Tales of Two Americas

by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)

  Even after Hurricane Andrew came marauding across South Florida, flooding buildings and hanging boats in the trees, it did not diminish our house’s power to locate me in time and space. I’d internalized its layout, which was the grid that supported my mental life. When our house was bulldozed, it continued to stand indestructibly in my imagination. My siblings and my parents are still living ghostly lives in that house; sometimes we bump into one another there, reminiscing.

  Not everybody gets a sturdy brick-and-mortar binding for this compendium of sense experience. So many people do not have that real estate in their past. It’s a luxury property, I’ve come to realize—a childhood home in the imagination. A stable referent, a sanctuary from which you can never be truly exiled. If you never had a home in the past, to what do you anchor your present?

  “I ran away when I was very young,” one of the men at the shelter told me. “I became a night boy.”

  ■ ■

  In November 2015, our eighth offer was accepted, our mortgage loan was approved, and to our astonishment and joy, we owned a home in Southeast Portland. After the apartment, it felt cavernous to me. It was a three-bedroom Victorian house, one of the oldest on the block, built in 1888, a “historic charmer,” as the Realtor kept referring to it, while sliding a pocket door into and out of the living room wall like the tongue of a cartoon frog. A wavy green light filtered through the many windows. Shadows flowed over the walls in the late afternoon, fluctuating ultrasounds of the weather moving all around us. We had a real yard, with a no-shit cherry tree and vividly hued mosses that really looked a lot like grass to me, a sort of psychedelic grass. I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever woken up in. Our new house was just south of Powell, a busy street, and within sight of a Jack in the Box. “Check your privilege at that Jack in the Box,” joked a New York friend when she visited. But to me, this street felt residential, in a very unfamiliar way. It was tree lined, and blushing with rosebushes. The house did not feel like it belonged to us, not at all, but I was grateful to live in such an old place, one that felt happily haunted by many other families’ stories.

  After we signed the papers, we drove over and stood on the lawn under a full moon. All the windows were dark, and I had a disorienting moment looking up at them and imagining our view from Barber Block. Here, the streets were so quiet. We were two miles from our old apartment. Easily, I could imagine how quickly a sort of amnesia might kick in; how tempting it would be to let this new silence swaddle us. “Happiness” does not have to be synonymous with “complacency,” of course. But now I better understood how a person might unconsciously begin to draw the curtains, turning a home into a walled garden. Would we forget about our homeless neighbors if we were no longer living within earshot of one another? If we weren’t literally rubbing shoulders? On our first night in the new house, this seemed like something dangerous to guard against.

  Not long after we moved in, between February and March 2016, rents rose by 14 percent—again, the fastest escalation in the country. My fiancé and I felt like we’d run into a fortress just before the drawbridge closed; we were relieved to be in our new home, and for me it was a guilty relief, a queasy relief. Tell me, how do you celebrate a homecoming when you know that so many people are being left on the other side of the moat? How do you keep your relief, your happiness, from moating you further? I was afraid to come home, to relax into the new happiness. Personal happiness seemed like a limp response to a problem that required, as the friend of mine in politics put it, “an Iron Giant.” The more intensely I came to know the pleasure of coming home, the more outrageous it seemed to me that so many thousands of Americans living on the streets had been abandoned to “their” fate, while “we” fell safely asleep. Home prices soared. Inventory was at a historic low. No-cause evictions were on the rise, with some people reporting five-hundred-dollar jumps in their rent overnight.

  Almost everybody in Portland was now feeling insecure about housing. At precisely this moment, the city took bold action on behalf of its homeless citizens. In February 2016, Mayor Hales legalized overnight camping on sidewalks and public rights of way, the “Safe Sleep Policy.” Between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., homeless people could now sleep in their cars in certain authorized parking lots; they could pitch tents in well-lit areas without fear of being moved along by police. The city released a statement explaining the rationale behind the policy:

  “Most of our homeless population are simply looking for a safe night’s sleep, and have suffered needless trauma that comes with uncertainty about where that safe night’s sleep can be.”

  Hales’s chief of staff, Josh Alpert, described this as a temporary measure—a way to make life safer and easier for people living without housing until the city could get the funding together for more shelter beds.

  In late April 2016, half a dozen business and neighborhood groups, including the Portland Business Alliance, filed a lawsuit against the city. As I write, they are currently seeking an injunction to bar the mayor from enforcing the policy. The plaintiffs say they are not antihomeless; some are activists who fear that Hales’s measure is “inhumane.” Hales’s response? “We are going to tolerate some level of street homelessness until we have enough shelter beds.” Wasn’t it inhumane, he countered, to sweep people who had nowhere else to go, when the city is running such a deficit of shelter space?

  A friend of mine who works in city politics expressed his frustration with people blaming the mayor’s office for the growing ranks of Portland’s homeless: “They don’t understand how the city is hamstrung. We need an extra hundred billion a year at a national level. No local entity or state has that fund-raising power. If it’s not a federal solution, I think we are in trouble.”

  And I thought of the faceless bodies sleeping in bags on the streets, which I continued to see in our new neighborhood, as I crossed the train tracks at Division on my way home. Zip up. Good luck.

