to turn to SNAP to get by.

Why Isn’t ‘Ebony’ Paying Its Black Writers?

Many factors fuel freelancers’ financial burden. The internet offers a glut of writing gigs but a dearth of good pay. Reporting on fields like human rights remains underfunded. Income is inconsistent. The “golden age for freelancing” in the 1990s has faded.

Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich saw her rates at one major publication drop by a third between 2004 and 2009. To boot, some outlets spend little on writers relative to their profits. According to Scott Carney, author of the Quick and Dirty Guide to Freelance Writing, the lucrative media conglomerate Condé Nast spends just .6% of its revenue on writers.

The fault lies with readers, too, who have come to expect access to news sites sans paywalls, essentially demanding that writers perform free labor for their enjoyment and edification.

Under such conditions, it’s little wonder that — according to a 2016 Contently survey — 35% of full-time freelancers make less than $20,000 a year.

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

And it’s not just that wages are low; at the same time, living costs are increasing rapidly. According to a recent report, more than 21 million Americans, a record number, spent a staggering third or more of their income on rent in 2014.

To take but one example of how these forces manifest for freelance journalists, Ryan McCready estimated on Venngage that a writer making $0.25 a word would have to write 13,340 words in a month — about the length of Macbeth — to live in Portland.

Troublingly, this paradigm in turn keeps marginalized people from being able to become freelance writers in the first place. Langston sees being able to live paycheck to paycheck and pursue her passion of writing as a privilege; she has a graduate degree and a partner to fall back on during tough months. Not everyone enjoys such luxuries.

As outlets ask freelancers to write for cheap or free and struggle to pay them on time, some are forced to turn to SNAP to get by.

In a cruel bit of irony, even stories about poverty are often written by the financially privileged—it turns out those in poverty are too poor to write about being poor. This not only pushes out perspectives that may have not been considered, it can drive away readers who assume the news is elitist.

In an article for the Guardian, Ehrenrich wrote:

“In the last few years, I’ve gotten to know a number of people who are at least as qualified writers as I am, especially when it comes to the subject of poverty, but who’ve been held back by their own poverty . . .

There are many thousands of . . . gifted journalists who want to address serious social issues but cannot afford to do so in a media environment that thrives by refusing to pay, or anywhere near adequately pay, its ‘content providers.’”

Veteran journalist Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, who worked as a parking lot attendant before reviewing books for the Washington Post for a decade, has seen firsthand how publishing shuts its doors on the under-privileged. He goes to writers’ conferences, he says, where he’s asked where he got his master’s degree; he has just a high school diploma. Magazine editors ask him to put $3,000 or $4,000 in reporting expenses on his credit card, so they can reimburse him — but he doesn’t have a credit card. Recently, a colleague asked him to Skype; he couldn’t drop $200 to fix his broken computer, so he asked her if they could talk on the phone instead. She almost seemed insulted, he notes. “And ironically, that person wanted to do a story about poverty.”

Another downside to low-paid freelance writing is that many are pushed away from crucial reporting because they can’t financially justify the work.

Veteran investigative journalist Christopher D. Cook says he started mixing contract writing with editing and teaching to get by. This diverse income keeps him off the food stamps he once relied upon — but it also means he’s unable to do as much investigative work as he once did.

“That’s a terrible position for society to be in, where it’s not economically feasible to have investigative reporting,” says Cook. “It’s central to our society and our democracy to have people be able to survive as journalists.”

When Predators Exploit Freelance Writers

It looks like this issue will only become more dire in the coming years; as experts expect half of the U.S. workforce to freelance in some capacity by 2020, the Trump budget plans to cut SNAP by $190 billion over the next decade.

So what can be done to support writers and their work?

Carney thinks that freelancers could do more to advocate for themselves, to negotiate a fair, well-paying contract once their story’s accepted. After going without health insurance for a decade, and at times having $12 in his bank account, he says valuing his own work helped him reach middle class.

“The world isn’t essentially fair. You get more if you fight for more,” he says. “If freelancers are willing to sell themselves for pennies on the dollar, then magazines are happy to take advantage of that.”

I’m Too Busy Being Poor To Be Creative

But of course, real progress can’t happen without changes to the system itself. Some suggest safety nets like guaranteed health-care coverage, a universal pension, and more grants for struggling freelancers. Currently, PEN America is among the few groups that offer emergency funding to writers.

Others say freelancers should unionize, or online outlets should experiment more with new revenue streams to have money to pay their writers more.

Workers’ rights attorney Paula Brantner adds that freelancers should be able to file wage claims, like employees. They should have a remedy beyond suing in small claims court if they aren’t paid for the work they do.

And Wellington thinks the government should offer everyone who makes, say, $25,000 or less annually a food allowance.

At the same time, we need to talk more candidly about the financial realities of freelance writing, and work toward the crucial de-stigmatization of poverty.

We need to talk more candidly about the financial realities of freelance writing.

For freelancers like Erica Langston, food stamps aren’t part of a lifetime of poverty, and due to lingering societal stigmas, it can be tempting to try to create distance from the chronically impoverished. This reveals a deep-seated classism that holds both the publishing industry and society back.

In 2015, Langston tried to use her electronic benefit transfer card at the grocery store, but the company had just changed the system, and the clerk had to put it in manually.

“I felt so uncomfortable in that moment. I was holding up the line. I handed over my food stamp card. I don’t know if anyone noticed. I don’t know if anyone gave a shit. But I had this internalized feeling that I was being judged because of that. And I even felt guilty because I wanted to explain in that moment, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. This is just temporary . . . ’

The fact that I would feel the need to explain that says a lot about the system in general. I mean, it’s temporary for me, but it’s not temporary for some people, right?”

