by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)
praise no flag
of surrender—
the guitar a blunt
instrument your hair
your shoes even your
voice shines.
—Kevin Young
LOOKING FOR A HOME
Karen Russell
IN MAY 2014, I moved to Portland, Oregon. It was my seventh move in five years. My boyfriend and I found an apartment with a month-to-month lease, a coup at a moment when Oregon’s apartment vacancy rate had been hovering around 2 percent—the lowest in America. Central Eastside, Portland, is rapidly gentrifying, but our neighborhood retained a gritty heterogeneity. We lived half a mile from the warehouses and the train tracks near the Willamette River, and catty-corner to an H. P. Lovecraft–themed bar where goth fairies drink highballs under a mural of purple tentacles (herbal tea is also available).
Our new apartment building was built in 1890; the landlord told us that it was on the National Register of Historic Places. It had beautiful Italianate window bays and Victorian trim, and looked to me like the architectural offspring of a castle and a cupcake, somewhat incongruously fronting a Shell station. Barber Block, as it is known, had housed a mortuary firm, a nickelodeon theater, a restaurant, a women’s dormitory, and a bank. We would pay $940 a month to live in a spacious one-bedroom, well below the market rate for Portland. How was this possible? A friend speculated that we were the hapless couple stepping into a B horror movie—storing our bikes in the old crematorium, turning a deaf ear to the wailing ghosts. My boyfriend countered that any ghosts had likely long ago traded up to a riverfront condo.
As it turns out, Barber Block is haunted, haunted by the living. Our apartment was above a homeless shelter. This was the reason why the rent had remained so low.
My first night in the apartment, I was awoken many times by a shrill minor-key chord. This was the train horn. Wide awake, I became alert to another chorus, much closer to our open window. Invisibly, anonymously, our neighbors introduced themselves to us. Voices flowed under the window, leaving a residue of muddy sound without clear meaning; out of the general eddying came the occasional metallic flash, a scream or a distinct curse. A man started howling threats around three a.m.; it was impossible to know if his interlocutor was real or imaginary. City dwellers everywhere have likely played a version of this grim midnight game, Does That Screaming Require My Intervention?
At a softer, pinker hour on that first night, just below our window, a woman began to wail. I went to the window but I saw only the lagoon of streetlight—nobody was visible. If I had gone outside and really looked, I’m sure it would have been quite easy to find hers and many other sleepless faces.
■ ■
The voices that we heard at night emanated from living bodies. You could not forget this. These voices had homes, walls of flesh and bone. The bodies they belonged to did not. This was confirmed for me the following morning, when I opened the door to the street and found a man curled in the alcove that separated our building from the street. To exit, I’d either have to wake this person up or take an awkward, lunging step over his unconscious body. I opted for the latter, telling myself that I did not want to disturb him.
This became a daily exercise in empathy suspension. The stranger in the doorframe was rarely the same man—people often turned up for a few days and disappeared just as suddenly. Sometimes I’d leave bottled water or food, but I don’t think I ever knelt to introduce myself or ask what else I could do. I was ashamed of this routine—the literal sidestepping of a suffering person. I kept telling myself that I did not want to wake these men; wasn’t that the reason I tiptoed around them? But it was my own equilibrium, I fear, that I did not want to disturb.
More than once, when the stunned broken-neck angle of a person’s body suggested something worse than sleep, I called 911. The first time the paramedics responded to one of my calls, they asked me to dial 211 for future nonemergencies. Then they gave me some tips for determining whether a person was overdosing or simply unconscious. The paramedics were on a first-name basis with some of the homeless residents of Barber Block. As one of the guys living at the shelter told me, as we watched EMTs tend to an unconscious man, “Turns out when you’re calling the paramedics night after night, it’s the same three guys that come out.”
