Poverty and Homelessness: Conflicting or Complementary Narratives?

Homeless: Can you build a life from $25?
By Peter Smith
In a test of the American Dream, Adam Shepard started life from scratch with the clothes on his back and twenty-five dollars. Ten months later, he had an apartment, a car, and a small savings.

Poverty Is Poison
By PAUL KRUGMAN
“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life.

Two articles appeared on the internet, within a week of one another, each illustrating the ongoing polarization of opinion about whether poverty and homelessness are functions of personal responsibility or the product of larger forces beyond the control of the individual.

The Christian Science Monitor documents the "adventure" of Adam Shepard, a young, white, well-educated, healthy man who decides to "test" whether the "American Dream" is still possible. He takes $25 and goes to a homeless shelter with a made-up story about a drug-abusing mom and an alcoholic dad. And he finds work, he saves some money and VOILA, he "makes it!" The upshot? YES, the American Dream is alive and well!!! A person can still lift himself up by his bootstraps in this great country of ours. All he needs is a will and he will find a way!

You can see I'm a bit cynical about the story. Wow. Shock. Young, educated, healthy, hard-working male can get a job and save money? Who would have guessed it was still possible!?

The article doesn't do nearly enough to probe the obvious limits of the story (and I also haven't read the young man's book, so I don't want to come down too hard). But this kid had EXACTLY what it takes to succeed in this country: a good mind, a work ethic, a healthy body, and a safety net (he has a supportive family and had a credit card in his pocket, even though he never had to use them). It didn't hurt that he was white and a man and had no criminal record.

Can people like this succeed in America? Of course they can.

Put that story in conversation with Krugman's NYTimes article about brain functioning and the stress of poverty. In the article--in almost a direct response to Adam Shepard, Krugman writes:

The fact of the matter is that Horatio Alger stories are rare, and stories of people trapped by their parents’ poverty are all too common. According to one recent estimate, American children born to parents in the bottom fourth of the income distribution have almost a 50 percent chance of staying there — and almost a two-thirds chance of remaining stuck if they’re black.

That’s not surprising. Growing up in poverty puts you at a disadvantage at every step.

I’d bracket those new studies on brain development in early childhood with a study from the National Center for Education Statistics, which tracked a group of students who were in eighth grade in 1988. The study found, roughly speaking, that in modern America parental status trumps ability: students who did very well on a standardized test but came from low-status families were slightly less likely to get through college than students who tested poorly but had well-off parents.

Krugman's solution to the problem of poverty is predictable: government programs.

But there's the lie in Krugman's essay. Governments cannot be expected to solve chronic poverty. They play a role by enforcing equal opportunity and anti-discrimination laws, providing educational opportunities, and creating equitable health and childcare systems for people at the low end of the economic ladder.

But chronic poverty, as I've experienced it as a nonprofit professional working with low-income families and now as a pastor, is also a function of radical inequalities in ability, bad or self-destructive personal decisions, and by impairments of human functioning caused by social and historical forces. The latter will take a generation or two of social will to move, and the former two causes will, sadly, always be with us.

No government program can erase inequality among human beings, nor can any culture that values freedom and personal responsibility take away the consequences from an individual who makes self-destructive decisions.

These two persistent causes of poverty are why churches and faith communities are necessary, along with government policy, to any coherent social strategy of addressing the condition of the poor. No government program can hope to provide the kind of care and support and opportunity for personal transformation that can be offered by a group of people who take seriously the spiritual imperatives to A) believe in the possibility of personal resurrections; B) be forgiven of our past failures; and C) provide care for the "least among us" no matter how they got that way.