One of the surprising things about poverty, to those who've never experienced it, is how damn expensive it is. One of the advantages of being fairly prosperous and credit-worthy is that corporations compete to be able to sell you things, driving down prices and driving up quality, while the poor make do with whatever they can find.
Neal Pierce does a fine job of laying out this dilemma in The High Cost Of Being Poor: Fighting The "Land Sharks'':
"Poverty is not just miserable, it's actually expensive, the Annie E. Casey Foundation asserts in its "KidsCount" report. The foundation documents how every outlay -- from food to rent to loans to health coverage to check-cashing or a car for commuting -- is likely to cost you an arm and a leg more if you're a low-income American.
"Some of the conditions can't be fixed quickly -- food prices up to double suburban rates in some inner cities that have been deserted by supermarkets, for example. Or rents so high that more than 5 million families are now obliged to spend over half their entire incomes for shelter.
"But there's a depressingly long list of predatory fiscal devices that have ballooned in number since 1990. Collectively, they're ripping off low-income America, trapping millions of poor Americans in permanent, high-cost indebtedness."
Pierce then goes on to talk about subprime mortgage-lenders, check-cashing outlets, payday loan shops and other businesses that prey on the poor. One solution he discusses is Centers for Working Families, a foundation-led effort to create one-stop shopping for services for the poor:
"CWFs build on past and existing models of neighborhood service delivery by combining the benefits of co-location, universality and service integration found in one-stop employment and social services centers, with the sense of membership and community involvement fostered by union halls and settlement houses, with the trusted one-to-one relationships nurtured by staff of family resource centers. CWFs will incorporate the various strengths of these models, but will also integrate new functions that support families."
Sounds totally worthwhile. There are also certainly also some other good efforts out there, from the People's Grocery to ShoreBank. But in an era when, as Manuel Castells says,
"Every 'First World' city has in it a Third World city of infant mortality,
malnutrition, unemployment, communicable diseases and homelessness.
Similarly, every 'Third World' city has in it a First World city with high finance,
fashion, and technology."
one wonders if there aren't more innovative models which could be used to redistribute the future, to provide greater leverage to people in the developed world who face problems not all that dissimilar to those faced by people in the developing world? If the financial and infrastructural systems in which the North's poor find themselves don't serve their needs, is not their situation in some fundamantal way not totally unlike that of the South's poor, who have no access to those systems to begin with? Might not there be some interesting lessons to pass back and forth, especially as communities in the South begin to leapfrog?
In other words, there's a lot of debate out there about how new technologies and new models are changing the game for many in developing world -- but is any of what's being learned applicable to poor people here?
I'm sure somebody much smarter than me thought of this long ago. Ideas for further research? Suggestions for models or noteworthy efforts? Anyone got the killer link?