Langston is one of many freelance writers who remain a step away from struggling to put dinner on the table. Others already can’t feed themselves. As the gig economy rises and government assistance wanes, will companies find a way to meet independent contractors’ basic needs?

And more importantly, what will happen to media if they don’t?

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-insidious-planning-that-goes-into-gentrification-7c31fda84150/ Sat, 14 Oct 2017 12:41:01 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3991 Read more]]> This shit doesn’t happen overnight.

by Melissa Chadburn

Cold brews and fourteen-dollar raw juice joints and white folks everywhere; in what seems like a blink of an eye, your neighborhood has changed completely.

But, despite how abrupt it can feel, gentrification doesn’t happen overnight.

Gentrification happens after months, and sometimes even years, of preparation — crafted in the offices of real estate moguls and in the halls of city government.

New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York have gentrified not because of the wishes of a million hipsters, but because of just a few hundred politicians, planners, and heads of corporations.

New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York have gentrified not because of the wishes of a million hipsters, but because of just a few hundred politicians, planners, and heads of corporations.
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It’s difficult to understand when it begins and how it all plays out. Often, areas that are gentrified were neglected for so long by the majority of the city that it can seem to be a sudden awakening.

But when transportation provides access from these once-forgotten neighborhoods to areas with more investment, and the place becomes teeming with young, (mostly) white Millennials it becomes hard to ignore.

So, I wanted to break this process down in a way that clearly breaks down the big, overwhelming process of gentrification and how it happens. Check out the four stages below.

Stage 1: Hobbyists and People Priced Out of Their Community Scan For Tax Liens

The more public resources taken away from a community, the more profitable it is to gentrify.

For example, I’m a Gen Xer and my partner is a Baby Boomer and if we want to retire and own property there’s no way we can afford it in Los Angeles.

So we may move to the next, more affordable community over to buy property. It’s the revolving door of gentrification — we were pushed out of our community and will become gentrifiers in the next.

Every city has a map of tax-data, homes, and property that are being auctioned away due to outstanding taxes owed.

Punch in a zip code and you could pinpoint blocks that are the next communities to be gentrified, which usually means buildings are in disrepair (so they could be bought cheap) and it’s close to other gentrified areas (so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for gentrifiers to move in).

Stage 2: Local Governments Contract With A PR Firm

This concept of cities branding themselves began in the ‘80’s when Reagan cut funding for public housing and transportation. Those cuts forced cities to turn to alternative sources of funding, in particular bonds, to finance things such as public transit and road repair.

But not just anyone can issue a bond — governments first had to prove they’d be able to pay them back.

And there are only two entities that decide if a government or company is capable of paying back a bond: Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s rating agencies.

These entities would downgrade the rating of any government with high spending (basic social safety net) and not enough income (i.e. too many poor people).

To increase their credit ratings, cities were forced into becoming more entrepreneurial in a short period of time. They hired city managers and public relations teams in a quest to turn themselves into profitable entities — as if cities were corporations.

To increase credit ratings, cities hired city managers and public relations teams in a quest to turn themselves into profitable entities — as if cities were corporations.
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This remains very much a part of one of the first steps gentrification: when people from higher income neighborhoods and hobbyists begin buying up real estate. This is the phase when the media might write an article about how this neighborhood is the next hot new thing or even the “next Williamsburg.”

You may have seen these deplorable billboards that are posted throughout Detroit:

Detroit is 83% Black, but the new Detroit that gets all the attention in the press is overwhelmingly white, which brings us to…

Stage 3: Cities Contract With Developers To Tap Into That Gen Y Skrilla

Ever since the advertising agency Barkley put out a report that the direct spending power of millennials is expected to reach $200 billion, cities have been partnering with retail developers to bring in mixed-use projects.

Mayor of Somerville, Mass. negotiated with the Developer of Reality Investment Trust in Maryland to build Assembly Row, 2100 apartments and condos, 1.75 million square feet of office space, and 500,000 square feet of space dedicated to retail.

Before this, Assembly Square was the least developed area of the city. After the flight of manufacturing in Somerville, it was free of housing and cut off from the rest of the city.

Ever since a report projected that the direct spending power of millennials is expected to reach $200 billion, cities have been partnering with retail developers to bring in mixed-use projects.
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This was by far one of the more affordable and diverse areas of the elite Eastern state housing for people who worked in property services and retail at one of the prestigious nearby colleges. Today the median age of residents living within a mile is 35 and within five miles it is 33.

Finally, with new revenue coming in, city mayors forge deeper relationships with developers, further privatizing public services. This privatization allocates public funding away from much-needed infrastructures such as transportation, education, and more.

For example, Dan Gilbert, a downtown Detroit investor and the guy who owns the development company that made the above billboard, developed a security force that patrols downtown Detroit and monitors more than 500 security cameras attached to Rock Venture’s buildings.

Gilbert’s security, along with a police force privately funded by Wayne University in Midtown, has become a police shadow agency, ensuring that low-level offenses in Detroit’s gentrified core remain at a minimum.

Wayne State, Detroit’s main university, has taken security one step further by certifying sixty officers with the state so that they can perform the same functions as real police. Now 60% of calls within Midtown are answered by Wayne State’s patrol.

The average response time in Midtown is ninety seconds. In the rest of Detroit, it can be up to an hour, even for deadly crimes. What does this say about how little we value poor and/or Black bodies of Detroit?

