One of the really cool things about having a blog, aside from the ego and vanity, is that I can write about things as they cross my mind. Some things are optimistic, like believing that there will be enough healthy players to play in our truncated baseball season. Others are more pessimistic and dark, like believing our coronavirus pandemic will never end.
Today's topic falls in the middle, but shaded toward the darker end. For too many in our communities, what I address is closer to a preview of Armageddon than a gathering storm.
In the course of writing my book, I had the opportunity to research and reflect on the plight of the poor in our society. I concentrated my effort on the impact of the unavailability of civil legal services for poor and near-poor litigants. Thus too many people are left on their own to represent their interests as best they can. Against and opponent represented by counsel, it isn't a fair fight.
And believe me, there's a huge difference between not wanting to pay for a lawyer and being unable to pay for a lawyer. As I assert in my book, there are myriad reasons that the unable to pay cohort is ever expanding. And news flash, the poor and near-poor have as many, if not more, interactions with the law than the rest of us.
In a recent post to my Facebook page, I recalled Frederick Douglass' 1852 Fourth of July speech commonly known as, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" Douglass pays homage to the success of the American experiment in self-government, liberty from Britain's colonization, and the freedom where each can shape his own future and seek his own fortune. But then he takes a swerve and basically and asks the question paraphrased as "what's this got to do with us?" Recall that this speech was delivered 9 years before the outbreak of the Civil War, and four million people were enslaved in America. In short, there was no liberty for a slave to celebrate, independence to exercise, or freedom to live as a person might choose.
In my Facebook post, I asked a similar question, "What to the poor is the Fourth of July?" Due to their lack of economic resources, the poor have little ability to celebrate independence and "freedom" as most of us - to one degree or another - do, and have even less reason to do so. The poor are subject to all the vagaries of our society, from the pandemic induced economic "recession" to interrupted educational opportunities to being more susceptible to death from the coronavirus.
According to reports from the Center for Disease Control, hospitalization rates for non-Hispanic black persons are five times more than non-Hispanic white persons; for Hispanic/Latino persons the hospitalization rate is four times greater than for white persons. Why the difference? I assert it's lack of financial resources.
In 2018, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that 9% of whites lived in poverty while 22% of blacks and 19% of Hispanics lived in poverty. A whopping 35% of indigenous people live in poverty and 15% of those categorized as mixed races also live in poverty. Since money buys food, safe and healthy shelter, and decent health treatments is it any wonder that the poor are hit harder by the coronavirus than others in our communities?
In my book, I discuss some of the causes of poverty and how the Federal Poverty Level is calculated. To make a longer analysis short, poverty, whether situational or generational, is often random. I also assert that the determination of who is and who isn't deemed to be poor is a political calculation that bears no relationship to the lives real people live.
But one thing, in my view, that seems beyond contestation is that for the poor every day is a fight to survive. Food insecurity, housing insecurity, income insecurity, and health insecurity are always threats to their survival.
For example, over the years SNAP benefits have been steadily reduced, in part to "incentivize" those who "can work" to find a job. And those who are unable to work have found their benefits steadily reduced to the point where the benefit received often fails to meet the recipient's real needs.
But it's housing insecurity that is the gathering storm that looms on the horizon. As you know, due to the pandemic, many people lost their jobs. Those who received unemployment insurance found that there wasn't enough money to meet their basic needs, thus forcing many to either make partial rent payments or make no payments at all. Combined with the pandemic's impact on people's ability to pay their rent was the fact that many courts, save for emergency matters, closed down, thereby no eviction cases were litigated.
Given that it's now summer, and the infection rate has either flattened or been reduced, the courts like slumbering behemoths awaken from their long slumber. Thus the backlog of eviction matters will, like widgets through an assembly line, move to their inexorable conclusion. And too often the tenant, thrust into a world he doesn't know, will more often than not be swept along by the process to arrive at an ultimate judicial order declaring that he (and maybe his family) have a date certain to move out and surrendering their premises.
Most tenants will not have benefit of counsel during these proceedings. Most won't know their rights, or how to present their cases to the court. Many of their landlords will have counsel who know the law and how to present their cases to the courts. Representation matters.
The evicted tenant (and family) is now either housed in a shelter, couch surfing, or sleeping under overpasses. The kids, if any, may be taken by the state and placed in foster care. The tenant, now with an eviction on his record, will find it difficult to rent other premises - and having the funds for first month's rent along with a security deposit may prove nearly impossible.
Over the coming weeks, this gathering storm will hit with a vengeance, upending the lives of millions throughout the country, with all the foreseeable outcomes brought home to them and us in stark relief. This is a collateral tragedy layered over the medical tragedy we witness on the news each day.
Watch this space.....
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