Hooverville, Next Stop

Over the past weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting a lovely middle aged woman named Jane*, while helping some friends of mine fix-up the steal of a deal fixer upper they just purchased. Over the 24 hours of moving things, sanding cabinets, and scrapping off 40-year old contact paper and various and a sundry shelves, Jane shared her a good portion of her life story with me. The story was both heart-breaking and infuriating.

In short, 14 months ago, Jane lost her job at 55 years old. As the job market has continued to unravel, she has given up or lost her home, her car, many of her prized possessions, and to some extent her pride. She has been diligently searching for a job with each interview ending the same way, they either thought she was too old or too qualified and would leave if something better came along (I wish as an interviewee, one could ask the interviewer “how do I know if I say I’ll be here for 2 years, you will keep me for at least 2 years?”, but I digress.).  She is praying that what little she has left in a storage unit will not be auctioned off at the end of the month, and she has literally begged her cell phone company to give her one more month.

In the last few months, Jane has become almost entirely reliant on friends to keep a roof over her head. She is homeless–though not in the sense we almost always imagine in hearing the word. She is apart of the growing number of folk that have lost a job and a home. They are not sleeping on the street, or at a shelter or even in their car, but are shifting from couch to guest room as they try to stay economically afloat. No job. No home. She is dependent on the kindness (and/or tolerance) of friends and relatives.

Jane’s particular situation demonstrates the disconnect that exists between the haves and have nots as the economy continues to unravel around us. See Jane has some well-off friends, but none of them are willing to help her. One rich Beverly Hills friend who lives alone told her, that she is unemployed because of “bad choices”, and therefore she couldn’t let Jane stay with her. Another said she needed to be able to have “alone time” in her 4-floor house with a rarely used finished basement. (It is only because of a friend who is living much closer to paycheck to paycheck and is supporting someone else who also lost a job that Jane currently has a roof over head.)

Jane’s friends are just a localized version of the “disconnect” shown in all of its glory on the Hill and in the media as they gravitate between ‘let them eat cake’ in the form of tax cuts, and patting financial institutions with bailout funds on the back while they do nothing but hold on to the funds. I know at least 10 people who are currently out of work. They are trying to decide how much longer they can afford their rent, their mortgage, or their car. Folks need jobs. Not tax cuts. Nobody is going out to buy a big screen TV with it.

Some ideas that could help put people back to work, train the long-time unemployable, and increase the size of the middle class are largely absent from the stimulus. How about some RFP’s to address our crumbling infrastructure? That would connect private industry to job creation. How about some access to the training programs that are afforded to some TANF recipients in some states for those who have been unemployed for more than six months? How about encouraging cities to take back abandoned houses and create opportunities for entrepreneurial non-profit and for profit organizations with a way to reposition the properties like NYC has done with the Neighborhood Entrepreneur Program? How about supporting some funds for small business—the nation’s largest employer? All of these things are key to maintaining viable communities to live and work.

The same old tax cut, entitlement spending, and cuts to programs that encourage future growth (uh, education any one?) ain’t gonna do it. But as Kevin Costner once said, “In America, they’d rather give you a handout then give you a job.” I guess the latter is too much like right.

* Jane is not her real name, duh.