Stage 4: Neighborhoods Are Affordable Only To The Global Elite (#MissionGentrification Accomplished)

The results: buildings are no longer meant to house regular people and instead house millionaires and billionaires.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the Big Apple.

A New York Times investigation found that 50% of apartments are vacant for the majority of each year.

In other words, the fourth and last phase of gentrification goes beyond neighborhoods being more friendly to money than to people — they cease being places where one can live a normal life and become luxury commodities.

Perhaps the worst symptoms of all this planning are when the displaced individuals of gentrification see their old neighborhoods plastered on billboards and in advertisements — the message that’s touted: this place has value now.

A flipside to this is that many Americans still don’t accept the existence of extreme racism and extreme poverty in this country.

In New York City, 50% of apartments are vacant for the majority of each year.
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Usually, the idea that there are whole groups of people whose rights and lives are violated and threatened on a daily basis occurs to many Americans only in moments of national trauma.

For example, a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the lead story in the post-Katrina issue of Newsweek deemed New Orleans’ “forgotten” people “The Other America.”

Four days after Hurricane Katrina, Michael Brown, then-director of FEMA explained the disastrous emergency response by saying: “The American people don’t understand how fascinating and unusual this is — is that we’re seeing people that we didn’t know exist that suddenly are showing up on bridges or parts of the interstate that aren’t inundated.”

In order to curb gentrification and other types of systemic oppression, society must first recognize the humanity of those most deeply disenfranchised by these systems, otherwise, they might never be dismantled.

This story originally appeared on Everyday Feminism. Republished here with permission.

By Nancy Kwak

Tokyo, London, New York, Paris, Manila. Few would think of Manila atop a list of the 21st century’s premiere cities. Nor would most think of the Philippine capital as a critical node in the global economy. Yet Manila is indisputably at the centre of some of the most important urban trends of the past half-century: it is the world’s most densely populated city, and continues to grow at an exponential pace. It serves as the headquarters to one of the fastest growing economies in the world (10th in 2017, according to the World Bank). Filipinos, especially residents of Manila, travel all over the world as nurses, nannies, construction workers and sailors. They provide the mass labour fueling the global service economy.

In our urbanizing world, Manila, and a few other rapidly growing world cities, are not only just helpful in understanding how global cities work; they are indispensable.

Manila has long served as a hub connecting regional, colonial and global economies. The city sits on the coast of Manila Bay at the mouth of the Pasig River; it is low-lying, fairly flat in topography, and woven through with estuaries. Not surprising given seasonal monsoons and tropical cyclones, Manilans often have to cope with devastating floods. The most striking aspect of life in Manila, however, lies not in physical attributes but rather in the legal status of the communities living above and around these waterways. For the residents of this city of nearly two million, ‘informality’ is an all-encompassing, defining feature of everyday life in the capital.

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The term ‘informality’ is sometimes conceptualized as a periphery or a place of exclusion, but it is more accurate to define it simply as an absence of government control, management, or knowledge over an area.
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The term ‘informality’ is sometimes conceptualized as a periphery or a place of exclusion, but it is more accurate to define it simply as an absence of government control, management, or knowledge over an area. A city can be predominantly informal with lively black markets and mostly unregulated labour and housing. Informality does not have to occur on the margins of everyday life. In Manila, informality is both ubiquitous and poorly understood; statistics are widely varying and erratically collected. The government estimated in 2010 that roughly one in five residents of Metro Manila lived in housing about which the government kept few records and over which it had little authority. The number has most likely grown.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s current Informal City project offers some estimates. According to a recent report, 40 to 80% of Filipino residents work in the informal economy. Meanwhile, informal settlements are everywhere apparent, with self-built structures lining the waterways and filling nearly every available space in the city, and with informal settlers working in seemingly every aspect of the urban economy.

Even a casual look at Manila, and other bourgeoning global cities, shows that the functioning of the urban economy depends on informality. Informality allows workers to subsist on marginal incomes. Informality provides homes where the formal market does not. Despite or perhaps because of their meagre pay, these workers’ role in the global service economy is anything but marginal. A shoe repairman sets up a roadside station where he fixes the shoes of the restaurant worker who in turn serves food to visiting investors and local businesspeople. Workers rest in informal settlements before getting up to drive the jeepneys that transport young men and women inexpensively to Makati’s call centers. There, they will answer questions and complaints from customers of global firms headquartered in New York, London, and more. All for a low wage. Informality provides the foundation for local and global profits.

Manila helps us to understand how informality grew into a prevalent way of life in some cities, and an integral component of the global economy. In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, poor rural migrants flooded into Manila, in search of work and food. For these desperate newcomers, land-use rights mattered much more than land titles. Rural migrants built their own shelter on unoccupied land in the city, whether along railroad tracks, extending on stilts over waterways, or under bridges, and they constructed a sense of ownership that included the right to lease and sublease their units.

Many ultimately set up their homes near or on Manila Bay in the northern district of Tondo — a community of some 180,000 residents by the early 1970s. Residents did not deny the lack of government recognition for their land rights. Nonetheless, they still felt a sense of ownership, as evidenced in Zone One Tondo Organization’s explanation for resident motives when staying in unserviced homes in 1973: ‘the people prefer to live in a very small barung-barong [shanty] that is their own rather than rent a place’.