■ ■
Daylight had revealed the members of the nightly choir to us. So many people were asleep under the bright sun or curtained inside the rain, depending on Portland’s moody weather. They were laid out in the open caskets of the medians, and camping under the loony-looking cherry tree near the Burger King. Dozens of sleeping bags were lumped in the dewy scrub grass near the river, forming a surreal tableaux. Nylon cocoons, large and shimmering, pupating under the lightly falling rain of Oregon. But this was a reverse metamorphosis. Very quickly, I lost access to that vision of the campers’ sleeping bags as a rainbow of cocoons. Under the gray skies of Oregon, I started thinking of the blue morgue, body bags.
■ ■
By June, I was feeling less like an intruder in the apartment, and more like its tenant. Walking through the rolling heat at dusk, I loved coming back to Barber Block. I loved the sound of the toothy key turning in the lock. Sometimes I’d call my boyfriend on the apartment intercom, just for the pleasure of being buzzed up. I couldn’t start up the stairs without pausing to look at the mailbox, where our surnames shared the white slot under an apartment number. My mind often felt like an overexposed photograph; it took me a few weeks to understand that I was experiencing simple happiness.
Temperatures were unusually high that spring, and then in July there was a terrible heat wave. Whenever I ran into someone on the stairs of our apartment building, we’d smile through a mask of sweat and commiserate about our lack of air-conditioning. I was getting to know my indoor neighbors, too. There was the young woman who looked like Velma from Scooby-Doo, the always-hoarse middle-aged musician, the Indian woman with the beautiful baby, the neurotic blond guy who patrolled the laundry machines. Certain voices bled through our bedroom wall at night, and now I could picture the faces of our indoor neighbors to which they belonged.
Outside was a different story. I’d gotten used to the train horns at night; the human screaming still woke me. How often did I get up and go to the window, to see if there was something I could do? After the first few nights, not very often at all.
Some of our homeless neighbors who we saw on a routine basis:
The young Mexican guy with tuba-player cheeks who slept on the cement steps near the apartment Dumpsters.
The white woman who flashed a pink, childlike smile at all passersby, revealing a single tooth. Who was watching out for her? She seemed to have no friends, no protectors. She was mentally ill and well over sixty years old. Anybody could do anything to her body, I often thought. Crimes against her body would go unrecorded and unprosecuted, and likely had. When I say that she seemed defenseless, I mean that the very air around her felt unshelled—yolky and violable. If auras existed, hers would have been spigoting rosy light. Yet she’d smile at anyone, everyone.
The horseshoe-bald man with ginger sideburns who was not quite five feet two, pacing the intersection with the harried aimlessness of a pigeon.
The white guy with a chronic sunburn and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! yellowed toenails who sat outside the Jackson’s gas station, holding loud, abusive conversations with himself.
“D’Nuts,” who was briefly my friend and then not, who once asked to take a photograph with me. Weeks later, he reappeared with a red Walgreens photo album, sweeping his hand over our photograph like a magician, as if the proximity of our two faces inside the plastic sleeve was as stupendous a violation of natural law as a levitating building.
■ ■
I wish I’d done a better job of getting to know these people, so that I could give you a fuller portrait of them. But the truth is that during my year and
six months living on Barber Block, I did not make a single real friend. At best, you could say that I became friendly with my homeless neighbors. We exchanged smiles, or a few words of conversation. The urgency of their needs could generate a kind of atmospheric pressure on the smallest of small talk, charging our brief interactions with something that felt like intimacy. But at the end of the day, I disappeared into my apartment, and we were still largely strangers to one another.
Most of these faces were white; most of those experiencing homelessness here are Oregon natives, and the population of Oregon is overwhelmingly white (the original state constitution had a “whites only” clause). Oregon has a history of racial exclusion and discriminatory housing practices that are very much a part of its present; as of this writing, thousands of Portland’s African American homeowners have been pushed out of their historic neighborhoods (which were created by redlining) to the city’s edges. But if you’re looking for diversity in Portland, the shelter is a good place to visit. Between 2013 and 2015, the number of unsheltered African Americans jumped by 48 percent. African Americans make up 7 percent of the general population in Portland, and 25 percent of those without housing. Homelessness is also on the rise among other minority groups, women, and families.
