NO....I'm confused about the "poor"??

[serryjw]

It sounds to me that many thousands that were evacuated were working poor homeowners that may have lived paycheck to paycheck (like most of us)but where NOT on the government handouts (welfare etc). If they were working and homeowners why is everyone treating them like they are a drain on society?
Do we have an demographics of HHI and home ownership?

[meisje]

1. Most of the properties were rentals

[wellstone dem]

2. many of the people I saw interviewed

were people who were working, nursing assistants, store clerks, etc.

[OnionPatch]

3. Common misconception

Most of the poor are "working" poor. They are the ones in all these great new jobs Bush has created in the service sector. Even those who have jobs that are a little higher on the ladder are still underpaid much of the time. My opinion is that, contrary to being a drain on society, they are the foundation of today's society. Cheap labor is the mantra of American business today. :( Most of them could not get along without it unless they made major changes.

[serryjw]

7. That's my point

Living as a working poor in NO I imagine you can still afford a small home. Cost of living must be much different than living poor in Detroit. I understand that IF they were homeowners they probably didn't have flood insurance. On a show last night they interviewed a (white) 30's female lawyer from NO. She worked 10 years to become a lawyer and has lost everything, including her ability to practice. It will take her 6 months to study and pass the TX Bar. I'm sure she will have no problem studing while living in a sheltor!:sarcasm:

[slampoet]

35. It is different from Detroit.

Having been born in Detroit and living with someone born in New Orleans, I have detected some differences.

First off. Prices to live in New Orleans were extremely cheap.
You could buy a Shotgun shack (2bed 1bath) for 60 grand in the year 2000. A family can work extra third jobs and save four years and get 10% of that, if their kids work too.

Because second, good paying jobs were VERY hard to find in New Orleans. I bough the Times-Picayune every week for 3 months during 1999 before the market fell and I couldn't find almost anything in the 5-8 fields I have experience in. Jobs asking for 5 years experience were offering $8.50 per hour.

Low rent with lower wages creates a black hole effect. An Inflation Hole where residents have a wage that wont get them through to a job in a better paying town.

Third is heat. Detroit residents need to pay for heat. This may be balanced by costs of air conditioning in NOLA. I never lived there long enough to get on a lease so i wouldn't know.

But fourth is Detroit is a city were you can't not have a car. We know how this fact fits in to survival.

[porphyrian]

11. Additional points people may overlook...

1) In the South, there are almost no unions. There is always someone more desperate who will take lower pay/worse working conditions over unemployment.

2) Welfare rewards people who don't work and who aren't married. Try to better yourself, and they take away your money. This is what really pisses me off when people go on about welfare recipients being lazy, criminal and/or immoral. Everyone should have to try to live on welfare for a year so that they'd know what the hell they're talking about.

[enid602]

4. poor

Much has been said of the poor of New Orleans, but I don't see where conditions there were much different from Detroit, Washington, the Bronx or Chicago. New Orleans just happened to get the hurricane.

[daninthemoon]

5. Excellent question. It's pretty important to find out those numbers.

[jobycom]

6. Exactly. It seems like BushCo is using "poor" to mean "black."

There is a wide range of poverty in New Orleans, from the working poor homeowners to the projects, which are little more than concentration camps the government sets up to house the victims of our economy. Even in the projects there are a lot of working poor with families.

I've read a couple of articles suggesting that the plan they see for reducing poverty is just integrating society, which implies that being or acting white is a cure for poverty. And a lot of the homes that are being called "poor neighborhoods" are owned by working families, and are only poor because low property values and higher insurance rates keep living standards down. The property values are lower because they are in black neighborhoods. See the cycle? And because they are lower in value, it's harder to get home improvement loans to renovate, whether for minor repairs or major reconstruction.

New Orleans poverty problem is a racist problem, and so far it looks like the solutions will be racist solutions. Even Mayor Nagin says he won't let the criminals back in. How's he going to stop them--get Katherine Harris to make him a list? And what about the white collar criminals who run the insurance firms and loan industry that discriminate on race and make poverty worse? They destroy more lives and property than the petty street criminals he plans to keep out.

One Republican joked that Katrina had finally cleaned up the low income housing areas they had wanted to clean up, and that politician was loudly criticized for his remarks, but it's beginning to look like he was criticized more for letting the cat out of the bag than for any real disagreement with his statement.