Those In Poverty: You Aren’t Responsible For Making Your Family Comfortable

The former president Ferdinand Marcos understood informality. He understood migrants’ claims to property rights; in fact, he tried to neutralize the political power of Tondo residents by defining informality in opposition to formal, state-regulated spaces. In 1975, Marcos issued a presidential decree criminalizing ‘squatters’ and ‘squatting’ as a ‘nefarious’ action punishable by incarceration and/or fines. In this way, the Philippine government implemented a clear legal dichotomy — formal versus informal, legitimate versus squatting. It did so in an attempt to strengthen the power of the state while undermining the political power of poor people who might oppose the ruling class. Put simply, the state created informality.

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Governments around the world build a divide between formal and informal residents, for historical and political reasons.
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The Philippine government is not unique in building a divide between formal and informal. Governments around the world do likewise, and for reasons historical and political. International advisors in United Nations technical assistance missions and U.S. foreign-aid programs advise Kenya, South Africa, Thailand, Peru, the Philippines and other so-called ‘developing’ countries to do so. These well-meaning technocrats, planners, housing experts and international development experts often find the manner and pace of urbanization in these cities unruly and confusing. So they urge national governments to foster order by adopting or reinstituting vigorous land surveying and titling programs. If individuals owned land, that land would become property — a site of investment and a potential source of profit. Regularized records would facilitate global investment. To Western development specialists, this is order, progress, modernity.

Development technocrats assure governments that fostering a class of property owners also means a class of citizens invested in political stability. Their message of stability appeals to governments concerned about their own security. Manila City Council members, for example, repeatedly requested advice from William Levitt, a U.S. property developer who quipped in 1948: ‘No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.’

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People living and working in these spaces have for decades contended with efforts to, essentially, delegitimize their economic activity and weaken them politically.
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People living and working in these spaces have for decades contended with efforts to, essentially, delegitimize their economic activity and weaken them politically. Informal dwellers have no illusions about their marginalization in the global city. ‘They think we are garbage people,’ one taxi driver and Tondo resident observed bitterly. And then, with a bark of laughter, he added: ‘Unless it is time for an election!’

This originally appeared on Aeon. Republished here with permission under Creative Commons.

America’s Racial Wealth Divide Is Worse Than Expected And Deepening Under Trump

The future existence of the middle-class hinges on whether we reverse the trends of growing racial economic inequality.

Pixabay

By Steven Rosenfeld

America is heading toward “a racial and economic apartheid state.” As the country becomes more diverse, today’s wealth gaps between whites and non-whites are poised to grow unless government policies helping people build personal wealth are reformed.

That is the takeaway from a dramatic new report, “The Road to Zero Wealth,” co-authored by the Institute for Policy Studies and Prosperity Now. It finds America’s racial wealth gap is larger than thought and deepening. Ironically, the report comes as working-class whites who feel economically adrift helped elect a president and Congress to prioritize their community — as opposed to reviving everyone in a sinking middle class.

Working-class whites who feel economically adrift helped elect a president and Congress to prioritize their community — as opposed to reviving everyone in a sinking middle class.

“We don’t know how to make sense of the two stories happening at the same time,” said Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, and one of the report’s four co-authors. “One is overall inequality, which is happening to the bottom half of wage earners [including whites]. And then there’s the story of the legacy of racism and wealth and asset building, which is a longer story going back centuries. Both these things exist at the same time.”

He adds:

“We’re missing the ways in which the overall inequalities that are affecting a lot of white working-class people are supercharging these racial wealth divides. So you have a white working class that legitimately feels like they have been betrayed or left behind, and they can’t hear the story of the racial dimensions of this because they are feeling their own pain. So how do we recognize that those two stories exist and they are intertwined and connected? And a lot of times, the solutions would be good for everyone who has been left out — free education would be a good thing; raising the minimum wage would help all kinds of low-wage workers.”

The report tells a stark story by using a new way to measure personal wealth — it doesn’t count assets that fall in value like cars and household appliances.

“A disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth is held in white hands, while households of color own a shrinking slice of the proverbial pie,” it said. “Today, this translates into a racial wealth divide in which the median net worth of black and Latino families stands at just $11,000 and $14,000, respectively — a fraction of the $134,000 owned by the median white family. Even more disturbing is that when consumer durable goods such as automobiles, electronics and furniture are subtracted, median wealth for black and Latino families drops to $1,700 and $2,000, respectively, compared to $116,800 for white households.”

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The authors project forward, to the years of the next presidential election, and further down the line to the early 2040s, when non-whites will become the majority of the country’s population. Looking to the near future, the racial wealth gap is poised to grow.

“By 2020, if current trends continue as they have been, black and Latino households at the median are on track to see their wealth decline by 17% and 12% from where they respectively stood in 2013,” the report said. “By then, median white households would see their wealth rise by an additional three percent over today’s levels. In other words, at a time when it’s projected that children of color will make up most of children in the country, median white households are on track to own 86 and 68 times more wealth, respectively, than black and Latino households.”

“Current trends suggest that by 2024, median black household wealth will have declined by a total of about 30% from where it stands today,” the report continued. “In that same timeframe, the median Latino family can expect to see their net worth decline by a total of 20% over today’s levels. By then, median white household wealth will have increased by about five percent over today’s levels.”

There are many reasons why this is happening. Going back nearly 75 years, the federal government prioritized policies favoring home ownership for whites but not for non-whites. One example from the post-World War II years is the government would not make home loans to black veterans. That policy, and others, such as making mortgage interest rates tax deductible, gave an edge to families with a higher foothold on the economic ladder.

However, the election of President Trump and the GOP Congress is deepening these long-simmering structural factors because the administration is shifting resources up the economic ladder or removing protections that kept lower- and middle-class people from slipping down.