Why is this happening? Homelessness, as everyone to whom I spoke kept reminding me, is a multidimensional problem. An incomplete list of reasons might include housing costs that have risen twice as fast as incomes; sharp declines in public assistance; deindustrialization, the automation of many jobs, and declining wages for low- and middle-income workers; discriminatory housing policies and practices and a housing system that perpetuates racial inequality; concentrated poverty that leaves generations of people moated without access to the opportunities available in wealthier neighborhoods; inadequate or unavailable psychiatric and health care; systemic racism in our criminal justice system, our schools, our job market, our public services; breakdowns in the foster-care system; and decades of erosion of the federal budget for housing assistance, which, adjusting for inflation, is about half of what it was in 1979.
Our poorest citizens—disproportionately people of color—continue to function as America’s fleshy insulation system, the shock absorbers who bear the brunt of the impact when rents skyrocket or jobs dry up. For many chronically homeless people, today’s “housing crisis” has been ongoing for decades. But it’s only recently—now that the blast radius has spread to white middle-class families—that we have begun to define Portland’s lack of affordable housing as a “state of emergency.” Upsettingly and unsurprisingly, the greater the incomes of those impacted, the more attention we pay to escalating rents and no-cause evictions. A 2016 report from Metro’s Equitable Housing Initiative noted:
“Even households with moderate incomes are finding themselves priced out of neighborhoods where they work or go to school.”
■ ■
In September 2015, Mayor Charlie Hales declared a “state of emergency” to address homelessness, as did Los Angeles, Seattle, and the state of Hawaii. Practically, this permitted West Coast mayors to fast-track new emergency shelters and to jump certain bureaucratic hurdles, with the goal of improving the lives of the thousands of men, women, and children sleeping outside each night. Hales’s decision came at a moment when Portland’s unsheltered population outnumbered the available beds three to one. Josh Alpert, Hales’s chief of staff and point person for the new strategy, said that Portland should be able to do much more for those living on its streets, much faster. The city opened a stopgap shelter for men in a former business school. It opened a temporary shelter for women and couples in the Army Reserve Center. City and county leaders pledged $30 million toward shelter beds, affordable apartment units, and rental protections.
Not everyone embraced the new initiatives. Some Portlanders complained about feeling unsafe in their neighborhoods; many business owners and homeowners alike were upset about what one commenter referred to in an online post as “the recreational homeless who are camping, fucking, and doing drugs in our doorways.” And I’ll admit to feeling alarmed by the marked increase of tarps lashed to trees and pup tents pitched on the sidewalks.
“We are making it far too easy for people to be homeless,” I heard several people complain. Was this true?
On a rainy October morning, I put the question to Dan, one of the men who staffed the shelter next door, a funny middle-aged guy and a benign flirt who could drink his body weight in Mountain Dew. He shook his head.
“Portland is a liberal city, it’s tolerant, it’s got a temperate climate.” But he told me he doubted that people were getting on buses in Philly and Dallas and “coming to Portland to be homeless,” as if it were the Disney World of homelessness. “Most of the people who you see on the street here were born in Oregon.”
I’ve heard this referred to as the “perverse incentive problem,” the idea that offering more services will draw even more homeless men and women to Portland. A version of “If you build it, they will come.” Those involved in homeless advocacy work call it “the magnet myth”—the notion that Portland, because of its progressive politics and relatively mild weather, holds a special attraction for homeless people, particularly young ones. In 2015, the Oregonian ran a special section on homelessness, which called this view an “oversimplification.” Portland does seem to attract more people without shelter than other parts of the country; but that appears to be true of cities generally. Urban areas usually have more services for the homeless than rural places, and if you are carless, or disabled, or sick, or penniless, the density of a city makes these services easier to access.
The Portland Housing Bureau issued a reminder that part of what presumably has made Portland so attractive to many liberal-minded people is its “culture of caring.”