[serryjw]

10. Excellent post

You said exactly what I believed that the word POOR was really to mean BLACK. You identified the problem (almost) correctly. You left out because the neighborhoods are POOR they have little in the way of property taxes to improve the quality of education to stop of cycle of poverty and lack of opportunity. So the cycle will continue.
Do you KNOW NO? Can you identify which neighborhoods were evacuated housing (homeowners) of working poor families?

[jobycom]

12. I don't know it that well

My parents grew up in New Orleans, so my memories of it are as much about visiting relatives scattered throughout the city as of any of the tourist stuff. Many of my relatives were older, and died off during the early 80s, but I remember visiting them in their neighborhoods and listening to them complain that the neighborhoods were being taken over by black people (not all of these relatives were nice, obviously). But some of the neighborhoods were the black neighborhoods of today that were flooded. I played in them, I walked their sidewalks. I remember some of the houses very well. They were very old neighborhoods. I asked my mother after the hurricane where some of these houses were, and many of them were in the flooded disricts. These weren't rental areas, people owned the homes.

But I couldn't give you the locations. I just never learned the names that well, and since I never drove to them, I have no instinct on where they were.

On taxes, I live in Texas now, and they've been under court order to not base educational funding on the property taxes from that district, but to have a more equitable plan. The plan still sucks, but it sucks more evenly than before. I'm not sure who New Orleans funds its school district, but when the public schools are mostly for those who are poor and underpriviledged, they are not usually funded well.

[serryjw]

15. A BIG problem not specific to NO

BUT when you are in the South, Black and un/under educated it become a true hardship, FEMALE HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD> HOMEOWNERS

Male householder, no wife present
4,070

Female householder, no husband present
16,118


RENTERS

Male householder, no wife present
4,723


Female householder, no husband present
30,053

[jobycom]

21. That's the very essence of the difference between liberals and conservativ

Conservatives see stats like this and want to change the reality to fit the structure they know how to deal with. They want to "encourage" fathers to stay with mothers so we don't have female householders without husbands present.

Liberals see stats like this and we want to change the structure that prevents these households from being viable. Eliminate gender inequality in pay. Provide day care assistance so single parents can work. Provide assistance to get single parents on their feet until they can get better paying jobs. Be creative.

Liberals deal with realities, conservatives with fantasies.

[serryjw]

23. Last time I addressed this I created a firestorm!

Simply stated, STOP having all these babies! Liberal or conservative I don't think it is the obligation of society to pay for YOUR children,when you chose to have them. Yes, I accept there are some tragic circumstances when you do everything right and it turns out badly. When you have no education, no way to support your children STOP having them. I don't want to deny anyone the experience but have ONE not 4. I have no problem helping you to get an education after the marriage breaks up to get on your feet. I do have a problem when you are raising several kids and you don't TRY to help yourself, and expect someone else to do it.

[fortyfeetunder]

24. Why would you post this?

I can understand why you created a firestorm. This sounds like something from Ronald Reagan's tirades of the 1980!

First your post is not directed to a DU audience, but to some unknown person who has "lots of kids." I only have one child so I know you aren't speaking to me.

Second, regardless how many children people have, we are going to pay taxes for schools, infrastructure, etc. to keep these children safe and healthy, regardless if they are kids on ADC or the millionaire's kids in the next county.

Third, when women have adequate health care and access to reproductive services, then you will see a decline in the birth rate.

[serryjw]

26. I posted it because I truly believe it

Of Course we pay taxes for schools. Unfortunately. the underclass (parents) have lousy health care and so do the kids. EVEN IF they had access to reproductive services many LOVE having big families, regardless of their lack of opportunity for the future.
I have no kids. I respect that you only had ONE!. I don't see how it is LIBERAL to pander to the underclass, tell them it is ok to be irresponsible and have as many kids as they want regardless of whether they can support them??


PLEASE Tell me how this helps anyone?

[jobycom]

29. Well, then, you either have to pass strong laws limiting the number of

children a person has, or bury your head in the sand as to the way reality works. What penalties do we give to mothers that have more than the accepted number of children? Imprison her and take the kids? Just take the extra kids? Who raises them? We don't save money because we have to pay someone to raise them. Forced sterilization? Do you trust your government enough to give them control over who gets sterilized? Talk about ethnic cleansing.

