Why We Get Edgy When the Poor Invade Our Space

One morning last week, I looked out our dining room window and realized we had a new neighbor across the street.

The house there has been empty and for sale for some time. But the new resident--a tall, middle-aged man with his belongings stowed in two blue plastic milk crates--seems content to occupy just the front porch, which is partly screened by a wall of decorative brick.

Increasing numbers of homeless people have drifted into our Mid-Wilshire neighborhood for some time. They beg outside stores and restaurants and sleep wherever a small, secure spot can be found. Recently, several families began squatting in the median strip along Highland Avenue. They hold cardboard signs offering to exchange work for food or a room.

Still, something about my new neighbor held my attention. And, as time passed, I realized that that something was nothing more complicated than proximity. The plain truth: I don’t want a homeless person outside my dining room window. From day to day, my feelings about him shifted: Bemusement became resentment, then slid into indecision. I thought about calling the realtor or the police; in the end, I did neither.

Something in me still rebels at snitching on a guy who’s just trying to get out of the rain.

If the political analysts are correct, we’re all going to be doing a lot a thinking about the poor in the months ahead. The analysts say the electorate is angry about welfare dependency, homelessness and the problems of impoverished immigrants. Political candidates at all levels seem to agree.

But people who work directly with and for the poor say the politicians may be fishing in waters more uncertain than they know. One such person is Vivian Rothstein, who directs the Ocean Park Community Center, a network of shelters and services for the homeless, battered women and runaway youths.

“I think this is very complicated,” she said this week. “On the one level, people are exasperated and frustrated and less tolerant. They talk about a political backlash against the poor and homeless. On another level, people are more tormented and agonized over these things than ever.”

And the results of that agony often are surprising. “There are very conservative people who don’t believe in a social welfare system or government social spending but are personally motivated to do something about, for example, homelessness. Many of them come from the churches, and they’ve worked as volunteers with us for the longest number of years.

“Most of those people are Republicans. Some of my more liberal friends have far less tolerance for homeless people than these religiously motivated conservatives. Some of the people who are most vehement about not wanting to pay higher taxes to support social spending want to do the most personally. Some of the people who think we should pay more taxes want to do the least personally. They don’t want to be confronted personally. . . .

“It is agonizing to see a person totally disheveled and covered with rags. We just don’t want that in our lives. It’s not just that people are angry that the homeless are in their front yards. They’re angry that they’ve been made to think about things that are hard and uncomfortable.”

As Rothstein suggests, our anxious new struggle over poverty has no single cause. But at least one is a consequence of our politics. As Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker remarked in a recent address at Gallaudet University, “The 1980s brought selfishness to new heights in America. They preached that you can get something for nothing--more services for less taxes. Today, we’re picking up the refuse of that philosophy . . . in state capitols across the land.”

Moreover, it now is clear that the severe impact of such self-deception has been felt not only by the poor but also by the broad middle class. During the 1980s, according to a study released this week by the Federal Reserve Board, both family income and net worth rose markedly among affluent Americans, while those of the poor fell just as sharply. The family income and net worth of middle-class people remained virtually stagnant.

These bleak facts may already have set in motion a new politics of middle-class anger--a politics composed in equal parts of resentment toward the rich whose advantages seem unrestrained and of frustration with the poor whose demands seem endless.

Embedded in that latter emotion is another cause of our discontent. Americans are an active, unusually self-sufficient people. We are impatient of delay and exasperated by the intractable. As a political community, we first engaged the struggle against want as a “War on Poverty.” But as we have discovered, it is a war in which final victory is impossible. On some deep level, that realization chaffs.

As Rothstein points out, the notion that some provision for the poor always will be required goes back to our civilization’s ethical origins. The author of Leviticus enjoins the new nation of Israel: “When you reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corner of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleaning of thy harvest. . . . Thou shalt leave them for the poor and for the stranger.”

But in our hearts, many of us still believe the poor and strange could just go out and get a job, if they really wanted one. It is this sentiment that lends our current debate over “welfare dependency” its troubling ambiguity. It remains unclear whether the object of resentment is the persistently poor individual or the permanence of poverty itself.

Finally, there is the simple fact that these are hard times. We are--each of us in our own way--anxious over the apparent fragility of our own well-being. At such moments, the poor are an alarming visual reminder of what could be.

We may say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” But few of us really want to believe it. Instead, we want to believe that the poor are victims not of circumstance or bad luck but of improvidence and foolish choices--things we can avoid, if only we are careful enough.

Like the homeless man outside my window, we all can see ourselves in the rain.

Tim Rutten’s column has moved from Fridays to Thursdays.