Poverty in Dallas: an Urgent Matter

[What follows is the text of my opening statement last week before a briefing session of the Dallas City Council and Mayor Mike Rawlings.  During the almost 3-hour conversation, we presented the initial findings of the Mayor's Task Force on Poverty.  It feels like we are making progress.]

`About six months ago, Mayor Rawlings invited me to chair a task force on poverty for Dallas.  The objective was to identify 5-6 steps that could be taken quickly to create catalytic impact relative to the problem of poverty in Dallas. 

The mayor reminded us all that the short-term future of Dallas was bright for the next 5 years or so.  Beyond that line of sight, things didn’t look so certain; in fact, the outlook for the longer term appeared troubling.  The mayor understood that the surprising growth of poverty in Dallas posed a very real threat to our entire community, and that we had to find ways to pull together as one for the sake of all. 

Poverty affects and magnifies every other challenge we face as a city.  Public education, higher education, community health/wellness, employment skills matching available jobs, public safety, transportation, quality of life issues in neighborhoods, food deserts—you name the challenge, poverty intensifies the surrounding problems.

What you are about to hear is the product of the task force’s hard work.  Much of what you will hear should be unsettling to you.  It is to us.  In my view, Dallas is not only the “tale of two cities,” it is also the untold tale of one city—a city within a city defined by poverty, limited opportunity and an uncertain future; a city well acquainted with unrelenting “toxic stress.”  It is not acceptable for a city as full of wealth and opportunity as Dallas to be ranked as the 4^th poorest urban center in the United States just behind Detroit, Memphis and Philadelphia. 

Clearly the time has come to go to work with new vigor. 

Detroit and hard lessons. . .

[The demise of Detroit, Michigan provides a fairly terrifying story for other large urban areas to consider, study and evaluate in view of local challenges.  This is certainly true for Dallas, Texas as we search for a new City Manager, Housing Director and City Attorney.  

The following essay from Joseph E. Stiglitz offers much food for thought.  

As always, I'd love your reactions.  What does Detroit have to teach us all?  LJ] 

The Wrong Lesson From Detroit’s Bankruptcy

When I was growing up in Gary, Ind., nearly a quarter of American workers were employed in the manufacturing sector. There were plenty of jobs at the time that paid well enough for a single breadwinner, working one job, to fulfill the American dream for his family of four. He could earn a living on the sweat of his brow, afford to send his children to college and even see them rise to the professional class.

Cities like Detroit and Gary thrived on that industry, not just in terms of the wealth that it produced but also in terms of strong communities, healthy tax bases and good infrastructure. From the stable foundation of Gary’s excellent public schools, influenced by the ideas of the progressive reformer John Dewey, I went on to Amherst College and then to M.I.T. for graduate school.

Today, fewer than 8 percent of American workers are employed in manufacturing, and many Rust Belt cities are skeletons. The distressing facts about Detroit are by now almost a cliché: 40 percent of streetlights were not working this spring, tens of thousands of buildings are abandoned, schools have closed and the population declined 25 percent in the last decade alone. The violent crime rate last year was the highest of any big city. In 1950, when Detroit’s population was 1.85 million, there were 296,000 manufacturing jobs in the city; as of 2011, with a population of just over 700,000, there were fewer than 27,000.

Click here to read more.

Poverty in the extreme. . .

The following report is shocking. 

The data reported sounds like something from a third world nation.  The unseen impoverished in cities like Dallas give a whole new meaning to concepts like "poverty," "the urban underclass," and "recession."  In fact, tens of thousands of our fellow citizens, and their number is growing, scratch out a life with virtually no resources.  Some have been living in depression-like circumstances for over 30 years.  What we're talking about here is "deep poverty."

After you read the report, let me know what you think.

Extreme Poverty In The U.S. Has Doubled In The Last 15 Years

March 12, 2012
By Pat Garofalo

According to the latest Census Bureau data, nearly 50 percent of Americans are either low-income or living in poverty in the wake of the Great Recession. And a new study from the National Poverty Center shows just how deep in poverty some of those people are, finding that the number of households living on less than $2 per day (before government benefits) has more than doubled in the last 15 years:

The number of U.S. households living on less than $2 per person per day — which the study terms “extreme poverty” — more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million, the study finds. The number of children in extremely poor households also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.