Or you can take the Republican route. Complain that things aren't the way you wish they were, and turn your back on reality.

[serryjw]

31. Obviously none of your suggestions are acceptable

To give woman access to birth control, educating them not to have more kids than they can afford would be wise. I'm sorry, I still have no idea WHY liberals continuously defend irresponsible behavior.There is a different between TRYING not to and NOT trying at all. IN MOST CASES birth control works. After you have had your children (1 or 2) tie your tubes or the husband should have a vasectomy.All that is done is we perpetuate poverty by having too many children you can't afford. BTW this is NOT a racial statement. We have as many whites in poverty as minorities that do this.

This maybe YOUR reality,isn't mine.

[SmokingJacket]

32. It's not a matter of defending; it's a matter of understanding that it

happens in spite of my personal disapproval.

I too believe that no one should have more children than they can support. For that reason I like the idea of free birth-control for whoever wants it. But other than that, what can I do about poor people who want a lot of babies? Not much.

Yeah, so people *should* have their tubes tied after a couple of kids. But unless we make a law that says they must, there will be a lot of cases where that doesn't happen. So should people live in poverty and misery because of bad planning? Even if they "deserve" to be poor because of this, I still don't want to live in a country where babies starve and families are camped out on the street.

That's what jobycom means about dealing with reality. Yeah, we can wish it were different, but we have to deal with what actually happens.

[serryjw]

33. WISHING has nothing to do with it.

I'm 55, I'm my day teen agers did not walk around with a preganant belly. IF you got pregnant you were sent to Aunt *(*&^* house far away. It is now acceptable, in some cases a badge of honor. SHAME is a good thing. It keeps us from doing stupid SH*T.

[jobycom]

36. Liberals DO do that

Liberals do provide birth control education, better access to medical care, etc. It helps, too, but it doesn't eliminate the problem. So you still haven't answered what you do when you try everything you just said, and you still have the problem. Starve the kids? Arrest the parents?

That's the issue. The problem will exist. You can provide education on the issue, and as liberals always show when we're in power, it helps. But it doesn't eliminate the problem. And a lot of families don't plan to be single parent families. A lot start off with good intentions and then wind up in that situation anyway.

The best solution is to accept that this is the reality, and plan around it, through government assistance, through creative ideas, through dropping pig-headed and false ideas of the way things should be and start dealing with the way they are.

Again, better day care systems for single parents, equality in pay so that mothers don't make 60% of what fathers make, education and job training, etc, are ways to help people survive in the reality in which they live, instead of telling them they should have done something different.

And it is a race issue, too, because of the inequality in pay, in hiring, in firing, in promotions, in education, in health care, in property values, and even in law enforcement. Blacks and Hispanics come out on the short end of those equations every time, so the problems are exacerbated for them. Not to mention that with the wealth restriction on black families and the history of denying wealth to black families in this nation, the wealth of the black community has not been able to catch up with the wealth of the white community, so that where a white family might have the resources to care for their derelict children, black families more often don't.

The problem won't go away by telling people to behave. No society has ever found a way to make all of its citizens behave. That's why they had exposure in ancient times, and monasteries in medieval times. To get rid of unwanted children. So we could use their solution and go back to abandonment and exposure as a solution, but that just doesn't seem right, to me.

[KT2000]

8. Working poor

you are right - there needs to be some statistics to set people straight.
I like to remind people when they show disdain for the working poor that that is who will be changing their diapers in their old age!
To say nothing of the many other low paid positions that everyone depends on to get through their day.

Katrina exposed prejudices that are way out of date.

[JanMichael]

9. Go to the following Census site...

site

[serryjw]

14. Bad link BUT I found this

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=16000US2255000&-qr_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U_DP4&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U&-_lang=en&-_sse=on


Interesting facts.Keep in mind that this is from 2000 census, the economy has gone down the tanker since then

51,435 NO VEHICLE!

Lacking complete plumbing facilities
1,856

Lacking complete kitchen facilities
1,900


No telephone service
8,292

[JanMichael]

16. It works now. You beat my edit.

Anyway on the right side of the data you'll see "MAP". By hitting this on "HomeOwners" you'll get a census map by block group, block and/or track.

