The Struggle Worsens for Those Who Struggle in Normal Times
America’s Poor and Homeless Live on a Precipice
America’s Poor and Homeless Live on a Precipice
Photo from The New York Times.
In an embattled enclave in Syria, doctors have seen patients die from what looks like the coronavirus but are unable to treat them because they lack beds, protective gear and medical professionals. A refugee camp in Bangladesh is so cramped that its population density is nearly four times that of New York City, making social distancing impossible. Clinics in a refugee camp in Kenya struggle in normal times with only eight doctors for nearly 200,000 people. — The New York Times
The police alert came in last night, as it has every night since the words novel coronavirus and COVID-19 entered the American lexicon. Two more positive tests in South Brunswick, but still we’re lucky. The state death toll is at 81; total cases near 7,000 — and this is a fraction of what we are witnessing across the Hudson River in New York.
We watch the news: Job losses. Ventilator shortages. Drive-through testing sites at capacity. New York is running out of hospital beds. This is what why public health officials say we need to flatten the curve — to slow the spread of the coronavirus and allow us to provide healthcare without being overwhelmed, which is likely to lead to shortages and rationing. It’s what we’ve witnessed in Italy, and we would be foolish to assume that it can’t happen here.
But we’re healthy. We’re stocked up, prepared for the most part. This is not the case for all. The Times today reports on what it calls the “most vulnerable,” those in refugee camps who have fled war and famine and are packed into camps that lack even the most basic sanitary conditions. “(I)nternational health experts and aid workers,” the Times reports, “are increasingly worried that the virus could ravage the world’s most vulnerable people: the tens of millions forced from their homes by violent conflict.”
The Times then describes the camps and the dangers:
Refugee camps across Africa, the Middle East and Asia are packed with traumatized and undernourished people with limited access to health care and basic sanitation, perfect breeding grounds for contagion. Extended families jam into tarpaulin shelters with mud floors. Food, water and soap are often lacking. Illnesses, from hacking coughs to deadly diseases, go untreated, facilitating their spread.
The coronavirus, which has already infected hundreds of thousands of people around the globe, could rip through these camps with devastating speed and mortality.
These are the most extreme cases, of course, and they can seem so far away. But as I wrote earlier this month, we have our own internal refugee problem in the United States — as do most capitalist countries — though we do not call it that. There are, on any given night, according to the National Coalition to End Homelessness, more than half a million people on America’s streets or in shelters and some experts have said the number can be as much as six to eight times that when you take into account those who experience homelessness at some point in the year. And these estimates often do not include people who are staying temporarily in hotels or on their friends’ or families’ couches.
Christine Barilka, who I interviewed in 2018 for the 37 Voices project (see story here), now finds herself in that position. She had been in affordable housing in South Brunswick, but gave her unit up because she no longer felt safe. There were drugs being sold in the complex and she was worried about the four grandchildren she’s raising.
Barilka told me last week that she now was living in a hotel on Route 130, paying about $100 a night, which amounts to almost three times the rent she had been paying. Technically, she said, she is homeless, but they are surviving with help from the township food pantry and the school district, which still provides free lunch through the National School Lunch Program.
“I don’t know how we’re doing it,” she told me when we talked on the phone. “I really don’t. I’m telling you that God is just blessing us. I don’t even — we’re getting it from the pantries. The school is delivering food.”
She gets about three days of food at a time, including yogurt and cheese and other staples, and “we use a lot of stuff for the children.” The hotel has a full kitchen, she said, so she makes “a pot of soup, vegetable soup, and I live on that, but I think I’m getting a little anemic I’ve got to start eating like more meat.”
She remains on the payroll with Middlesex County, where she works as a driver, but she is home because she has her grandchildren to take care of, and because both she and a grandson suffer from an auto-immune disorder that makes them especially susceptible to infection that requires them to take even greater precautions than the rest of us.
She sat in her car outside of the pharmacy as we talked on the phone. Her husband Jesse was inside the Rite-Aid in North Brunswick picking up medications — it was the nearest pharmacy carrying the meds — because she can’t.
But she says she’s lucky — “blessed” is how she puts it — and she remains upbeat about her prospects.
I’m a more pessimistic person, all I could think of was just how tenuous their existence is, in a nation that purports to be the richest in the history of the world. There are nearly 330 million Americans, 42.6 million people living in poverty and nearly that many living above the federal poverty line but below what the United Way defines as the basic cost of living. In New Jersey, a state with about 9 million residents, about 900,000 live in poverty and nearly 3 million more are what the United Way calls Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained, and Employed (or ALICE).
