SAN FRANCISCO – “Let me tell you about abandoned people,” whispered J.R., his voice rising above the sighs and snores of sleepers curled on the church pews around him.
“Those people who were abandoned in New Orleans,” he said, “they were abandoned long before that hurricane hit. We all were.”
J.R., who gave no other name, spends his days with 100 others embraced in the holy warmth of a magnificent edifice, 103-year-old St. Boniface Church. Sunlight streams through stained glass, and gilded saints smile down from the domed ceilings; the smells of sour, acrid clothes and bodies mix with the lingering scent of incense.
This looks like an evacuation center – row after row of desperate people and their sparse belongings, a backpack here, a blanket there.
But this roomful of displaced people is neither an emergency shelter nor a temporary situation.
This is an ongoing, daily, chronic disaster.
Ordinarily, the faces of America’s poor are as hidden as their stories. But Hurricane Katrina has spotlighted the deep poverty that this country has failed to deal with, a world of people who live without Social Security numbers and without running water, people who are too poor even to shop at Wal-Mart, and whose children go hungry.
Even as the economy strengthened in 2004, Census Bureau figures show that 37 million Americans lived under the poverty line, a jump of 1.1 million from 2003. People living in poverty have, in fact, been increasing steadily in the U.S. since 2001.
For years, advocacy groups and researchers have been shouting the frightening statistics: 45.8 million people don’t have health insurance; 25 percent of America’s blacks (and 44 percent of Houston’s) live in poverty; 36 million Americans are hungry or at risk of hunger.
But before Hurricane Katrina exposed the raw poverty and its consequences, no one wanted to hear this, said Reese Fayde, CEO of Living Cities, a New York-based nonprofit group.
“You are made to feel you are detracting from something good, that you’re not patriotic, that you’re trying to focus on a niche issue,” she said. “Poverty didn’t happen overnight, but now it’s as if someone lifted up a rock and wow, there they are, all those poor people!”
The Rev. Cecil Williams, a veteran social activist who leads San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church, said he keeps getting calls from people who say, ” ‘Not only did we not know there was so much poverty, but also that so many of these poor people were black.’”
It’s frustrating, Williams said. “We’ve been there all along, we’ve been saying the problem is not solved.”
But in many cases, poverty is invisible, said Rosemary Cubas, who lives in one of Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods. She said that on her block, four or five families often live together in one-bedroom apartments.
“You don’t see our poor because we don’t let them sleep on park benches or homeless shelters. We just squeeze in, and everyone is overcrowded and underfed.”
Living on a very limited income, she said the problem is complex.
“Where do we go? Poverty is not only in the economics and the food, but also in the ability to see opportunity and take advantage of it. Poverty is also psychological, and that leads you to either have hope or no hope, and if you have no hope, you are truly, truly poor, because you have no way out.”
For those who have been living in poverty, and those who have been trying to fight it, the air of surprise about this chronic disaster is both frustrating and amusing. For some, it’s also a glimmer of hope.
“I do wonder whether this is one of those moments where, as this country reflects on its values, there’s an opportunity for change, for movement,” said Olivia Golden, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.
“This country has options,” said Omowale Satterwhite of the Oakland, Calif.-based National Community Development Institute.
One option, he said, is to put the storm and the shock behind us and move forward as if it didn’t happen.
“The other possibility is that the soul of the country gets touched and the entire country is in a dialogue, trying to discover a common truth about who we are and who we want to be,” he said.
Many who live in poverty now welcome the chance to further expose what their lives are really like.
“I think the normal person would be shocked at what our daily existence is like,” said Norman DePover, 50, who spends his days sleeping in the San Francisco church. “Just trying to find a bathroom, something to eat, to get a shower and stay warm, those are my problems.”
A few pews away, Brian McDougal, 48, said it’s much cheaper to buy clothes at a secondhand store than to use a coin-operated laundry. He replaces his entire wardrobe – meaning the clothes he is wearing – several times a year.
Nancy Cantor of Scottsdale, Ariz., who lives on about $12,000 a year, said rationing food is a way of life.
“Peanut butter and jelly is good. A can of soup. At the end of the month, you cross your fingers and hold your breath,” she said. “We hurried up and made room in the shelters for all of the people who were made homeless by Katrina, yet we have people in this country who have lived for years not knowing if they are going to survive the heat and cold.”
At St. Boniface Church, J.R. pulls a knit blanket tight around his shoulders and considers his role in this country. Is he hidden? How did he get here? Why does he stay?
“This is a capitalist society,” he said with all of the pedantic patience of a social scientist. “Capitalism means some people get richer and some people get poorer. In order for this system to work, for there to be really wealthy folks, you’ve got to have me at the bottom.”
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