[Pirate Smile]

13. Newsweek has a long cover article on poverty in America.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=157483&mesg_id=157483

[serryjw]

18. Education will always be the solution to poverty

It does not have to be college educated but a trade that will lift the NEXT generation out of sub standard existence.Unfortunately the NEXT generations do not get the benefit of the American dream. They just continue the cycle by dropping out of HS and not acquiring a trade. This is NOT specific to NO>

[earth mom]

17. Yep, it looks like they lumped everyone together...

renters and homeowners. So now ol * is going to have a lottery so some will get back homes that they already OWN and some will not! :sarcasm:

Hopefully the homeowners will be able to prove ownership before * Co steals their property! :grr:

[finecraft]

19. Story about a family I "adopted" at the local evacuee shelter

Their names are Latonya and Michael. They are both in their mid 30's, and they have 4 girls. They evacuated to New Iberia before the storm. They stayed in a cheap motel for 4 days, then moved in with a relative here in town. (This relative now has 20 people from New Orleans living with them)They are looking for a house to rent so they can start their lives over. They both worked at Antoine's Restaurant in the French Quarter for almost 10 years. Michael started as a dishwasher, then got promoted to a fry cook, then an inventory control position. Latonya started as a clean up/prep person, and was promoted to the inventory order/ receipt department. Care to know how much Antoine's paid them? Keep in mind, they both had been there almost 10 years. $7.50 an hour. Yep...one of the signature restaurants in the Quarter, a place where the cost of one meal for one person easily cost over $100.00, paid loyal 10 year employees $7.50 per hour. (They did not share in customer's tips, or they would have been making $2.15 per hour) And it's not just Antoine's. This is the dirty-little-secret behind cities that base their economy on tourism. The tourism industry pays its employees crap. These people had never taken a penny of public assistance in their lives. They were embarrassed that they had to go register for food stamps. They were lease/purchasing a home in New Orleans and raising 4 children on $7.50 an hour. Unbelievable.

[MountainLaurel]

27. Thank you for pointing this out

$7.50 an hour after 10 years of employment -- and inventory control is generally considered a skilled position.

[SoCalDem]

20. When you lose your job, you ARE a deadbeat

Especially when you still OWE the money you owed before you lost your job.. (republican thinking)

as long as you can keep all the plates spinning, and never ask for help, they are ok ...but if you have an unforeseen calamity befall you, and you need temporary help?? Hah!. You'll get a handful of warm spit, and a lecture about how you should have "planned better".

[journalist3072]

22. This is an interesting question....

I remember hearing some report on the news. And it made reference to people who couldn't evacuate because they had not gotten paid yet. They were not scheduled to receive their checks until like 2 days after the hurricane.

When I heard that, I didn't know if they were referring to your "first of the month" folks, or if these were State employees who were not scheduled to get paid until like that Wednesday.

[MountainLaurel]

28. Both, I think

There were also many people -- hotel workers and such -- who reported being told that if they didn't show up for work on Monday (the day Katrina hit landfall), they would be fired. Imagine being so desperate for a job that you would put yourself in harm's way to keep it.

[journalist3072]

34. That is totally disgusting to be threatened with being fired

Who could expect anyone except emergency personnel to report for work in such conditions?

[HeeBGBz]

25. Looking at South Mississippi

You have a huge amount of destruction of businesses on the beach. Casinos, tourist attractions, restaurants, hotels/motels and the Mall were all destroyed. So your freshly unemployed are wait staff, kitchen help, housekeepers, retail sales, casino staff - (the Hard Rock casino was a week away from opening. My son's girlfriend and my step daughter were going through orientation and ready to start work. Now they have to start looking again.)

All vital members of society, but most on a paycheck to paycheck existence.

[gauguin57]

30. One of the most profound comments I heard within days of Katrina ...

... was one of the women stuck at the Convention Center. She looked right at the news camera and said, "We pay taxes to this government, and this government won't even help us."

I think some of these Reich-wingers want to convince rich white people that the displaced of Katrina are a bunch of bums who just want to sit around looting stores and taking government money. Well, guess what? These ARE working people who DO pay taxes, with the expectation that when something catastrophic happens to them, that their government will snap to and help them with their most basic needs and protection.

We all pay taxes. The Bush Crime Syndicate ... er... "Administration" uses that tax money for an immoral war. Then sits with its thumb up its butt while people who pay those taxes die starving and parched in a pile of garbage. None of us can never be secure in the knowledge the gov't will take care of ANY of us when disaster strikes.

I will never let go of my rage against this Bush bunch. Never.