When Did We Stop Seeing Poverty?

people walking by

This piece focuses on history, money and class. It might scare you, and it might make you mad, but it asks some important questions. When did we, as a nation, start to confuse poverty with immoral behavior? When did we become so uncomfortable talking about poor people’s lives that we just stopped seeing poverty?

For most of human history, transience was pretty common. We talk a little bit about that here. Whether from feudalism, natural disaster, slavery, sharecropping, work camps or boarding houses, well into this century people slept wherever property owners and bosses allowed or told them to sleep.

The biggest shift in this dynamic happened after World War II. With the GI Bill, access to “home ownership” and higher education massively expanded. This was what some people would now call a “government handout”. In any case, it shifted the idea of what “home” meant. No longer just a building or a piece of land, home became an idea about what it meant to be an upstanding citizen. And socially, that meant mass consumption, keeping up with the Joneses, car ownership and myriad other forms of accumulating and displaying wealth. These then started to dictate how the country thought about infrastructure and social policy. I’ll save that part for later.

That was a while ago. So didn’t we learn anything since? Well, sort of. Many who consider themselves progressively-minded like to think of the late 1960s and early 1970s as a move away from mass consumption and toward a more compassionate, poverty-aware, and globally-minded politics. And for many individuals, there was a shift in their mindset. Structurally, however, that’s only part of the story.

Seeing Poverty and the ‘White Flight’

When the social movements of the 1960s faded and the people involved “grew up” – I’m choosing that terminology carefully—most of them “settled down” in one place. They got married, had children, got jobs, and bought houses. Their priorities changed. They also, importantly, bought these houses further and further away from the people they considered poor. The racial tensions and uprisings in major cities across America in the 1960s also led to “white flight.” This might more accurately be referred to as “the flight of white people and anyone else who could afford it.”

And yet, this is where some interesting statistics start to help us understand the American shift in attitudes toward poverty in general, specifically in the last 70 years. As it turns out, almost all Americans think they are middle class. According to a 2015 study by the Pew research center, a full 87% of Americans surveyed identified as falling somewhere within the middle class, including the three categories of lower middle class (29%), middle class (47%) and upper middle class (11%).

Much of the reporting has focused on how people who make a lot of money tend to identify as middle class. (This includes those with six figure salaries). Just as interesting, only 27% of people living in households earning less than $30,000 a year identified as lower class. What these statistics don’t reflect, therefore is actual income discrepancy. (51% of people in the six figure bracket identified as middle-middle class. So did 34% of people earning $30,000 or less.)

Instead, it shows us that most of us believe, and believe strongly, that we are part of Middle Class America. That comes with respectability. It comes with a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality. Homeless people bear the brunt of our connecting money to morality. This is because they are poverty’s most in-your-face representation when you leave the confines of your job or suburban neighborhood.

Our Own Precarious Financial Status

Homeless people are also a reminder of something uncomfortable: the realities of our actual financial situations. Two thirds of Americans have no savings at all. Only 37% of those surveyed could cover a $500 to $1,000 financial emergency in cash. Of course, that’s not even a big financial emergency. (18 hours of daycare a week, in South Carolina costs $600 in a month. I speak from experience).

So, what does all of this have to do with homelessness? When we see someone living on the streets, or panhandling, or camped out under an overpass, it feels like a slap in the face. Looking at those people as human beings with full lives, stories and circumstances that led them to where they are might just mean confronting our own very real instability. And who would want to do that? So we start differentiating between “us” who have homes and paychecks that come regularly, and “them.”

This is where stigma comes in. Seeing homeless people as drug addicts, irresponsible, crazy, lazy, criminal or dangerous means we don’t have to consider them as part of “our” American middle-class society. Clearly, if so many of us think we’re part of that middle class society, it’s something that means a lot to us.

But here’s the thing: once we listen to the stories of people who don’t have stable housing, things become much clearer. They are human beings, just like everyone else we consider “normal.” Our counterparts have worked hard in their lives, loved people, and they feel pain and cold and wind. They’ve probably even wanted the same things you do, including that white picket fence, 2.3 kids and maybe even the dog. The difference, then, is not degeneracy. It’s personal history and how rough their lives have been. Until we really get that, homelessness is impossible to “fix.”

What Can You Do? Get Involved!

Your voice can help end homelessness. We’ve made it easy for you to contact your federal and state legislators. Tell them ending homelessness is a priority to you. Click Here to Get Involved!


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M. Nell Curran, Ph.D.

Nell Curran is a writer, scholar and educator. She has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. Her work explores the experiences of people living through and recovering from poverty, homelessness, incarceration, trauma and neglect, and the policies and programs that impact them.

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