While extreme poverty doubled overall, it tripled amongst female headed households. Of course, there’s always the tact taken North Carolina Republican State Representative George Cleveland last week, who simply denied that anyone in his state lives in extreme poverty. As we noted at the time, “the 728,842 North Carolinians who are classified as living in deep poverty might take issue with that assessment.”

Little girl's truth

Just tonight I watched her walk, hand-in-hand with her mother up the crowded downtown city street.  Traffic rushed past without notice.  Her spindly legs seemed barely able to support her small frame.  So fragile, I waited for the wind to whisk her away.  She must have been all of 6-years-old ... faded cotton dress ... ragged little tennis shoes ... a pair of much too large glasses.  A huge Barbie Doll backpack with the look of having arrived from some "in-touch" charity drive was draped across her small shoulders and somehow did not fall to the ground.  Her mother appeared homeless or at least lost on the streets.  Maybe they were headed to the bus station or possibly to one of the family shelters. 

I couldn't tell. 

But I saw her.

I really saw her. 

She begins her life far behind the curve set by kids like my grandchildren. 

This little girl has little chance in this country of ever "making it." 

Will she finish high school?  What are her chances for college? 

When will she become a mother herself? 

I wondered about her current health and her health care options. 

Where would she sleep tonight? 

Would she ever be truly safe? 

Where were the boundaries of her world when it comes to love, affection, opportunity? 

Did she know her daddy?  Did he know her?  I didn't like the obvious answers that came to me instinctively.

For some reason as I watched this unremarkable pair walk the street, I thought of the church and its members and its leaders--me.  I thought of a thousand books I'd read dealing with some grand thought or seemingly priceless theological or psychological nuance that was meant to "help me" do better, feel better, get on better.  I thought of all the Sunday School classes and all the sermons and all the seminars and all the praise and worship times and sessions and trainings.  I remembered countless learning opportunities. 

I considered all of my "advantage".  And I realized in that one defining moment on that downtown block as I drove home after a day in my pampered world that all of it was rubbish, worthless, foolish, a horrible waste--an illusion and worse, a delusion.  For all the claims, most of the essential, highly regarded stuff of my world is simply not true.

That one little first grade girl and her life and her mom--that is true and more, the life I caught a glimpse of today is the only truth that really matters.

The game is far, far from fair and just and livable.  And, of course, I know it is much, much worse elsewhere even in my city, not to mention the vast, teeming Third World.

This fact causes me problems with "business as usual" faith, serious problems. 

One thing I do know:  all my advantage with its vast world of words and ideas has done nothing to prepare me for handling the ultimate, undeniable truth delivered to my heart this evening by one tiny little creature stumbling along down a very busy, unknowing city street.

[I wrote this reflection several years ago.]

Urban death, urban despair

Each year for the past 15, Central Dallas Ministries has assisted low-income families bury their dead.  While every situation is unique, all share in common a desperation and an anxiety impossible to describe.  I find nothing more unsettling or difficult as the challenge facing very poor families when they've lost a loved one.  On top of the natural grief, the burden of claiming the remains and finding a way to pay for burial often proves extremely difficult. 

My own experience with these awful times drew me to the report below about the city of Detroit and the difficulties facing its morgue.  The story reports on what may best be regarded as a symbol of urban despair in our nation's central cities.
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Unburied bodies tell the tale of Detroit — a city in despairTim Reid in Detroit

The abandoned corpses, in white body bags with number tags tied to each toe, lie one above the other on steel racks inside a giant freezer in Detroit’s central mortuary, like discarded shoes in the back of a wardrobe.

Some have lain here for years, but in recent months the number of unclaimed bodies has reached a record high. For in this city that once symbolised the American Dream many cannot even afford to bury their dead.

“I have not seen this many unclaimed bodies in 13 years on the job,” said Albert Samuels, chief investigator at the mortuary. “It started happening when the economy went south last year. I have never seen this many people struggling to give people their last resting place.”

Unburied bodies piling up in the city mortuary — it reached 70 earlier this year — is the latest and perhaps most appalling indignity to be heaped on the people of Detroit. The motor city that once boasted the highest median income and home ownership rate in the US is today in the midst of a long and agonising death spiral.

To read the entire article click here.