Poverty and Service, Part 1

"The poor man's conscience is clear; yet he is ashamed.....He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him; he rambles and wanders unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market....he is iin as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured or reproached: he is only not seen....To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable." :::John Adams, 1790

It's called gentrification. The dictionary actually defines it this way:the restoration and upgrading of deteriorated urban property by middle class or affluent people, often resulting in displacement of lower income people.

I'd never before heard of this term until my summer began. And like many other things in life, once you are aware of it, you notice it more often. Much like buying that car and thinking you're the only one that has one, then finding on at almost every intersection and in seemingly every other driveway.

In Cincinnati there is a street feeding program we're a part of. For $200 we can buy enough food to feed a huge population of homeless men and women in a park there in Cincy. Each day we let one youth group head down to Camp Washington where they make the sandwiches, cut the fruit, pack up the drinks and then drive to the park where at the appointed time these men and women begin to shuffle in and take their free meal. It's costs us $800/week to feed them.

This is probably the last summer we'll be doing this street feed. Turns out the neighborhood is changing and the homeless have become both a danger and an eyesore. Probably mostly the latter and a little of the former.

They sold the park property to a performing arts school who's going to build their new theater there and put in a nice parking lot and presumably charge $25-$50 a ticket to see plays and shows. It will be well recieved and will help attract the type of people they are looking to move into the newly remodeled penthouse apartments. Slowly the corners are popping up with coffee shops, trendy sandwich bistros and swanky bookstores with intelligent sounding titles and plush leather chairs modernly arranged in reading corners.

The underlying plan is to remove the homeless. Since the city simply doesn't want them, they don't really care where they end up and the hope as it was stated to me is to simply scatter them out and hopefully instead of one big problem, there can be some little ones all over.

Soon that neighborhood will be trendy, popular and buildings that were run down and eyesores will hold lofts renting from $1000 a month and heading up. The problem of the homeless will be gone or at least out of sight and the world will be a better place, if not a safer one.

Let's be honest, in the back of our minds we don't want those people around. They are probably all on drugs and at the least they are drunks. They don't contribute to society, they live off the system, they are a danger. They are clearly losers with no present and definately no future. With all the jobs out there they could get one if they'd simply have any sort of self motivation and had more self respect. Unfortunately, they've screwed up somewhere and now love the bottle of cheap liquor more than anything.

And I wonder how that paragraph sits with you. I'd be shocked if you had no response. Either you sat there reading and nodding your head in agreement, remembering back to a time when you ventured out to a downtown event and afterwards made your way to your car as quickly as possible praying under your breath for safety and hoping not to get mugged or assaulted or at least hit up for money.

My hometown of Portland has an area called the Pearl District. It's really nice down there. They have some great coffee shops, an amazing burrito place, a Pottery barn, Restoration Hardware, Urban Outfitters,some bakeries and all sorts of clothing stores I've never heard of who sell amazing clothes at even more amazing prices. Shopping down there makes prices at Abercronbie and Banana Republic feel like a thrift shop. People down there think of those clothes as something you do yard work in. And I like the Pearl District. Just the name sounds cool and its so enjoyable down there, the people are fun and its so safe. There are no bums, no panhandlers, no one armed vietnam vetrans with their harmonicas.

That's why its popular. A few years back, like when I was in high school the pearl district wasn't even called the Pearl District. It was a run down, bad part of downtown Portland. You didn't go there becuase there was nothing there to go for. Once you got past like 16th street you were off the map as they say. But Portland had an aggressive plan to get people back into downtown. They had Pioneer Courthouse Square, a new 5 story mall-Pioneer Place complete with an entire 4 story building across the street just for Saks. Niketown was there, and the newly remodeled Performing Arts Center. And so they decided to venture north past 16th. Thus the Pearl District was named and created. The people loved it, and apartments and lofts were built or renovated and new life was breathed. Gentrification was accomplished and those who used to occupy Pearl before it was cool or trendy were displaced.

The only problem was that the bums, excuse me, the homeless, didn't leave. They went down near the Square and Pioneer Place. Now within a block of checking out that $450 dress at Saks is the blind dude with the dog and a guitar. And right after him is the morbidly obese gentleman just sitting there, with the "audacity to just ask for money" as I once overheard an attractive woman say on her way to her Lexus.

In fact it became a game with my friends when I was home to see who could make it the farthest from the mall back to the parking garage before getting hit up for money. Got any spare change? No we reply, Gap bag in hand.

And now downtown is trying to clean up its image. Everybody moved north to the Pearl because, well there's a lot of reasons they give but the bottom line is no bums.

"I is not the man who has little, but the man who craves more, that is poor." ::: Seneca The Younger (5? B.C.-A.D. 65)