New Haven's IMR same as Malaysia

[Tricia Truitt]

Here's the URL to a prinatable version of this excellent article.
Printable
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4538524,00.html
or Main article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,825149,00.html

On Mon, 4 Nov 2002 14:01:13 -0800 (PST) Stephen Bezruchka
<sabez at u.washington.edu> wrote:

> US In Denial As Poverty Rises by Ed Vulliamy;
> The Guardian; November 02,
> 2002
> 
> The north wind cuts cold and sudden across the
> historic green of New
> Haven. It blows through the 'tent city' where
> the homeless huddle. And
> it blows round the spires and quadrangles of
> Yale University, one of
> America's richest Ivy League colleges.
> 
> The contrast is stark: Charlene Johnson, three
> months pregnant, emerges
> from her bivouac, worrying about the winter
> that lies between her and
> her due date. And all around are Yale's stone
> walls, elegant colonial
> churches and smart people walking past
> boutiques and coffee shops,
> carrying their course books.
> 
> 'You know what's underneath you?' challenges
> Rod Cleary, who was
> released from prison in Los Angeles after a
> conviction for gang
> fighting, found but lost a job in New Haven,
> and has now been evicted.
> 'I'll tell ya: bones. This green was a cemetery
> once; you're sitting on
> a pauper's grave. And, man, that's what it's
> going to be again if we
> ain't careful.'
> 
> Charlene fell behind with her rent in June and
> took a bribe of $200 to
> move out of her digs, so the landlord could
> hike up the price. 'It
> seemed like I had some money for once, and it
> was summer.' Her son
> Nikolas was billeted with a friend and Charlene
> started looking for a
> place with her boyfriend, Scott, hopefully
> before the cold set in.
> Without success - Scott was laid off on
> Wednesday from a construction
> firm. 'Not enough work,' he says. 'And once
> you're out, you're a speck
> of dirt on the ground, and they walk over you.'
> 
> New Haven's tent city was established after the
> authorities closed down
> a homeless overflow shelter a few weeks ago. At
> sundown yesterday it was
> to be cleared by the police, with Charlene,
> Scott, Rod and 150 others
> sent on their way into what promises to be a
> vicious winter.
> 
> New Haven is a metaphor for the America which
> on Tuesday elects its
> Senate and House of Representatives. It is the
> country's fourth poorest
> city, where the ghetto laps at the walls of a
> university worth $11
> billion (£7bn) in tax-exempt endowments,
> educating America's next
> generation of rulers. A sign at the freeway
> turn-off advertises New
> Haven as the birthplace of President George
> Bush.
> 
> It is a city with the same infant mortality
> rate as Malaysia and a
> terrifying rate of deaths from Aids - one day
> care centre alone
> commemorated the loss of 600 clients at a
> memorial service on Wednesday.
> But it is located in America' richest state,
> Connecticut, which has,
> proportionally, more millionaires than any
> other.
> 
> This is the super-rich New York hinterland for
> those too wealthy even to
> feel the pinch on Wall Street. It is called the
> 'Zebra Coast', laid out
> in strips of black/white, black/white;
> poor/rich, poor/rich. And in New
> Haven the polarity is underpinned by the
> history of Yale University's
> engagement in the slave trade - currently being
>  excavated by some of
> its own students.
> 
> 'New Haven,' says the Rev David Lee of Varick
> Church in the city's
> northwestern ghetto, 'is a microcosm of
> America. It's the vicious cycle
> between rich and poor and the system of
> exploitation. The wealth is in
> your face all the time, something you can never
> aspire to. It's like
> being a kid in a candy store, being told you
> can look but you can't
> never have a lollipop.'
> 
> The mall downtown, on the 'wrong' side of the
> green, is a ghost mall;
> just a few 'hoodrats' hanging around Cross
> Flava records and security
> guards to keep them in order. 'Folks who
> commute to work,' says the boy
> behind the counter, 'they spend where they
> live. And the people who live
> here don't have anything to spend.'
> 
> Statistics released last month by the
> government census bureau show that
> for the first time in 10 years the number of
> people caught in the
> poverty trap has suddenly increased.
> Unemployment is up from 4.2 per
> cent in 2000 to 5.7 per cent last year. While
> the middle class shrinks,
> the numbers living below the official poverty
> line of $18,104 a year for
> a family of four has shot up to 33 million -
> from 11.3 to 11.7 per cent.
> That's the first increase since 1992.
> 
> While President Bush's windfall tax breaks to
> the super-rich breezed
> through Congress (with Democratic help), the
> proposed rise in the
> minimum wage is frozen.
> 
> The proportion of children without health cover
> has increased from 63.8
> per cent to 67.1 per cent. The poverty rate for
> children in the US is
> worse than in 19 'rich' countries, according to
> a study by the
> University of Michigan.
> 
> Income statistics showed the first significant
> decline in average income
> among blacks in two decades; the white average
> also fell, and only
> Hispanics maintained their level.
> 
> Statisticians are struck by differences between
> this dive and the usual
> downward turns that accompany recessions. 'The
> poor are trailing further
> behind than in the past,' says Robert
> Greenstein of the Centre on Budget
> and Policy Priorities in Washington. 'The