Brian Kulas, who lives in East Brunswick, falls into the ALICE gray zone and suffers from mental illness and is on disability. When we talked in 2018 for 37 Voices, he told me that the maze of regulations and red tape could be difficult to navigate — and that was during a time of normality. Today, he said via email, “there are new challenges” brought on by the imposed isolation and the growing economic uncertainty caused by the spread of the virus. The system in good times, he said, is complex to. navigate, and “to even find services to assist with getting to that next level of self-sufficiency” can be nearly impossible.
Today, he said, those with mental illnesses “have to find healthy ways to adjust, fast.”
And though the reasons for social distancing and the expanded restrictions certainly make sense and are justified. To keep it simple, they basically limit some of the key points of recovery, the most evident (being) do not intentionally isolate yourself from people and try to get out past your front door, do not box yourself in alone.
For him, the mental health issues dovetail with the experience of poverty and near poverty, in which “access more than ever is the lifeline.”
Access to food, access to hygiene products, access to the internet, access to work. Many of us work in the food, hospitality and service industries. And the hard life we already knew, has been voided out and a blank space remains with no certainty. The only commitment we have been provided, is if you have a place to live of any kind, you cannot be forced to move out.
That’s his situation — he has a subsidized apartment given to him because of his disability — but he knows many others “in poverty who pay by night or week in rooming houses or boarding homes without a documented lease.”
“I have a friend right now who is in that very situation,” he said. “They worked two jobs in Atlantic City, but do not qualify for unemployment. Hopefully, the owner will be compassionate.”
That is unacceptable. Congress is expected to approve an economic stimulus bill today, which will help some, but leaves so many on the outside looking in. The bulk of money in the bill will provide money to struggling “small businesses,” as defined by lawmakers, though the definition has long been bogus and historically has pushed money upward to the largest corporations. Individual payments — the $1,200 per person check — will go to those who have filed income tax returns. David Dayen, a journalist who writes about economics and government spending and is now the editor of The American Prospect, told Sam Seder on Thursday that the “creaky system” is not up to the task and that millions of poor Americans, most of whom are people of color, will fall through the cracks.
Part of the problem is that we have described this legislation as a stimulus package, meaning that the goal is to jump-start an economy in crisis at a time when that may not be possible. What we need is not stimulus but direct aid to individuals in the form of monthly checks designed to prop them up during this time of crisis. Call it a temporary universal basic income. Call it welfare. Call it a dole. I don’t care. The point is, we have to move beyond the traditional approaches we’ve taken in the past, we need to stop penalizing the poor and near-poor for their economic difficulties.
In addition, we need price controls that keep necessities within reach of those who were struggling before the current crisis hit.
Kulas considers himself fortunate, because he receives Social Security Disability, which helps him with rent. But he lost the part-time, one-day a week job he had in Atlantic City, which meant he has had to cancel the insurance on his car and cut back in other ways. Extra money, he said, “can help buy basic needs.”
But that is the next problem. There realistically is nothing to buy that meets my budget. There is plenty of Dove shampoo and soap, but … a three-pack of soap at 99 cents is scarce. More then ever, people who once could afford name brands and higher-end products, are buying generic brands in bulk. Though I do understand their reasoning, there is not much left for people in poverty.
Barilka, Kulas, and the other 100 million to 150 million Americans who live paycheck to paycheck (40 percent of Americans cannot cover a $400 emergency expense without borrowing money) are getting by for the moment, but they live on a precipice. On one side is their current struggles; on the other, potential homelessness — which brings me back to the Times’ story on international refugees.
The story is accompanied by a photo of a refugee camp in Idlib, Syria, that haunts me both because no human being should have to live like this, but also because it reminds me of what I witnessed in Lakewood when I was researching and writing my book As an Alien in a Land of Promise. My argument then and now is the same: Capitalism creates refugees, because it requires that a monetary value be placed on every transaction, every person, every good, and that those without value get tossed to the side. America’s homeless population are refugees within our borders. They are vulnerable — see The Washington Post, which reported March 15 that housing advocates “fear an outbreak could occur in large homeless encampments where thousands of people live on the street and lack the ability to self-quarantine, receive medical attention or access cleaning facilities.”
These are the most vulnerable, but their vulnerabilities are our vulnerabilities. As the journalist Anand Giridharadas tweeted earlier this month, “Your health is as safe as that of the worst-insured, worst-cared-for person in your society. It will be decided by the height of the floor, not the ceiling.”