ONE IN four Americans live in poverty, and 2.5-3.3 million Americans spend the night in a homeless shelter every year. Dr. Ken Hopper and author Barbara Ehrenreich visited the University on Wednesday to discuss the effects of homelessness on public health.
Mentally ill and chronically ill individuals are more likely to experience homelessness, and homeless individuals are more susceptible to various diseases. Yet treating homeless individuals is not going to solve the problem of homelessness, Hopper said. Illnesses exacerbated by homelessness are merely symptomatic in the way that homelessness itself is symptomatic of deeper societal problems of inequitable income distribution and widespread poverty.
Individuals interested in addressing homelessness must begin with the lack of affordable housing. Due to rising private housing prices and falling stocks of affordable housing, in addition to declining government expenditures on housing subsidies, paying for shelter is becoming increasingly difficult for working-class Americans.
This trend manifests itself in greater numbers of individuals who are homeless; in New York City, for instance, homelessness nearly doubled during the first three years of the Bush administration, an exaggeration of a trend of increasing homelessness dating from the mid-1980s. One in six African-American children in New York will spend the night in a homeless shelter every year.
Given the increasing numbers of the homeless, which result from rising real housing costs (costs that are adjusted for inflation), one would expect the government to craft policies that help individuals pay for housing and to reformulate the way the Census tracks the number of individuals who are susceptible to homelessness, namely the poor.
Bush, not surprisingly, has not taken action to address rising housing costs, nor has the Census adjusted its methodology for calculating poverty, a formula that is certainly sensitive to changes in cost of housing. The Census still calculates poverty by multiplying the cost of nutritionally adequate food for an individual by three, an archaic method that fails to take rising housing and health care costs into account.
This inaccurate measure of poverty has advantages of political expediency, however. By vastly underestimating the number of poor individuals in America, the ruling party can pretend that widespread poverty does not exist.
Ehrenreich and Hopper say that a quarter of all Americans live in poverty. This figure is based on the cost of rent and other basic needs subtracted from one's wage. If one does not earn enough to pay for housing, food, health care and transportation, then one could accurately be described as impoverished. The Census bureau ignores the true extent of the poverty crisis in America, however, by using an archaic formula that vastly underestimates the extent of poverty.
Ehrenreich personally experienced the reality of life as a member of the working poor as a waitress, hotel cleaner, house cleaner and Wal-Mart employee over a period of two years. She describes her experiences in the book "Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," and also discussed them Wednesday.
While working as a waitress in Florida, Ehrenreich spent over half her income on rent in a trailer park. In Minneapolis, her pay at Wal-Mart did not cover even the cheapest rent in the area. Because real wages are so low compared to the cost of living in many communities, Ehrenreich met many homeless, full-time workers, and even more who illegally shared small rooms or apartments with many individuals or worked two jobs just to pay the rent.
Spending such a large percentage of one's income on rent means that many of Ehrenreich's co-workers would skip lunch daily to save money, or would be unable to go to the hospital if injured or sick due to the prohibitive cost of health care. Furthermore, the low-wage employers often would not grant even an afternoon off to go to the doctor. Ehrenreich described one house cleaner who tripped over a depression in someone's front yard, could not afford to go the doctor and was not given the afternoon off by her boss at Molly Maid cleaning company. The woman continued to clean the bathrooms of the rich, hopping on one foot all afternoon.
The Census bureau may not consider a Wal-Mart employee impoverished. It may see a seven-dollar-per-hour wage as adequate to buy three times the cost of nutritionally adequate food.We as citizens have the responsibility to understand the intentional inaccuracy of federal poverty data. Moreover, as human beings, we are morally obligated to rectify a situation in which 12 percent of our fellow citizens are impoverished by federal standards and 25 percent are truly poor.
As Hopper and Ehrenreich pointed out, we cannot merely medicate the illnesses that result from homelessness any more than we can pretend that homelessness is not symptomatic of deeper societal inequalities and economic insecurity. To remedy the various symptoms of an unjust economic system, we must destroy and reinvent the system itself, with the vision of a decent standard of living for all Americans as our goal.
Zack Fields's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at zfields@cavalierdaily.com.
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