The election of President Trump and the GOP Congress is deepening long-simmering structural factors.

“The racial wealth divide is not a new phenomenon, nor can a single presidential administration or other policymaking body expect to ameliorate the racial wealth divide overnight,” the report says.

“However, since the inauguration of President Trump in early 2017, two phenomena give cause for concern that the trends of the past 30 years might become even more pronounced in the near future. First, less attention has been paid to the growing racial wealth divide compared to previous administrations. Second and more alarmingly, there have been a bevy of policies proposed or championed by President Trump — from healthcare to immigration to housing and financial services reform — that would inevitably and exponentially exacerbate racial wealth inequality.”

The report poignantly notes that the reasons for inequality in America have little to do with the work ethic espoused by the political right.

It continued:

“While some falsely argue that this racial wealth divide stems from choices made by individuals and communities, the facts tell a different story. Recent research shows that the racial wealth divide persists across all levels of educational attainment and family structures, seriously diminishing the ‘personal choices’ argument. Case in point? White high school dropouts own more wealth than black and Latino college graduates. Furthermore, single-parent white households own more wealth than two-parent black households.”

Further, the report says the country is on a precipice, and unless government policies — at the federal and state level — do not do more to bolster the middle class, regardless of its racial composition, the middle-class will keep shrinking and disappear, creating “a racial and economic apartheid state.”

“To claim that the future existence of the middle-class hinges on whether we reverse the trends of growing racial economic inequality is by no means an exaggeration,” the report said. “Indeed, the rise of a once-strong American middle class didn’t happen on its own. Rather, it required a healthy, vibrant economy, including significant investments in Americans’ ability to build lasting financial security, such as through homeownership, higher education and transportation, all of which enable families to build wealth.”

Does Seattle Have The Solution For America’s Income Inequality?

“However, these policy investments haven’t had a lasting positive effect on the middle class because most often, they were intentionally directed at white communities and away from communities of color,” the report continued. “Although the intentional exclusion of communities of color from opportunities to build wealth is a morally repugnant feature of American history, it remained economically viable at a time when the vast majority of our populace was white. As we look ahead to a time when people of color will comprise the majority of the population, however, we are committing economic suicide if we continue believing that we can exclude the majority of the country from opportunities to invest in the future.”

Collins, a co-author, said the solutions start with understanding that America’s economic woes traverse racial lines — and shouldn’t pit struggling whites and non-whites against each other. But the solutions also include acknowledging and reversing many decades of institutional racism.

The solutions to America’s economic woes include acknowledging and reversing many decades of institutional racism.

“I think it is owning up to these two dynamics,” he said. “But then if we want to address the racial wealth divide, we have to understand that it has its own historic dynamics. We, in the report, say you should have a racial wealth audit. Any [government] policy that we think will be good for everyone, let’s just not assume that if it’s a universal approach. Let’s make sure, let’s look at how it affects the racial wealth divide.”

Collins also said that the top 20% of wage earners — disproportionately whites living in large homes in better-off suburbs, who send their kids to private schools and work in upper echelons in corporate America, finance, medicine and law — should surrender some of the government subsidies they receive to lift people below them.

The top 20% of wage earners should surrender some of the government subsidies they receive to lift people below them.

“We also talk about this upside-down subsidy thing,” he said. “We already spend $600 billion-plus helping people build wealth in this country. But it’s mostly going to the top 20% of the already-haves. So just reversing some of those upside-down wealth-building subsidies would be a really good start, and should be politically more acceptable. You’re not looking at new revenue. Look at the resources we are already using to help encourage home ownership [such as the mortgage interest deduction], which is mostly going to people who already have big houses and two of them.”

Collins said he and others will try to raise these issues when Congress turns to tax reform this fall. But he is not optimistic about the Republicans in Washington. Instead, he looks toward state governments for near-term progress.

“We are trying to make that an issue, like let’s look at the upside-down subsidies,” he said. “I guess I don’t have any short-term optimism about the national picture. I do think people can start to pilot some of these things in states. It goes to the Dream Hoarders book.”

“That’s where you have the interesting politics of the top 20% who benefit from all these tax breaks and subsidies,” Collins said. “If you get that constituency to recognize that they are a barrier to greater equity and maybe they shouldn’t be getting those levels of subsidies. We see that discussion happening in a lot more places than two years ago.”

This article originally appeared on AlterNet. Republished here with permission.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/bad-advice-on-the-bougie-butt-kings-of-american-capitalism-e04b55476a6e/ Tue, 22 Aug 2017 21:31:44 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=4590 Read more]]> Welcome to our latest Bad Advice column! Stay tuned every Tuesday for more terrible guidance based on actual letters.

“Because of circumstances beyond my control, fate, and bad timing, I am underemployed and having to use the local food bank to help supplement my family’s grocery needs. I only go once a month and only take what we can use. While having to deal with my own embarrassment and shame, I find myself resentful of the other people there.

I get extremely angry when noticing people with expensive accessories and clothes vying for a limited number of resources, when I have had to sell pretty much everything I own just to stay in my apartment and keep my daughter in clothes and shoes. How can they justify coming for free food or other amenities while still owning an iPad, $500 purse, and more jewelry than Mr. T?

I am trying to contain my jealousy and downright envy, but it is difficult.

How can I avail myself of features that I need and still be civil? This is eating at me. I feel so guilty judging the others that I get nauseated when it is time for my trip. This is not me and I do not know where this attitude is coming from.”