“The wider community also has a stake in ending homelessness. As members of a community,” writes the Portland Housing Bureau to Multnomah County, “we want to take care of our citizens, including those with illnesses or disabilities who cannot care for themselves. In addition, all of us want safe, clean and livable streets and neighborhoods.”
Who would disagree? But some Portlanders felt that the campsites under bridges and on public property had made their neighborhoods less clean, less safe, less livable.
Biking down the Springwater Corridor during this period, a gorgeous twenty-one-mile trail along the Willamette River, you would have found a blue heron sanctuary and scenic buttes covered in firs and also hundreds of tent campers. Local residents who lived near Eighty-Second Street, where most of these tents were concentrated, complained of crime, drug use, pollution, and noise. Some bike commuters reported that they no longer felt safe along the trail, and asked the city to clean up a strip they’d nicknamed the “Avenue of Terror.”
“I mean, we’re calling it the ‘Avenue of Terror’? That’s not a nature trail anymore,” a comedian joked at an open mic near our apartment, where my boyfriend and I went not long after we’d moved to Barber Block.
The room was mostly silent (it was also mostly white, a bald, inescapable fact of life in Portland that nearly all of the comedians worked into their sets, finding dozens of scaldingly funny ways to tell us how discomfiting it felt to play to a nearly all-white house). I remember thinking that maybe everybody’s conflicted attitudes about the homeless camps had created some kind of impenetrable fog in the bar, an earnest anxiety so thick that no joke could cut through it.
Despair can function as an analgesic, numbing us to our shared responsibility for this crisis in progress. It can be almost comforting to yield to despair, in the face of vocabulary like “growing wealth disparity,” and “climbing housing costs,” which evoke a sense of inertial forces, ungovernable and unstoppable as the shifting of tectonic plates, continental drift. Or, for an even uglier metaphor, the runaway growth of subdividing cancer cells. In Portland, for example, journalists have been writing about the homeless camps “mu
shrooming” throughout the urban woods and public plazas of downtown Portland—a word I’ve used myself to describe the scene, as if the proliferation of human beings sleeping under tarps and cardboard were the result of unusually heavy rains.
But just like “natural” disasters in the Anthropocene, housing bubbles and market crashes have human authors:
“‘Millions die’ was ultimately a policy choice . . .” writes Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts. “The victims had to be comprehensively defeated well in advance of their slow withering into dust.”
Davis was talking about famines in the “golden age” of liberal capitalism, but the same statement applies to the overlapping crises of our present moment.
A Room Becomes Home
One day at the end of my first Oregonian summer, I surprised myself by calling the bank and requesting that they change the address on my checkbooks. I started buying my insurance through Oregon’s Health Co-Op. My boyfriend’s sister gave me a Ducks T-shirt, so that I could camouflage myself as a local sports fan. My agent shipped all the mail she’d collected for me over the past half decade to the Barber Block apartment. My boyfriend gave me a waterproof jacket for the winter rains, the knee-length shroud of resignation that Oregonians wear from October to March. I watched the salmon become suicidally amorous in late red September, muscling up Eagle Creek with the last of their strength to spawn and die. I learned that Couch Street in downtown Portland is actually pronounced “Cooch,” as in 2 Live Crew’s “Pop That Coochie.” I watched leaves curl and fall off the trees in our neighborhood, snow ghosting over them. I ceased to feel shock when I looked up from lacing my sneaker on the Burnside Bridge and rediscovered the flickery outline of Mount Hood. The cashiers knew my name at the Jackson’s minimart. One of them, Janice, gave me a Christmas card with a candy cane taped on it; I felt elated, even after I watched her hand one to the guy buying Max Caf coffee behind me. Once or twice, a new acquaintance greeted me by name on the street, a dizzying collision in the middle of an otherwise anonymous weekday. I started feeling a little less like a silhouette. We bought a table with feet like lion’s paws, or perhaps a lion pretending good-naturedly to be a table, and a chest of drawers. I unpacked the rest of my seventy-pound suitcase.
