Awareness of poverty not increased by Katrina

Allen G. Breed

Don’t tell the Rev. Randall Mitchell that Hurricane Katrina somehow opened people’s eyes to the depth of poverty in this nation. Americans knew the extent of the problem long before the storm, he says.

They’d just learned to live with it.

“They’ve come into acceptance of it,” the preacher says from the apartment he evacuated to, in Dayton, Texas, 300 miles west of New Orleans. No, rather than revealing poverty to Americans, he says, the storm “exposed ... the people who maintain it. That’s all.”

When Katrina struck Aug. 29, thousands of people who had not known loss suddenly knew what it was like to be homeless and jobless. To taste hunger and feel thirst. To go without medical care or even toilets.

And those who didn’t experience the misery and chaos firsthand saw it in graphic detail every day and night on television. The desperate, angry masses at the Superdome and convention center. The rampant looting. The floating bodies.

With much of New Orleans still under water, President Bush stood before the stately St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square and declared the nation had “a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.”

Katrina was the cataclysmic event that was supposed to launch a vigorous “national dialogue on poverty.” It didn’t happen, many say.

“From my perspective, it’s kind of like one hand clapping,” says Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. “We’d love to have a dialogue, but there needs to be someone to have a dialogue with.”

Not long after Katrina struck, the Census Bureau released figures showing that the poverty rate had climbed for the fourth straight year. More than 37 million Americans live below the federal poverty level (defined as an income of $19,000 for a family of four), including 12 million children.

Five million of those children live in families that earn less than half the poverty level.

Jane Knitzer, director of the National Center for Children in Poverty, says it’s not so much that Americans don’t know that poverty exists. They just don’t want to think about it, because it’s just too hard.

“Very often people feel that there’s no solution to poverty, that it’s intractable,” she says. “It’s a secret nobody wants to deal with.”

But how big a secret, really?

Stanford University researchers Emily Ryo and David Grusky, hearing pundits insist that Katrina “unleashed a newfound commitment among the public to take on issues of poverty and inequality,” decided to measure this supposed awareness-raising effect.

The researchers analyzed data from Syracuse University’s Maxwell Polls on Civic Engagement and Inequality, conducted in 2004 and shortly after Katrina. Ryo and Grusky divided respondents based on their answers to detailed questions on their attitudes toward poverty. They created four basic categories: “activists,” “realists,” “moralists” and “deniers.”

Activists, defined as those who support state intervention to reduce poverty, went from 58 percent of respondents in the 2004 survey to 60 percent post-Katrina; and there were small gains for deniers, who believe poverty and inequality are “neither substantial nor growing” (from 21 percent to 25), and for moralists, who see poverty as a motivator, not a social problem (from near zero to 1 percent).

The most dramatic gain was among so-called realists, who don’t believe in the state’s ability to reduce poverty or inequality; their numbers nearly doubled to 11 percent.

Interpreting the findings, Grusky, a professor of sociology, says they show a majority of people already accepted that there was a problem and were doing something about it. The rest, he says, either see poverty as an individual problem or simply don’t care.

“This idea that it’s a dirty little secret, this poverty and inequality,” he says, “just doesn’t pass muster.”

News coverage could partly explain the rise in denier and realist views. Some “did not take well to the liberal lesson that they no doubt regarded as foisted upon them,” Grusky and Ryo wrote in their report, and so “the `call for action’ story ... was countered by the equally powerful lesson that government intervention is all about inefficiency and ineptitude.”

If President Bush, faced with falling support for the war in Iraq, has had little time to address entrenched poverty, there is activity on the state and local levels, says Bruce Katz, director of the metropolitan policy program at the Brookings Institution.

A growing number of states are passing minimum wage laws and adopting their own earned income tax credits, Katz says. And a lively debate has begun in places like Fresno, Calif., which was identified in a post-Katrina Brookings report as having the highest concentration of urban poverty in the country — even ahead of New Orleans itself. (That city has formed a task force on poverty and held a series of public meetings.)

“There’s very positive momentum ... on a series of initiatives that, if pursued with vigor, alleviate poverty,” he says.

But Katz and others say recent federal actions to reduce funding and flexibility in public housing programs, and proposed cuts to the federal earned income credit, threaten to undermine these efforts.

“Just about anything you can think of needed to address the needs of poverty is on the chopping block,” says Avis Jones-DeWeever, study director for poverty, education and social welfare programs at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Jones-DeWeever says Americans were too preoccupied with the war and the budget deficit to be outraged when storm evacuees were kicked out of subsidized hotel rooms. Not only do Americans have short memories and attention spans, she says, but many believe that most poor people must have something wrong with them.

“This is a huge, cataclysmic event, and it’s sad to say that even that is something that hasn’t maintained a push or momentum to address poverty in America,” she says. “I’m not sure what it would take.”

In the storm’s immediate aftermath, Jones-DeWeever says she saw “some of the best media activity I’d seen in years” on poverty. “I would have liked to see that effort more sustained.”

But in our 24-hour news, iPod-obsessed society, “we’ve been benumbed” to the suffering that confronts us every day, historian John Hope Franklin says.

“It’s not so much Katrina as a phenomenon as it’s Katrina as a metaphor for what our society has become,” says Franklin, an emeritus professor at Duke University who has written about and participated in some of the seminal moments of the civil rights movement. “It reflects; it’s a mirror of what we’ve become _ super-extraordinarily complacent.”

Foscarinis gives Bush credit for including in his budget request money to reduce chronic homelessness. In his Jackson Square speech, the president proposed the creation of a Gulf Opportunity Zone where tax relief, incentives and loans would help jump-start job creation.

“It is entrepreneurship that helps break the cycle of poverty,” he said.

Jones-DeWeever and others accuse the Bush administration of using the Iraq war and the Katrina recovery effort as excuses for not addressing poverty nationally. But Foscarinis disagrees.

War or no war, the homelessness activist says, “the needs of poor people are never at the top of the agenda.”

“The president made that one statement,” she says of his Jackson Square call to action. “I don’t think it’s realistic to expect him to be the one to lead this charge. I think there has to be a lot of pressure from political leaders, and I don’t see that.”

For his part, Rev. Mitchell is tired of seeing people beat up on the president and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Disabled in a work-related accident 20 years ago, the 56-year-old preacher turned his attention to social issues in New Orleans. He says the despair in parts of his city was just as deep during the two terms of Democrat Bill Clinton, and that elected officials in New Orleans have to accept some of the blame for money wasted and opportunities squandered.

“The national dialogue has to be an honest dialogue,” says Mitchell, who lives on $600 in disability payments and $65 in monthly food stamps. “We have to look at ourselves first. That’s honesty.”

In the seven days between the storm’s arrival and his own evacuation from his ruined Uptown apartment complex, Mitchell swam through the murky waters to the Superdome, and walked the trash- and corpse-strewn streets at the now-infamous Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He sees a lot of politicians and pundits “pimping” those images for their own agendas.

He says it’s time for a little less talk and a lot more action.

“Talk is cheap and costs nothing,” he says. “And something from nothing leaves us exactly that. Nothing.”

(Associated Press)