October 2, 1999
In 'Boom,' More Lint Lines Pockets of Poor
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
ASHINGTON -- From the vantage point of his college major,
business administration, and his current calling, homelessness,
Jesse Martin offered his considered summary of the latest federal
findings on the booming economy.
"Basically, the statistics mean the Bill Gateses get the money
-- there's the boom," Martin said, more stoic than resentful as he
counted as riches his barracks-bed existence inside the Community
for Creative Non-Violence, a shelter housing 600 poor men, women
and children six blocks from the Capitol.
"And the poor, they go like the song -- just getting poorer,"
Martin continued, citing all manner of real-life experience of his
60 years -- lately a heart attack without benefit of health
insurance -- to confirm the fresh data of the bureaucrats. "Of
course the gap is widening. Whoever got the money, that's who
continues to get it."
Across the capital city's underside, where social workers say
the most noticeable boom lately is the growing population of needy
homeless women with children, impoverished Americans easily
confirmed Friday the bleak footnote to the new Census Bureau report
on the rising incomes of America. For all the boom, income
inequality continues apace, the government concluded, with the gap
between the rich and the poor failing to narrow despite record
prosperity in the late '90s in the middle and upper social reaches.
"None of that surprises me," said Patricia Smith, a care-worn,
determinedly optimistic 49-year-old grandmother deep in poverty.
Ms. Smith, surviving on a patchwork of welfare and workfare,
charity and volunteer labor, recently learned that the four
grandchildren she found herself forced to nurture on the city's
streets all last winter will soon be joined by a fifth.
"My two daughters are on drugs and one of them is pregnant
again," explained Ms. Smith, quietly alarmed at this growth
indicator in her role as the drug-free, court-appointed guardian of
the children of her addicted daughters.
In the world of Ms. Smith, drug addicts receiving what she
considers overly generous government assistance stir far more
resentment than the rich Americans getting richer out there beyond
her horizon. "The economy's plain," she said. "If you don't have
money, you're not going to get anywhere. If you know somebody or if
you're not on drugs, you get pushed aside.
"I know it's rough out there," she said, describing a
harrowing three-month homeless period of bobbing and weaving with
the children in the streets and back alleys because, she said, she
could find no clear help from the city's anti-poverty bureaucracy.
"They said I had too many children for a shelter."
"This place saved me," Ms. Smith said gratefully at one of the
city's charity bastions, Bread for the City and Zacchaeus Free
Clinic. All about her, the monthly flow of 3,500 families seeking
charity food baskets was particularly heavy at midday. The first of
every month presses the poor to reach extra deep and seek out the
center's basket donations in waiting for their regular cash and
food-stamp dole to come around again.
"In the streets, I was washing the kids and changing their
clothes behind bushes, and many people were kind to us," Ms. Smith
said. She scowled at the memory of one man who she said talked of
charity in return for sex with the oldest granddaughter. "I didn't
have a life, never mind an economy."
In a nearby corridor, 25-year-old Patrina Swinson waited for
some free-clinic care and scoffed at the boom and what she
considers its incessant consultation as an ultimate barometer of
life. "My reality is not in stocks and bonds," she said. "We're
all still scraping around here, still at the bottom. My reality is
in my neighborhood, not the economy," she insisted, proudly
describing her plans to learn computer technology to move beyond
her low-scale job as a counselor in group homes for troubled
teen-agers.
The economic boom's presence can be noted in the city's poorer
neighborhoods in the form of land speculation and the razing of
low-rent, if seedy, housing, in the view of Fred Henry, vice
president of the Community for Creative Non-Violence, a private
charity dating from the old anti-poverty programs and Vietnam War
protests of the 1960s.
"Developers are closing out a lot of poor people with their new
emphasis on building middle-class housing," Henry said, citing
this as a factor in the fastest growing homeless category, women
with children. Aside from that, he said, "Nothing has really
changed across the last five years of economic boom."
Larry Weeks, a 42-year-old resident of the center who was
disabled after a series of odd jobs, has been working in the
center's kitchen school, aiming for a fresh start. "I listen to
all the news a lot and usually go by what I hear," said Weeks.
"But if you're out there living the economy, you know it's not
really booming," he said, describing his frustration in seeking
$10-an-hour jobs and finding only $6 or $8 ones. "So what should
be reported from here is hard times, lots of hard times,"
A number of poor people interviewed emphasized that in the
depths of unrelenting material troubles, they bolstered themselves
on spiritual values. Steven Sanders, a 35-year-old computer
technician who said his life fell apart in addiction to crack
cocaine, insisted that he was on the right track back precisely
because he had adopted the Bible, not the economy, as his guide.
"Oh, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, that's very
true," he said. "But I feel you can only be 'rich' in how you
treat others in God's image and how you feel within." He grinned
at what he said was this obvious point being missed in the endless
government data and analysis about the boom and the state of
national contentment. "When the Bible says, 'To whom much is given
much is required,' it's not really about the economy," Sanders
said from his place in the homeless shelter, looking happily out of
tune with the boom times.
