Are Poor People Disgusting?

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

"In its magnificent equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the street and stealing bread." - Anatole France  

Poor people are disgusting, they may even smell bad. And never mind the mental illness and addiction! You can barely stand to be in the same room with them and be comfortable! That's what's become of poverty in the US. The disgusting poverty is supposedly the result of poor individual choices by the poor themselves. 

But the truth is our current beggar-on-every-corner economy is the result of a series of public policy decisions that drove masses of people out of their homes, out of care, and into the street. In the '70s Nixon stopped the federal government building affordable housing, and in the 80's the Reagan administration cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75% as he cut taxes on the wealthy roughly in half (and, with his successor, raised payroll taxes eightfold). The local homeless charity, "Loaves and Fishes" began in the '80s. The US hasn't had such a homeless population as it currently has since the Great Depression.

As governor, Reagan also closed California's asylums, sending the inmates out to the street. This movement to evict the mentally ill poor is bipartisan too. JFK had a policy to close the big federal asylums and replace them with smaller transitional housing that would prevent the abuse isolated asylums experienced, and integrate the mentally ill back into the community. Congress approved closing the asylums but neglected to fund the transitional housing. Then Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it the most shameful episode in all his years as a public servant.

The majority of the homeless are just too poor to afford rent, not mentally ill or addicted, but homelessness poverty also induces its own form of PTSD, so their mental condition is not always optimum. Homelessness is often attributed to too few houses, and blamed on zoning restrictions, but in the USA, there are more vacant homes than homeless, five times as many in San Francisco. The problem isn't too much regulation, it's the heartless distribution of the fruits of our civilization.

Writer Mark Kreidler describes how even the current meager support the poor receive now is diminishing. During the pandemic, "federal policies directed stimulus payments to households, enhanced and extended unemployment insurance, expanded both the Child Tax Credit and food and housing assistance programs, and made health care more accessible. As a result, the U.S. experienced a historic reduction in poverty rates, both overall and for children, despite a crisis that shuttered businesses and put millions out of work."

So...it's possible for public policy to address homelessness, just as it addressed air pollution in Southern California. But as long as the public views poverty as exclusively the result of some individual's bad judgment, it's unlikely public policy will change, no matter how important such policy is. 

Meanwhile, a technician who worked on affordable housing told me he was disgusted with the way the poor treated their housing. "They trashed it," was his comment after he returned to maintain it. 

But poor people are not that concerned with material things--its why they're poor--and the public funding for maintenance in their housing is notoriously skimpy. One could blame the poor for not taking care of their material surroundings, but failure to provide adequate funding for anticipated maintenance is a kind of covert sabotage. It also confirms that "disgusting" observation to do that.

The public's disgust also shows up when mixed-income neighborhoods are proposed. Four- or eight-plexes among the mansions! Are you kidding! The income monoculture of suburban sprawl is the rule, now, because respectable people can't live adjacent to the poor. The idea of poverty as a virtue, practiced by countless generations of monks, has been abandoned.

But poor people have something to contribute. They are typically generous--one reason they're poor. In fact, my poor in-laws would literally give you the shirt off their back, even if it was their last shirt. We definitely need such generosity rather than the scrooge-ified public policy we now have, and we certainly need to perceive the people who are traumatized as human beings. It's what the Good Samaritan did, and it's the least we can do. Pursuing profit, or advantage, at any cost has led us to the current dog-eat-dog economy, and the suffering of the poor.