  Homelessness in Portland: Worse or More Visible?

  In Kevin Brockmeier’s novel The Illumination, human pain begins to glow. Auras appear around people’s fractured bones and migraines, their pain now fanning out of them, a global light show. A disk of fire hovers above an athlete’s ruptured disk. Ulcerating sores shine as bright as lightbulbs through a woman’s closed mouth. Skin becomes a lampshade for radiant pain.

  What is the dark genius of this premise? It indicts all of us. It exposes the willfulness of our daily blindness. And the myth that it’s our ignorance of the suffering of others that prevents us from acting on their behalf. It’s a book about the open secret of suffering.

  According to the most recent Point-in-Time count performed by the city, the number of unsheltered people in Portland on any given night did not increase between 2013 and 2015. At that time, there were more than thirty-eight hundred people sleeping on the street or in shelters. Nearly everyone here will tell you that the crisis is getting worse. But perhaps the city’s lenient camping policy has simply made the suffering of homeless people more visible.

  I was worried that if I moved off Barber Block, I’d lose touch with our homeless neighbors’ need; in fact, the challenge has not been losing sight of it but staying sensitized to it. An ambulatory example, from my ordinary commute down Milwaukie Avenue toward our new house:

  On my walk home, I do not give a dollar to a tall, furious white man who stumbles down the street cursing at me, choking on the bone of some undislodgeable pain.

  On my walk home, I pause over the sleeping body of an obese African American man, his unconscious body flung over a tree root, a Big Gulp alive with ants next to his walker. He is sleeping on the bare ground, exhaling a sticky stillness. If he were a character in Brockmeier’s novel, I would be blinded by the radiant light pouring out of him. A nova would have fanned out of his skull, perhaps, or exploded from his heaving chest, slicing through the Douglas firs and X-raying the baseball diamond, dilating the pupils of
the three young blond children on the Go Wheelie. But in this universe, I barely break pace. This is not an unusual sight in my neighborhood, a man sleeping with his head on a tree root.

  St. Francis Dining Hall/Staying on the Pommel

  “Socks! Oh, please ask people to donate socks.”

  Sue Unger, the director of Social Ministries for St. Francis Church, stared hopefully up at me, her soft eyes’ powerful appeal focused and magnified by her glasses. It was April, and I’d asked Sue if I could interview her, to learn more about her work as the director; I had served food and scraped plates alongside Sue, but this was our first in-depth conversation. Her tone gave me the definite sense that if our hour together produced even a dozen more clean, balled socks for her guests, she would deem this interview time well spent.

  I had started volunteering at the St. Francis Dining Hall after we’d moved to the new house. It’s located a few blocks south from our old apartment. For a while, I’d been resistant to the idea of working at a shelter. My fear was that I’d drown there. The need seemed overwhelming. I grew up in America. Horrifyingly, I have internalized a warping, heart-deforming attitude toward basically all verbs—a market logic when it comes to evaluating the risk: reward/cost: value of every human activity. Unregulated, the drive to “maximize” profit from every investment of time would, I’m certain, destroy my life. If I’m not vigilant, these kinds of calculations, of which I’m often barely aware, can tilt me toward failures of compassion. For example: I saw the work being done at the St. Francis Dining Hall, and I thought, Fuck, this is Sisyphean.

  Volunteers were wiping tables in circles. They were setting out rounds of bread, vases of fresh lilacs, salt and pepper shakers. Two hours from now, they would clear the dining hall and begin to prepare the next meal. I saw this, and I must have done some quick, unconscious math, because I had this thought: Your time would be worth more elsewhere. The ugliest voices in me, invoking the “big picture” and the “grand scheme,” protested: Keeping a few dozen people fed, what good does that really do? Surely this was simply “treating the symptom,” handing out a piece of buttered bread. I’m really not sure what my grandiose advisers thought I should do instead. But according to this chorus, serving bread and salad and chicken to fifty or so homeless men and women was a bad investment. Energy unwisely spent, when I could be helping by . . . and here, the voices fell silent. Revealed for what they are: voices that cover for fear, laziness, selfishness, hopelessness, a cowardly egotism.

  The first thing I learned at St. Francis is that many different kinds of sustenance are exchanged between servers and guests at a dining hall, and that the nourishment is very mutual. I also learned from veteran servers that this is a skill: giving of yourself without going numb, staying open, avoiding burnout. The people who work at the shelter have learned how to swim through the need without drowning in it. They are shrinking the ocean of need, drop by drop. Many of the volunteers I’ve met at the St. Francis Dining Hall are parishioners, and many are simply committed to helping this population; at least half of the volunteers on my first night were homeless themselves.

  “If we had funding for a few steady employees, it would make a big difference.” Sue sighed. “When Eric gets sick, we have no cook. If I’m sick, there’s nobody to back me up.”

  The St. Francis Dining Hall is plagued by the same week-to-week instability as the population it serves. Nevertheless, they keep their doors open; this past winter, they hosted an emergency cold-weather shelter, sometimes single-handedly staffed by Sue for hours at a time.

  “Hospitality,” Sue told me. “That’s our mission, to extend hospitality to our guests.”

