327: The look and cost of generational poverty in U.S. cities

[Photo by Lurene Helzer of North Philadelphia slum, 1987. Photojournalist Lloyd Francis driving car.]

327.

Published news story by Lurene Kathleen Helzer, July 5, 1994, East Bay Journal, “Berkeley eases landlords’ cost to evict”.

This brief story describes a common problem for The City of Berkeley. The problem is general maintenance of the less-wealthy area of town.

Berkeley is a fantastic city noted for academic excellence, science and even for its role in American history. This is known well.

It’s also noted, though, for an unaffordable liberalism. What does that mean?

It means that Berkeley has always had a voting bloc that wants to make life as easy and hospitable as possible for the downtrodden. There would be nothing wrong with this if the poor didn’t come with heaps of costly problems for Berkeley from the start. Let’s try a fair look at it:


The poor, typically, have many “first level” problems for which they’re not even remotely at fault. Chronic illness, lack of education, parental abandonment, for instance. American society seems forgiving of these shortcomings, in general. It’s genuinely not the person’s fault, and they need help immediately.


From those issues, however, spring the more costly problems that average people despise. What are these costly, embedded, “second level” problems?


The frequent problems with drugs and alcohol, the lifelong need for cheap housing, the need for eternal government money and – more than anything – a kind of legal laxity or ignorance coming from poverty that the rest of a metropolis will not tolerate. This small story is a good example of how the problem works itself out at city hall.


Poor areas of town typically have drug dealers, loitering. With street-drug dealing arrives the violence, broken windows, etc. When it’s time for a city to evict the residents of a crack house or similar property, someone’s got to pay. It might be Section 8 housing, which is supported with federal tax dollars in the first place, and if the residents need to be evicted for their crimes, the city or county or state needs to pay the cops for their work at the property and/or in local courts, sometimes at time-and-a-half. It was costing Berkeley money they did not quite have to spare in 1994.


Members of Berkeley’s city council sometimes wanted to be forgiving of the poverty-stricken residents, their landlords, to keep the housing cheap and available for troubled families. Other city council members did not. They argued about it during this 1994 meeting.


The city attorney, Manuela Albuquerque, also present, finally backed away from the whole debate in slight exasperation. She reminded the politicians she was “just a lawyer” for Berkeley and considered ethical questions about who pays for what to be their problem.


Assuming there is no riot, this is always the conclusion of such debates because there’s only so much a government can do through law. At some point, the cops and lawyers leave the room because there’s literally nothing more they can or will do.