— Via “Dear Prudence,” Slate, 15 August 2017

Dear Resentment,

There are two kinds of poor people: You, a good poor person who is experiencing poverty for reasons that only good people experience poverty, and the gaudily outfitted charlatans at the food pantry who have the bad kind of poorness that bad people who wear jewelry get. You are the only person on earth who has ever needed to use a food bank because of circumstances beyond your control, fate, and bad timing. Everybody else is at the food bank because they are foolish squanderers made of greed and avarice and personally derive joy from stealing food from your children. It’s not out of the bounds of reason to consider the fact that the entire food bank itself might have been constructed by people with nice purses specifically to troll you.

You can tell everything you need to know about another person’s entire financial situation by evaluating the accessories they wear, none of which could have been gifted, obtained secondhand, or purchased affordably as well-crafted imitations. It definitely does not behoove the bougie-butt kings of American heteropatriarchal capitalism to have the lowest-income people fighting each other over low-sodium cream of chicken soup instead of mutually supporting each other in an effort to dismantle the classist sociological strata that oppresses all but the richest among us, so it’s more likely that you’re the only person at the food bank who isn’t 100000% buck wild over the whole situation. What a wacky universe we would live in if this were just a super fucked-up culture that made people feel miserably ashamed of poverty and incentivized judgmental competition over basic necessities, instead of this just being another case of You vs. The Bad Poors.

“My wife has a diminishing sex drive and now continually making excuses as to why it is not a good time to be intimate. I am 69 and she is 61. She had breast cancer six years ago and this precludes her taking medication that may help. Do you have any advice — other than my taking on a discreet lover?”

— Via “Sexual Healing,” The Guardian, 31 July 2017

Dear 69-year-old,

The last thing you want to do is have a series of honest conversations with your wife about her sexual needs, your sexual needs, and how or whether you can mutually satisfy your disparate sexual needs as two respectful partners who wish for the other to experience their twilight years with joy and comfort. No indeed, taking a discreet lover is your only and best option. Nothing could be wiser or more necessary. A discreet lover is the sole solution to your problem. It’s not just a good idea, it’s imperative that you obtain a discreet lover instead of doing literally anything else.

“I’ve been dating this certain girl for eight months, and all of sudden she has gotten to where she now wants to hold hands in public. She is 22 and I am 24. Isn’t holding hands in public a little juvenile?”

— Via “Ask Willie D.,” Houston Press, 10 August 2017

Dear Holding Hands,

You’re young, so you may not know this yet: Women, who tend to be very childlike and frivolous, are prone to escalating relationships, often pressuring men to make extreme commitments before they’re ready. Holding hands in public after eight months of dating really puts you on the spot; it’s a lot to ask of a young man who’s just hoping to play the field and have a little fun before settling down into something more serious. Regardless, displays of affection have objective meanings on a universal scale of maturity understood and agreed upon by everyone, it seems, except for your girlfriend. Tell this young lady in no uncertain terms that you do not want to look like some kind of silly baby man by holding her hand at the mall; instead, settle down at the food court with your financial portfolio and spend a few responsible hours diversifying your investments together like the grown-ass adults you are.

The brownstone I lived in for eight months in 2009 and 2010 had few amenities — the building often smelled like leaking pipes, the carpets were threadbare in many places, and the steam heater in the corner was completely out of my control, resulting in quite a few freezing mornings and sweltering nights. It did, however, have a gas stove and oven which, the landlord had told me, was pretty new and “worked great.”

Unfortunately, everything else in the unit was electric, which meant that I’d need to set up separate utility accounts and pay for the gas every month just to run the stove and range.

“It’s like $10 to turn it on and then another $20-$30 per month depending on how much you use it,” she explained.

Yeah, I’m just not going to do that, then, I thought, doing the math in my head.

At that point, $30 was just a little bit less than my take-home after a day of making lattes, which is what I was doing every day that I wasn’t at my public radio internship. The rent on the apartment — which was the least expensive I could find in Seattle — was already going to cost well more than half of my monthly income. With student loan payments to top it off, I barely had living expenses to speak of, and the extra money I’d spend on the gas just didn’t seem worth it.

This wasn’t my first go-round with poverty: We grew up without much money, and I supported myself through college. But after graduation — when the student loan envelopes started showing up and I had to move out of my inexpensive college town to a city that actually had jobs — the situation was dire. But I knew how to handle it.

Every month, I’d scrutinize my budget, looking for things to trim or ways to increase my earnings.

I moonlit as a cocktail waitress. I considered selling plasma (again), but the bus ride to the clinic was too long to fit into my days. I didn’t have a car or health care (or a stove). I picked up odd jobs on Craigslist, receiving cash under the table for nights of cocktailing or working as a cater waiter. I visited food banks. I never bought clothing. I stopped shaving to save money on razors.

Eventually, I was able to get a slightly more lucrative job, began piling on freelance work, and basically never looked back.

I am very, very confident that I did everything in my power to provide myself the best life possible as a young adult, and that the choices I made were the correct choices. My life now would indicate that that’s the case. And still, without fail, when I tell someone or write about that time in my life, I’m met with a cascade of advice.

I am very, very confident that I did everything in my power to provide myself the best life possible as a young adult, and that the choices I made were the correct choices.

Well-meaning people who have never been poor are convinced that they know what I should have done. That subtle tweaks to my budget could somehow stretch my $9.50 per hour. I should have gotten a roommate. I should have lived somewhere cheaper. I should have found a better job.

Anyone who’s ever lived in poverty has probably had this experience.

