Homelessness is What Happens When You Let the Free Market System Take Over
by John Lawrence
In an article in The California Sunday Magazine titled "3 kids. 2 paychecks. No home." about a family with two working parents that can't afford a 2 bedroom apartment in Salinas, the industrial and economic center of Monterey County, California. Salinas is the hometown of John Steinbeck and where the Steinbeck Museum is located. Steinbeck was one of the most prolific of American authors. He wrote "The Grapes of Wrath" among other novels about the homeless and poverty stricken families in the Great Depression. He wrote about the homeless guys in Monterey who lived in a place they called the Palace Flophouse in "Cannery Row" Many of his books were turned into movies including Grapes of Wrath starring Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda's Dad. Jane Fonda at age 81 is still getting herself arrested in Washington, DC for protesting about climate change.
So what's new? Steinbeck wrote about the poverty in the Salinas Valley. Candido and Brenda and their 3 kids are living out of a Toyota Sienna in a Salinas Food 4 Less parking lot.
"Now they were in the parking lot of Natividad Medical Center, just outside the emergency room. The lot was well lit, and there were bathrooms in the ER waiting room, open 24 hours. The hospital staff was mostly welcoming. At night, however, after everyone fell asleep, Candido had been noticing the tiny flicker of a lighter in a nearby pickup truck and the profile of an older man. Candido kept the van’s dome light on and made sure its doors were locked."
Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" was burned and banned. Steinbeck received death threats and the FBI put him under surveillance. He was called a communist. That was before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The book was banned in many libraries and copies were symbolically burned in towns across America. There is in America a refusal to acknowledge the rights of its poorest citizens to a life of the barest necessities for them and their children. Steinbeck wrote about poverty in the 1930s and 40s. He probably thought that his novels might have convinced enough Americans that every citizen should be entitled to a basic level of existence, but he would have been wrong about that. Almost 100 years later the situation has only gotten worse for the homeless.
"Mornings were the hardest. Everyone was achy, tired from a bad night’s sleep, and on this morning, too, it was all they could do to keep to their routine. Brenda and Candido insisted on maintaining a semblance of order. “We’re not like some people,” Candido would tell the kids. “We wash our clothes. We don’t pee outside. We keep ourselves clean.” In the hospital bathroom, while Candido got ready to go to work and Brenda stayed behind with Adelene, Frankie helped wash and dress Josephat, brushing his brother’s teeth, then his own. Breakfast was whatever Pop-Tarts or granola bars were left over from the food bank. Finally, they straightened up the van, pulled the seats back into position, and put on their seat belts, Adelene in her car seat, Frankie and Josephat in their boosters. They drove the 15 or so minutes into town, fusing with the early traffic, indistinguishable from all the other families starting their day.
"When the van stopped, the boys hopped out. They went around to the trunk, grabbed their backpacks off the built-in clothing hooks, hugged their parents, and walked through the front gate of their elementary school."
Wages for working people haven't gone up indexed for inflation since the Reagan revolution of 1980 which ushered in the second Gilded Age. Meanwhile, billionaires have accumulated more and more money not by building railroads like Jay Gould did in the first Golden age or by developing the steel industry like Andrew Carnegie did, but by manipulating financial instruments. In many cases these financial industries were hedge funds which took over industries like the Hostess Baking Company, manufacturer of Twinkies, loaded it with debt, paid themselves handsomely and then let the industry go bankrupt while thousands of employees lost their jobs. Hedge funds engage in vulture capitalism which seeks to strip a functioning company of its assets, while management and executives feast on the carcass before it is stripped bare and the employees are left to rot, many of them on the streets.
"Today, the region’s 91,000 farmworkers live with stagnant wages (the median pay for farmworkers is $12.79 per hour) and the constant threat of ICE (the majority of these laborers are undocumented). Public health officials describe an epidemic of malnutrition among the workers and their families, and hunger has become widespread. The perverse irony that “The Valley That Feeds the Nation,” the title of a colorful mural in nearby Soledad, is now struggling to feed itself has been lost on nobody. Activists argue that a lack of fair wages in agriculture, in particular, is a key driver of this food insecurity. But for now, charity is what the industry is willing to offer. Last year, at the Food Bank of Monterey County, much of the 12 million pounds of emergency food assistance it provided was donated by agricultural companies"
The Salinas Valley supplies the world with lettuce. Recently this lettuce has been banned because it has been contaminated with E. Coli. bacteria. A spokesman for the CDC said, “Heading into the Thanksgiving holiday, it is critically important to avoid buying or eating romaine lettuce from the Salinas growing area so you can protect yourself and your family.” Is this divine retribution for the many years that wealthy agricultural corporations have refused to pay their workers a living wage? A living wage would be one that allowed its workers to rent a 2 bedroom apartment in Salinas.
"By far the greatest difficulty facing Salinas families, though, is the disappearance of affordable rental housing. In recent years, tech workers from the Bay Area have been relocating to Monterey County, and there are currently plans for a commuter rail that would run from the heart of Silicon Valley to Salinas. This influx of higher-earning tenants into an already congested market has led to a rise in rents, which in turn — together with the exclusionary zoning, no-fault evictions, and barriers to new construction that have beleaguered the rest of the state — is creating unprecedented housing instability among Salinas’s working poor. Over the past eight years, there has been a 37 percent loss of low-rent units in the city, while rents have shot up by almost 60 percent since 2014 — roughly four times the national average. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the “housing wage” necessary to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment in Salinas, whose costs now exceed those of Miami and Chicago, is $29.62 per hour."
It should be pointed out that waiting for the free market to build housing that poor people can afford is like Waiting for Godot. In the play, of course, Godot never arrives. The only trend line in the case of housing is for more and more people especially older and sicker people to be kicked out onto the street. That is the absolute right of landlords to do so if the tenants cannot come up with the rent. In California there is a tiny glimmer of hope, however, as a rent control law will go into effect January 1, 2020. This law will limit rent increases to 5% a year, small comfort to those whose wages will not go up by that amount and who cannot afford the inflated rental prices in the first place.
"Increasingly, the city’s residents have found themselves bereft of adequate shelter altogether. “There’s always been poverty here,” said Reyes Bonilla, who runs Community Homeless Solutions, a local nonprofit. “But homelessness on this scale? It’s an entirely new thing.” He added that many of those coming to his organization for support defy the stereotypes about homelessness: The vast majority of them are working and have simply been priced out of a place to live. Families are doubling and tripling up in overcrowded, substandard conditions; they’re resorting to garages and toolsheds, cars and abandoned properties. In Monterey County, approximately 8,000 schoolchildren were homeless last year, more than San Francisco and San Jose combined. For many of these kids, the safest, most dependable part of their lives is the school they attend."
If there is little hope for a better life even among families in which 2 parents are working full time, what does this say about the future of America? It is the recipe for more gang violence, more drug trafficing, more lives lived on the lam. If one cannot support one's family by legal means, people often resort to illegal means and violence usually goes right along with it. This is the recipe that has been followed in poverty stricken areas of Honduras and Guatemala resulting in mass migrations to the US border of people fleeing poverty and violence. But here, even if they got in, they would only find more poverty and the result of not even having a roof over their heads which they probably had where they came from where rents are not so outlandish.
The US could do a lot to ameliorate this situation not only here but abroad as well. Instead, America is focused on spending a trillion dollars a year on a military-industrial complex whose main job is to use violence towards poor people who have been driven to violence because they have no hope their situations will ever get better any other way. Economic inequality is only getting worse with larger and larger shares of GDP going to those who already have more money than they could possibly spend in a 100 life times while the poor, if they're lucky, live out of Toyota Siennas.