> increase in poverty is likely
> to be larger in 2002.'
> 
> Such is the power of money in Connecticut and
> its neighbours that the
> North-East was the only region in the country
> in which the mean income
> did not decline. But the price was paid here
> where Elm Street, after
> skirting the mock-Oxbridge walls and towers of
> Yale, twists abruptly
> into New Haven's own nightmare.
> 
> Students have been given special maps, and
> advice not to venture past
> the CITGO gas station, where the ghetto begins.
> Houses are boarded up
> and gas stations take cash only - payable up
> front - and have
> bullet-proof glass and bars at the pay point.
> Sandwich and gift card
> stores also deal in Western Union money
> transfers, like the one Carl
> Robbins is sending back to his family in
> Kingston, Jamaica - $150 out of
> the $650 he grossed this week as a hospital
> janitor.
> 
> At the gas station on Dixwell Avenue, Everton
> Mayne gets his money back
> on a pack of Newport cigarettes because he has
> found the same pack down
> the road four cents cheaper. 'You got to think
> about these things,' he
> cautions.
> 
> Monica Osborn works in the operating rooms at
> Yale and New Haven
> Hospital, and in 11 years has increased her
> wage from $8 to $13 an hour
> (Connecticut calculates that $17 is the
> 'liveable wage'). Recently her
> son suffered concussion and, although she works
> at a hospital, health
> insurance comes extra and she was caught out.
> Her employer docked the
> cost of treatment from her wages, leaving her
> to manage for two months
> on $300 for a family of four. 'I can feel it
> getting worse,' she says.
> 'Trying to feed the kids, we all have two,
> maybe three, jobs. I do hair
> braiding to get by.'
> 
> Wages at the university are a little better,
> says Mark Wilson, who for
> years worked on the ancillary workforce before
> becoming an officer of
> the hotel and catering workers' union that
> fought to close what it calls
> the 'casual pipeline' whereby the university
> would lay off employees the
> day before it was obliged to take them on
> staff.
> 
> 'I don't actually wipe their butts,' says
> Wesley Smith, earning $11 an
> hour loading a trolley full of students' dirty
> laundry, 'but I got to
> get clean what they wipe off.'
> 
> Yale is exempt from paying city taxes, except
> on commercial property it
> owns. But a consortium of community groups
> asked the university to
> donate a single day's interest on its invested
> endowment - that's $5.2
> million - to the city's public schools. So far,
> no response.
> 
> 'We just wanted some kind of partnership,' says
> the Rev David Lee, who -
> as a graduate of Yale Divinity School - this
> year harvested enough
> signatures to seek election to the university
> board. He was seen off by
> the architect Maya Li, in what was regarded as
> a brazen snub to what
> Lee's church calls 'the host community'.
> 
> Dixwell Avenue is where Lee tries 'to put a bit
> of hope back in people's
> eyes that's just been taken away'. He says: 'I
> can feel it, just over
> the past year; people is sinking back down.
> It's hard to keep people off
> drugs. It's hard to tell people not to go to
> crime, when they made that
> extra effort to straighten out, then got beaten
> back down again. I had a
> man in my congregation come to me on Sunday
> saying his daughter who is
> 13 was considering suicide.'
> 
> There is now a brutally simple barometer of
> poverty in modern America:
> HIV.
> 
> At the Immanuel Baptist Church on Chapel
> Street, a few blocks from fancy
> restaurants where the young elite go for
> dinner, there was a service
> with a difference on Wednesday. The Aids
> Interfaith Network was
> commemorating the lives of 600 of its clients
> who have died of the
> disease since it was established 15 years ago.
> 
> Some of the congregation were living with HIV,
> a couple in wheelchairs;
> others were those who work with and for them.
> The network was set up by
> a group of churches to fill the abyss between a
> dire need and the
> malfunctioning of America' commercial
> healthcare system.
> 
> Project director Joyce Poole says: 'Aids has
> become the disease of the
> poor - 80 to 90 per cent of our clients are
> living below the poverty
> level; 15 per cent are homeless; most have not
> worked in years. Half are
> dually diagnosed with HIV and hepatitis C. If
> you can't support
> yourself, you do it by other means, and those
> means are often criminal.
> Most of our clients have had at least one
> encounter with the Department
> of Corrections.'
> 
> Yet Connecticut's Aids prevention budget has
> just been cut by 30 per
> cent - due, says America's richest state, to
> the economic downturn.
> 'This is a discourse,' says Poole, 'about
> poverty.' And as America
> prepares to go to the polls, the gap between
> rich and poor is widening
> by the day.
> 
>                    Hard times
> 
>           · One in 11 families, one in nine
> Americans, and one in six
> children are officially poor.
> 
>           · The most affluent fifth of the
> population received half of
> all household income last year. The poorest
> fifth got 3.5 per cent.
> 
>           · The official poverty line is an
> income of $18,104 pa
> (£11,570) for a family of four. A single parent
> of two working full-time
> for a minimum wage would make $10,712 (£6,846).
> 
>           · 40 per cent of homeless men are
> veterans.
> 
>   · Up to a fifth of America's food, worth
> $31bn, goes to waste
> each year, with 130lb of food per person ending
> up in landfills.
> 
>