In the U.S., we have become so accepting of the fact that poverty is not a symptom of a grossly unequal economy, or the result of numerous systemic failures, or the product of years of trickle-down economics, but instead, that the only thing standing between a poor person and the life of their dreams is their own decisions, their own choices, and their own failures.

This is why I would advise any person whose immediate reaction upon hearing about a friend, relative, or stranger on the Internet who is living in poverty is to offer unsolicited advice to hold their tongue (or fingers), at least long enough to consider what other forces contribute to poverty and how their “help” may actually be insulting, incorrect, and downright damaging.

In the U.S., we have become so accepting of the fact that poverty is not a symptom … but instead, that the only thing standing between a poor person and the life of their dreams is their own decisions, their own choices, and their own failures.

The Most Common Advice Doesn’t Add Up

The over-simplification of poverty is often apparent in the advice that gets disseminated by people who have money and companies who make money off of other people’s financial predicaments.

Earlier this year, an infographic circled around which underscored this fact. Created by a company called InvestmentZen, the infographic showed how to “build wealth on the minimum wage.”

Aside from the fact that it contained numerous logistical issues — it used the federal minimum wage, which isn’t accurate in most states, either because their wage is higher or lower due to tip-crediting — the graphic also seemed to be concerned about moralizing the decisions of poor people and less about actually helping anyone.

Advice from the graphic included “learning skills on YouTube,” only eating in-season produce, and remembering that “the best things in life are free.”

“You can make excuses, or you can do something about it,” the graphic chided. “It’s your choice to make.”

Twitter instantly took it to task; the response was so heated that it eventually led one of the men responsible for circulating to issue a retraction, calling many of the criticisms “fair.”

I suspect that the graphic was so easily mocked because the advice it selected was familiar. Despite the myriad systemic reasons that many people live in poverty, there are a handful of “tips” that well-meaning (most of the time) folks recycle with alarming regularity.

Despite the myriad systemic reasons that many people live in poverty, there are a handful of “tips” that well-meaning (most of the time) folks recycle with alarming regularity.

Move somewhere cheaper. Buy in bulk. Get rid of your car. Get a roommate. Eat out less.

These changes seem simple — if you just spent less money on groceries, you’d have more money! If you didn’t have a car, you could save hundreds on car insurance! — but they fail to take into account one crucial element of humanity and existence: The dollar amount of a thing doesn’t fully capture the value of it.

Most people who live in poverty are working jobs where their income is determined by how many hours they can spend on the job, which often don’t fall within typical commuting hours, and often run well over forty hours per week.

When you’re poor, your time — especially your free time — is extremely precious. And many of the prescribed tips for saving money cut into that free time, make it less enjoyable, or might even actively cost more money in the short term.

I’ve written before about the actual cost of moving — renting a truck, putting down a deposit, the financial hit of taking time off work to move — but recommending that someone relocate their entire life to save on rent also neglects to account for the real value of living in a place with a support system.

Whether it’s a family by birth or by choice, living near people you know offers a sense of responsibility and place — not to mention a couch to crash on if you get evicted and the potential for free childcare or other assistance.

Whether it’s a family by birth or by choice, living near people you know offers a sense of responsibility and place — not to mention a couch to crash on if you get evicted and the potential for free childcare or other assistance.

To illustrate this point, let’s use another common tip: giving up a car.

Access to transit is one of the single biggest investments that communities can make to help people get out of poverty. But overwhelmingly, transit systems are failing poor people. And for seniors or disabled people, taking the bus may be even more difficult if cities and transit authorities don’t accommodate for various mobility, vision, or hearing impairments.

Which means that the cost (both figurative and literal) of giving up a car might be steeper than keeping it. Which means that even if a person makes the choice to save money by riding the bus, the bus may not be there for them.

There’s also the issue of time and convenience, particularly if you live in a smaller city, which tend to have much spottier bus service.

We can look at it like this: Estimated cost of owning a car over a year: about $725 per month, according to AAA. That’s a lot, but compared to riding the bus (because let’s assume a person doesn’t have the upfront cash for a bike, a lock, and the gear they might need to commute in all weather), it’s not really.

Where I live, it costs about $5 per day to commute via bus, assuming I’m traveling inside the city and just going to work and back using a single method of transit. Multiply that by five days per week (though most people working minimum wage work more than that), and it’s about $100 per month. That’s still less than $725 — until you account for:

Two hours of commuting compared to thirty minutes of commuting (at $13/hour): $19.50/day in lost income, or $390 per month.

Cost of an extra hour of childcare to account for the commute time (at $13/hour, as well): $260 per month

The cost of using the bus for weekly grocery trips (which limit the choices a person has and reduces the ability to buy in bulk, another favorite piece of advice for people with means to give to poor people) and the occasional other appointment: about $50 per month.

Which equals $800 — and doesn’t take into account the fact that grocery shopping by bus is not ideal for someone with kids in tow. Additionally, taking the bus to get groceries makes it less likely that a person can comparison shop, visit multiple stores for ultimate savings, and purchase products that are less easy to carry, like fresh produce or bulk items.

You can also see from this example how interconnected so many of these pieces of advice are.

Get rid of your car” is a fine piece of advice in a vacuum, but when it’s coupled with “drive for Uber to make extra money,” you’ve now prescribed something that’s literally impossible. “Spend less on groceries” is fine on its own, but if you’re also recommending that someone switch to commuting by bike or bus and move to a less dense place with fewer food choices, you’ve now quadrupled the daily difficulty of their life.

And that has a real cost, even if it’s not tangible or numeric.

