I took a neighbor to run her errands the other day.
This neighbor is a young woman with little children; they were in the car with us we went up and downtown, checking off her to-do list. My neighbor doesn’t have a car right now, and her new apartment is far from the bus stop. She and the children acted like it was a fun adventure just to be riding in my messy dented Nissan.
The neighbor loves her new apartment. It’s in a nice neighborhood so the children can play outside daily, which they couldn’t do at her old place. Her old place was a leaky rental house in a bad part of LaBelle, in sight of where Tink was shot to death. She couldn’t let the children play outside because it wasn’t safe. It wasn’t particularly child-friendly inside the house either. There were so many leaks that the carpet rotted, and one day the soaked patch started wriggling with bugs. But she was free of that house now. She’d gotten the new place with a government housing voucher.
The housing voucher meant that the government had docked her food stamps by hundreds of dollars, though. That’s how it works. If you get some forms of government assistance, they take away some other because the assistance counts as income.
Imagine, for just a moment, that you had the chance to get away from a slum house on a very bad block where people were murdered, with worms in the carpet and mold everywhere. Now imagine that in order to do so, you had to cut your grocery budget from $800 a month to $300. That’s what my neighbor did.
And before you ask, yes, she is employed. She works hard. She’s looking for a second job, an easier walk from her apartment. And in the meanwhile she’s studying to finish her high school work that she never finished as a teenager, on a borrowed computer while her children are napping, so she can go to college and get a better job. I have never seen someone who works so hard in the face of so many odds.
When I dropped her off at home, my neighbor promised to pay me back for gas by giving me her birthday money if she got any. I declined and said not to worry about it. I wish I could have done something more.
I thought of her all day yesterday. I hope she gets that degree. I hope she can get ahold of a car and keep working hard, and that the work pays off.
I thought about the fact that, if you grow up in America, you’ve probably frequently been told that the poor are poor because they don’t work hard enough and don’t make good choices. If they just cut corners and worked diligently without indulging themselves, they could be rich. And if they’d just make wise decisions when budgeting, they could be comfortable. I thought of my neighbor, working as hard as she could, starting from the bottom and scraping her way up to better herself, having to choose between a house that wouldn’t kill her and having enough to eat.
I thought about her as I read the New York Times article you’ve probably all heard about by now, because one section of the article went viral. About the woman who decided to buy a house that cost nearly one and a half million, when she had budgeted for “only” nine hundred thousand.
“I decided, I’ve done a lot of traveling, I’ve had a lot of fun,” said Stephanie DiSantis, according to the Times. “I’ve done the thing where I’m like, ‘I’m hungry for pasta, I’m going to go to Rome for three days,’ I can stop doing that. I can afford to be a little house poor.”
“House poor.”
The word “house poor” has a meaning; it’s somebody who makes what looks like an adequate income but lives in poverty conditions because all their money goes to keeping them from homelessness. Not an obscenely wealthy person who had to give up impulse trips to a foreign country so that they can afford a mansion. It’s been pointed out that the chair photographed behind that woman in the article costs about six thousand dollars retail. There are a lot of house-poor Americans. This lady isn’t one of them.
My neighbor isn’t even house-poor; she couldn’t afford to live anywhere at all without government assistance. She’s really poor. But in any case, DiSantis was shocked to find out how much that giant mortgage ate of her travel budget and her ability to take breaks. And by breaks, I mean an entire year off. “I got super burned out at work. I remember thinking, ‘Man, if I was still in that townhouse, I could just quit my job for a year and be fine.’ The mortgage was so low, I could take a year off, I could relax, I could refuel and now I really can’t. ”
I looked back at the story I’d heard Tuesday and the one I was reading Wednesday.
I thought about all the times I’d been told that rich people are rich because they make wise choices, and poor people are poor because they are lazy.
I don’t know how to explain that our society is broken.
If you can’t see it all around you, I don’t know how to make you see.
We are broken, and the hard work of the people who have the deck stacked against them can’t fix anything. Rich people are as likely to make stupid choices as poor people, but they won’t suffer for it. Poor people will suffer no matter what.
I can’t describe how frustrated that makes me, but here we are.
Image via pixabay
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, visit our donate page.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In