Hammers and Nails

Today we took a walking tour of the Lower East Side. We got to visit the Tenemant Museum and see an apartment of one of the Irish Settlers from the 1800's. Very small apartments back then, 3 rooms (a bedroom, living room and small kitchen that only fit a stove). To potty one had to hike outside and use the outhouse. Our visit was eye opening and frustrating at the same time; frustrating to think that while we have advance a lot as a society, we still have poverty all these years later, it just looks different.

Personally I've been studying the topic of poverty for quite some time now. It's actually the social issue that propelled me in to the field of service-learning when I too was a college student. But my lens of how we address the topic, the people who experience it and our ideas for solutions have drastically shifted over the years. Examining the role that choice plays is critical, but also eye opening; as our class is starting to see there is a bigger social fabric that we are all a part of and many factors contributing to a person's ability to make the right or "better" choice.

As we question society's choices on which laws get passed, what programs we create and how we need to both collectively and individually address the issues of affordable housing, access to food, fair wage, etc we also need to culturally shift our lens to find solutions that have yet to be created. As Haley said yesterday, "When your holding a hammer everything looks like nails". I think we've been holding hammers for too long and we need to put down our hammers so that we can see that we are looking at more than just nails. Fighting poverty with the criminal justice system and charity alone are not working. Passing laws that punish people for being sleeping in certain parts of the city only perpetuate the problem. Take the no horizontal law in San Francisco as an example which makes it illegal to be in a horizontal position if you are in a public space like a park or bust stop. The law is very specifically targeted towards the homeless who often resort to subway stations or park benches too get a little shut eye. By making it illegal means they can be cited and fined, if they don't pay their fines they are cited again, so many citations in your record turns in to a felony, a felony prevents you from ever getting permanent housing because so many landlords won't take the chance on someone who has a record. So where does that person go? What options do they have? Is access to housing a basic human right and if so, who's responsibility is it to provide it? Who pays for it? What alternatives have we not considered as a society? How do we think about shared land cooperatives, community housing initatives and altering zoning regulations. Should making affordable housing be mandatory? In New York City alone there are nearly 59,000 homeless people, 22,000 of them are children whose families have no other option but to sleep in a shelter at night. But get this, a recent count of the vacant building spaces found that there are enough spaces to house 199,000+ people. In other words there is 3xs as much vacant space in NYC as there are homeless people! (Source:Uneven Growth, MoMa exhibit) 

So is it the people or the system? It's certainly not an issue of availability, it's an issue of access and affordability and we have to move away from market rate housing as our only way of thinking about housing if we are going to make housing affordable.

Posted by Renee Sedlacek