This, I think, is truly at the heart of the advice we tend to offer poor people: It implicitly says that we believe that they should be willing and able to exchange their own time on earth, comfort, happiness, and even physical health and safety just to scrape by.

Being Poor Is Really Expensive

The assumption that “simple advice” can dramatically change a person’s economic outlook assumes that a person’s poverty is solely the result of personal failings, rather than very real and costly systems of oppression, including legacy poverty, systemic racism, mass incarceration, punitive immigration policies, medical debt, and more.

Regardless of the personal choices a family might make to save money, there are some unavoidable costs that are baked into our financial and social systems.

Overdraft fees, late fees on missed bills, high-interest credit card fees, and payday lenders are just a few ways that poverty begets higher expenses. The average payday loan borrower — who is usually short just a few hundred dollars between paychecks — ends up paying more than 300% interest on their initial amount.

These companies make billions each year by offering people a necessary service that costs them an outrageously inflated price.

Banks also find ways to capitalize on people without money. Many checking accounts require that a person carry a minimum balance — and fine customers for every month that they don’t meet the requirement. And that’s assuming a person even uses a bank! An estimated 8% of Americans don’t use a bank, largely due to their low monthly income. As a result, they pay more money in fees at check cashing businesses or by using prepaid debit cards.

There are hundreds of small ways that being cash-poor can make it harder to save.

In addition to these fees and fines, a lack of funds in-hand can also mean paying more for services and products. Whether it’s putting charges on a credit card and paying interest or buying in smaller denominations (and thus paying more per unit), there are hundreds of small ways that being cash-poor can make it harder to save.

The Washington Post reported on a study on this subject:

When [researchers] compared households with similar consumption rates shopping at comparable stores — and controlling for two-ply TP — they found that the poor were less likely than wealthier households to buy bigger packages, or to time their purchases to take advantage of sales. By failing to do so, they paid about 5.9% more per sheet of toilet paper — a little less than what they saved by buying cheaper brands in the first place (8.8%).

Poor folks don’t buy single-use items because they never thought about buying in bulk — it’s often because they literally don’t have the money to do so, or don’t have a way to get bulk items home.

Our broken immigration system is also responsible for trapping new Americans (and their children) in low-income jobs, substandard housing, and legitimately dangerous transportation and work situations — all of which have a compounding effect on poverty.

Each year, immigrants pay billions into our tax coffers, only to get the short end of the economic stick.

New Americans are less likely to report wage theft, may experience housing discrimination, and of course, often have to pay massive sums of money to travel, bring relatives to the county, and send money back to their nation of origin.

And if you want to begin the process of obtaining citizenship? Expect to cough it up. Just becoming a US citizen can cost up to $900.

Mass incarceration also has a stark economic impact, specifically on the Black community — a population that already sees lower lifetime earnings and increased rates and instances of poverty.

Poor People Deserve To Taste Something Other Than Shame

One in four Black children born in the era of mass incarceration will have a parent who is incarcerated, which will limit that parent’s earning by an average of 40% over their lifetime. The cycle of incarceration is expensive at every single step — from the cost of arrests, legal fees, and fines, parole, and lost jobs and hours on the clock, evictions, and so much more — and effectively traps people in a feedback loop of poverty that’s nearly impossible to break.

Even those who aren’t themselves incarcerated pay for incarceration, though. The cost of visiting a spouse in prison (both in lost time and expenses), inflated commissary bills, prohibitively expensive phone bills, the cost of lost time due to traveling, court dates, and meetings, and legal fees make it impossible for some families to dig out.

Having poor parents also puts in motion a cycle of disadvantage (and not because poor people are just worse at raising their children). The vast majority of people who grow up poor stay poor for a variety of complex reasons — which means no amount of coupon-cutting or Costco shopping can dig some families out of poverty, and to suggest otherwise is just disrespectful.

Personal Choices Don’t Fix a Broken System

The InvestmentZen infographic was roundly mocked because it was a symptom of a larger problem, which is that people with means love to give advice to poor people. This serves two distinct purposes:

1. It makes people with means feel better about their means because they feel like they have wealth as a direct result of their own effort — and not systems and structures that helped them along the way; and
2. It makes people with means feel better about those systems, rather than being forced to confront them or work to dismantle them.

When the infographic said that a person “can’t earn minimum wage and live in an expensive city and be wealthy,” they weren’t telling a lie — but they were accepting implicitly that it’s okay for people who work full-time to live in poverty if they live in large cities.

Imagine if everyone took that advice — if every person working minimum wage up and fled all of the major cities to go live and work in smaller markets with less expensive rent. Cities literally could not function.

Despite the commonly held belief that only teens should or do work for the minimum wage, the fact of the matter is that millions of Americans of all ages, a/genders, and educational levels support their families on hourly low-wage jobs. That includes seniors, disabled people, and women of color.

Millions of Americans of all ages, a/genders, and educational levels support their families on hourly low-wage jobs. That includes seniors, disabled people, and women of color.

The answer, then, is not that poor people live differently, but instead, that we create a society and an economy where people who work full time can live in the community where they work.

No amount of cutting back on luxury spending or driving extra hours for Uber can change the fact that there is literally nowhere in the country where a minimum wage job can support a family, that good union jobs have been in decline for decades, or that housing costs have priced people out of their homes. Cutting coupons, commuting by bike, and enjoying outdoor activities can’t really fix that.

So, instead of telling poor people what they should do to work around a system that’s leaving more and more people behind every year, we need to consider how the system can bend and change to better fit the needs of all people.