[lit-ideas] Re: The American Poor
- From: Carol Kirschenbaum <carolkir@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 14:47:13 -0700
Judy spaketh:
> one possible answer is that London (etc.) are very much more
> expensive than elsewhere in Europe. So the comparison's a bit
> silly.
ck: I don't know about "silly," but it seems that many if not all stats
about The Poor are skewed and flaky. Even housing stats, which should be
easier to get (limited, at least) aren't. On the surface, it's not hard to
see that landlords' taxes influence the market, in each county, and
increases of all sorts are passed along to tenants.
But greed--sorry, market forces-accounts for the tripling of rents within a
years that we see. (Why triple rents? Because they can. And if your family
can't pay the new amount, another can.) Is it unfair to accuse landlords of
greed, when these lords are buying up property that's also tripled in cost
to them? Exactly their argument, and who can blame each landlord (offshore
or US-based) for making a profit? It's not as if their intention is to
create of the once-middle and working classes a seriously impoverished class
of tent dwellers. And that's why government must be involved--welfare state,
if you will.
Outlying parts of London (well, East Croyden, actually) were less expensive,
rent-wise, than Manhattan, but what isn't? (California, that's what. God and
maybe Arnold know why.) Last I hunted for a place to live, a 4-bedroom
farmhouse in Provence was half the cost of a dinky 2-bedroom cottage in an
iffy area of Austin, Texas.
But rental prices change...and that's partly my point. People of means lock
in mortgage rates, over time. Good deal. But people in the poverty cycle
(like my parents, alas) don't ever have a down payment--not that they really
understand why owning a house would protect them against the fluctuating
cost of the biggest-ticket, most essential item in their lives (pace Katrina
victims et al).
Habitat for Humanity certainly helps some families achieve this stability.
The point is STABILITY, not some phony-baloney 'American Dream' crap.
Whether you're American, Dutch, Romanian, or Brazilian, if the rent zooms
up, your life goes into chaos.
Then there's the new immigrant model of familial welfare: Large Mexican
families here pool their resources to purchase one house for everyone to
live in. As more get jobs, the family buys more houses. This describes a
huge proportion of those illegal immigrants they babble about on the news. A
few years before the house purchase, though, they were scrambling across the
Rio Grande. Legal or not, these folks are the new middle-class homebuyers.
Unfortunately, not all people have trustworthy families that pull together
and avoid deep poverty. Indians and Pakistanis famously buy motels in the
Southwest (and employ the family, too).
Has anyone encountered a sociological study explaining African-American
poverty, in part, as a consequence of slavery-destroyed family units? I
wouldn't have thought about this, but the marked differences in the ways new
immigrants accumulate wealth and privilege in this society (and Europe, in
business?) make me wonder.
Carol
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
