many miles

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You could smell the stench as soon as you entered the house. Then, immediately, you saw the filth and chaos. People had lived here until recently, and some of the residents had had pets. A dog had even been left behind for several days until a neighbor was able to let him out.

We had been looking at properties in North Philadelphia when we came across this former boarding house. It was an ordinary 3-story brownstone in a fairly intact city block in a part of town where many buildings are boarded up, burnt out, or torn down often leaving weed strewn empty lots. I had seen a few boarding houses before, but they were all empty. For whatever reason, this house, however, still held some of the belongings of its former residents, and, while walking though the house, I got a glimpse of how life can be when you have little or nothing.

Renting a room in one of these houses means you have a roof over your head, but very little else. You usually share a small bathroom with several other tenants, and only one or two rooms may have a stove and possibly a sink with running water. Other tenants make due with hot plates, jugs with water, and plastic buckets. These houses, usually converted from simple single-family homes, are rented out short-term, room by room, for cash.

In this particular house, each room had a number on the door and makeshift locks — the original locks were long gone. Many windows were broken and taped, some were simply boarded up. Walls and ceilings were full of holes, some patched with newspaper, or left as-is exposing pipes and bricks. There were signs of leaks and water damage, rotten floorboards, and debris everywhere. The makeshift electrical wirings showed the genius of improvisation rather than skill. This house was from another world — a world so far from the one where I live in terms of circumstance, yet so close in terms of geography.

Walking through the house felt a bit like peering into other peoples lives and seeing things they probably wouldn’t want you to see. Some rooms were completely trashed. Some rooms had the belongings in piles. One room had a hot plate and a plastic basket with some pots and pans and cooking utensils. Another room had and old small TV, a VCR, and a stack of old VHS tapes. And in third room there was a Monopoly board game — it seemed so out of place.

All rooms were full of junk, partially broken (but somewhat still functioning) furniture, mattresses, and tattered clothes. All rooms except one: the top floor front bedroom. It was almost empty. There was a small tray with cat litter in one corner, a carpet, a built-in closet, a dresser, and an old chaise-lounge for a bed. On one wall was a small picture of Jesus and a Rosary, and on the dresser was a pamphlet from some church. Everything was old and well-worn, but strangely neat — someone had tried to not live in chaos.

I have traveled to countries like India, and I have seen poverty. But when you see it up close in your own city here in America, then it’s somehow different. How can this even exist here? This is certainly not a new problem in our society, but rather one that doggedly refuses to go away. And while there appear to be a near infinite number of reasons as to why and how we got here, we do not seem able — or maybe not willing — to resolve the problem of poverty.

Sure, the issues around poverty are multifaceted and complex, and I don’t want to trivialize this in any way. But it does seem clear that in our society, poverty is seldom front-page news and therefore also not a high-priority issue. Around Thanksgiving and Christmas we have the annual “homeless stories” on TV with some appropriately sad footage from homeless shelters and soup kitchens. This is little more than “poverty porn.” Wedged between commercials for insane 5-am-can’t-miss-Black-Friday-super-sales and pre-Christmas-last-chance-super-deals, these dramatic (but superficial) poverty-stories are designed to let the media — and us consumers — have a bit of tempered guilt in the busy shopping season. The idea is not to actually have us abandon the malls, but rather to let us feel a level of kindness when we tell ourselves that “yes, we care.”

Yes, I admit it, I don’t have any ready answers either. But I think that changing our priorities would go a long way. For example, we are always ready to spend vast sums on protection against foreign security threats. And yes, it makes perfect sense .. up to a point. I would argue that poverty, be it urban or rural, is much more of a security risk than most imagined (or real) threats from abroad. Poverty and related woes like unemployment, poor education, and insufficient health care are a cancers that are eating away at the framework of our society from the inside.

I often hear how the “poor are just lazy” or “on drugs” and countless other often completely baseless “assertions” as to why the poor are poor, the unemployed are unemployed, and the uninsured are uninsured. These nonsensical statements are then usually followed by something along the lines of “we cannot afford a cradle-to-grave welfare system anyway” or “I’ve worked hard my whole life and have never gotten anything for free,” and so on. We have so many ready excuses for why “nothing can be done” and we seem blind to the fact that no matter how hard we think our lives are or have been, life in poverty is exponentially more difficult.

UPDATES:

• copied from my old website
• minor language/grammar tweaks