  It is hard to be hospitable. The need is bottomless; how much should we give? At the shelter, I saw an outflow of energy that cannot be quantized.

  The people who work here, day after day, have developed a remarkable equipoise. It’s not callousness—Sue has highly sensitive antennae out, attuned to the fluctuating emotions of everyone under this roof, staff and guests. But somehow she isn’t knocked off the pommel. I watched her go from table to table with the affect of a no-nonsense den mother, checking in on people. She brought people clean socks and Q-tips, Advil for a headache or a fever. She seemed to know everybody’s name, and I thought about my first months in Portland, what a joy it had been to exist for someone as “Karen,” a word floated out to me, buoylike; it was my birth name, and it was always a homecoming to be greeted and known.

  After ladling out salad greens and cheddary macaroni, I was asked to help with cleanup. In the kitchen, I found a bearded, middle-aged man staring down with rapt concentration at a flat object on his palm. He had a walking cane painted purple and gold, decorated with swirling peacocks. His eyes loomed over me, clouded with agitation. Now I recognized what he was holding: the mixing blades. And I, too, was hypnotized by the way the steel tapered to a point.

  “You know you’re not supposed to be back here, Michael.”

  Sue materialized behind me; before I could ask what to do, she calmly plucked the mixing blades from him and guided him toward the door.

  On his way out, Michael accidentally kicked the doorjamb loose. Now the door refused to stay open. Twelve times, twenty times, he tried to kick it back under the door. A three-inch triangle of wood had plunged Michael into hell. His face was balloon-taut and agonized. He kicked with such urgency that I was afraid to approach him. He would be tethered to this spot forever, it occurred to me, unless somebody could help him to stake that door back into place.

  A teenage volunteer from the high school, a sweet kid who scooped ice cream like he was digging toward Jules Verne’s center of the Earth, his small bicep bulging, paused to see what was causing Michael such distress. He knelt and made a gentle adjustment, and then Michael exhaled in relief, free to go.

  ■ ■

  On another shift at St. Francis, several weeks later, I went after the tall stock pots with steel wool. Very old stains webbed the bottoms and sides of many of them; scrub as you might, certain stains would not lift; I found this a tough reconciliation. Things were cleaner than they’d been, but they did not look clean. The part of me that wanted everything sparkling had a hard time volunteering in this kitchen.

  The next time, I volunteered to wash the trays with the aid of a heavy-duty industrial dishwasher. All I had to do was rinse and load them. Immediately, I blinded myself with the spray from a high-pressure nozzle. Was there no way to modulate this fire hose? Too embarrassed to ask for help, I got everything wet. By the time the pots were clean, I looked like someone who had just returned from a day pass at the water park. My hoodie was thoroughly soaked, my hair matted to my skull.

  John, a man who looked so much like my father, who had been living on the streets for most of his life, came in to see how I was doing. Watching me from the splash zone, he did not disguise his alarm.

  “Try stacking them like this,” he said, and then completed a load in approximately a quarter of the time that it had taken me.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll try.”

  The trays were coming so much faster than I could wash them.

  Dozens of ketchup-colored trays piled up beside me. I shot water at the brainlike spatter of calcified spaghetti, aware that I was close to tears.

  “You will learn your own system,” John kept repeating kindly by my side, as if trying to convince himself of this. “We all have to start somewhere.”

  ■ ■

  I am writing this having recently cast my first ballot as an Oregonian for Portland’s mayoral election. Our mayor-elect, Ted Wheeler, put affordable housing and homelessness at the center of his campaign. He has proposed a Tenant Bill of Rights to protect people from spiking rents and no-cause evictions. Citing Salt Lake City and San Antonio as models, Wheeler has promised to help people transition from the street to safe, stable homes. In a statement issued by Wheeler in December 2015 while running for electio
n, our future mayor committed to ensuring that everyone on Portland’s streets would have “the option to sleep inside” by the second year of his administration. He also made this bold pledge: “For every investment made to place someone in a shelter bed, parallel dollars need to be spent on permanent housing.” And a collection of Multnomah County advocacy groups, politicians, and service providers plan to put a $350 million bond campaign on the November ballot to build more affordable housing.

  Of course, these positive changes alone cannot counter the global economic trends that drive income inequality, or the slow violence, decades in the making, of federal budget cuts.

  I spoke by telephone to Rich Rodgers, a former adviser to the Portland City commissioner in charge of housing, and the volunteer chair of Wheeler’s housing committee, to ask for his veteran perspective on the affordable housing crisis and homelessness in Portland.

  “For the first time ever, housing is the number one issue here in Portland,” he told me.

  We discussed Mayor Hales’s permissive camping policy. Rodgers commended his chief of staff, Josh Alpert, for changing the policies around police sweeps of homeless camps. He described past raids that had ended in the destruction or confiscation of men’s and women’s few possessions—“It literally does kill people.” Camp sweeps are no longer indiscriminate; if they occur, they are meant to target criminal activity that endangers the public. Police officers are now trying to build relationships with the campers in their neighborhoods. The city is coordinating with campers to get them access to clean water, footlockers, and regular garbage pickup.