Get Out!

There is so much bad news, really bad news (and clearly not “fake news”) that too many of us are impervious to the human tolls, the individual stories that aggregate into mass sadness, that are the underlying truth. In short, we have built up emotional callouses to the tsunami of information that floods our lives. From bombing and artillery victims in Syria and Yemen, the targets and families of mass shooting here in the United States to those facing dire poverty or starvation all over the world, there is just so much. We are salved by statistical “averages,” numbers that can be so skewed by heavy weights at the top and bottom but look good only when lumped together. Some hide behind catchy slogans or truly fake news. Or we just don’t care, or only care about ourselves. Sympathy and empathy have left the building.

 

It is impossible to take it all in and deal with it. But isn’t it time to humanize the pain? Perhaps to think that in little ways, perhaps we can do something about it? At inception, that has to start with empathetic understanding, a story at a time. So today, I’d like to focus on one relatively small part of this global reality, right here in our own backyard: eviction. Not so small if you are being tossed out of your home. Folks losing their homes because they just cannot pay. Children joining their parents on the streets or in toxic living conditions in dire poverty. And it’s not the tale of chi chi high-price cities like San Francisco, New York or Washington, D.C.; it’s happening in communities all over the United States and less in those upscale cities than reflected in smaller cities and towns.

 

Our wage statistics talk about averages – they say we are earning more – but for 70% of Americans, wage stagnation has been a fact of life for decades, right into the present. The growth in the top third has pulled the average up but for most of us: nothing. As prices for everything are rising. Our unemployment statistics suggest there are enough people working, that unemployment is not an issue. Once again, we are dealing with averages and statistics that are severely twisted: people who have stopped looking for work out of hopelessness aren’t even in those numbers while folks with minimal part-time or marginal gig employment are.

 

If you look at the regions where evictions are soaring, they correspond heavily with concentrations of opioid addiction, particularly bad public schools, communities with subpar healthcare and areas heavily reliant on yesterday’s jobs with a dearth of new-tech opportunities. Oddly enough, with the exception of Oregon (which is hardly the worst), the West Coast has among the lowest evictions rates in the land. Compared with South Carolina, Michigan, Maine, Wisconsin, Georgia, Virginia (mostly the area not immediately adjacent to Washington, D.C.) or Oklahoma, even Oregon comes up smelling like a rose.

 

Until recently, and the numbers are still coming in, there was little or no research on the number of evictions in the United States. Thanks largely to studies by Princeton sociology professor Matthew Desmond – the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize – we are beginning to generate a clearer picture of this accelerating American phenomenon. It is isn’t pretty. Desmond started by looking at Milwaukee (he received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin), then broadened his scope to Richmond, Virginia and then to the entire United States. The April 6th New York Times summarizes:

 

“Mr. Desmond’s team found records for nearly 900,000 eviction judgments in 2016, meaning landlords were given the legal right to remove at least one in 50 renter households in the communities covered by this data. That figure was one in 25 in Milwaukee and one in nine in Richmond. And one in five renter households in Richmond were threatened with eviction in 2016. Their landlords began legal proceedings, even if those cases didn’t end with a lasting mark on a tenant’s record.

 

“For landlords, these numbers represent a financial drain of unpaid rent; for tenants, a looming risk of losing their homes.

 

"In Richmond, most of those evicted never made it to a courtroom. They didn’t appear because the process seemed inscrutable, or because they didn’t have lawyers to navigate it, or because they believed there is not much to say when you simply don’t have the money. The median amount owed was $686.

 

“Inside the courtroom, cases sometimes brought in bulk by property managers are settled in minutes when defendants aren’t present… ‘The whole system works on default judgments and people not showing up,’ said Martin Wegbreit, director of litigation at the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society. ‘Imagine if every person asked for a trial. The system would bog down in a couple of months.’

 

“The consequences of what happens here then spread across the city. The Richmond public school system reroutes buses to follow children from apartments to homeless shelters to pay-by-the-week motels. City social workers coach residents on how to fill out job applications when they have no answer for the address line. Families lose their food stamps and Medicaid benefits when they lose the permanent addresses where renewal notices are sent…

 

“The new data, assembled from about 83 million court records going back to 2000, suggest that the most pervasive problems aren’t necessarily in the most expensive regions. Evictions are accumulating across Michigan and Indiana. And several factors build on one another in Richmond: It’s in the Southeast, where the poverty rates are high and the minimum wage is low; it’s in Virginia, which lacks some tenant rights available in other states; and it’s a city where many poor African-Americans live in low-quality housing with limited means of escaping it.

 

“‘This isn’t by happenstance — this is quite intentional,’ said Levar Stoney, Richmond’s mayor. A quarter of households here are poor, leaving many people a car repair or a hospital visit away from missing the rent check. But that poverty collides with a legal structure that responds to such moments swiftly.”

 

In the end, America appears to be content to abandon more human beings to abject poverty and hopelessness. Some rail at the swamp in Washington, D.C. or blame globalization or immigrants; others suffer in poverty not knowing where to turn. It seems that the new American value is to turn our backs on this plight.

 

It’s OK to give massive and unneeded tax breaks to the rich and build more prisons, but underpay public school teachers, cut public healthcare programs, cut back the value of food stamps, and support a legal system that caters to landlord and treats desperate tenants like insects to be exterminated. But this is the government we voted into office, one that controls both houses of Congress, the presidency and the majority of governorships and state legislatures.

 

It strikes me as so strange that so many of these feelings are generated in states with powerful Christian voices… with too many people who look at Biblical teachings as if that Holy Book were just a menu. That’s not the Judeo-Christian perspective I was raised with, but regardless of your faith, if you care (and you should), there is an election coming up. Vote for what is right, what is best for America. Do something about it!

 

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is time for a change which means we either relearn what it is to be a “one for all, all for one” nation or get ready to split totally apart: people first!