poverty

The tricky thing about the hood is that you__e always working, working, working, and you feel like something__ happening, but really nothing__ happening at all.

To cause pain was a disease. As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs.

There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood. I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.

The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. 10 After the numbers were released, Milwaukee__ chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief__ views: __e believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future._ What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department__ own rules presented battered women with a devil__ bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction.

You know what you learn when you study the legal system? Poor people pass down damage the way rich people pass down an inheritance.

For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never __ash out the stain of servility._ There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them.

I don't, when I think of a city, think of these people, people with very little who are content with that. That is, I think about poverty and culture and traffic and pollution and crime...

...[A] lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up. They take what they can-mostly in pleasure,and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what have they got to lose if they do die in a car wreck or a knife fight or something else equally stupid.

I think of what it means to be a teenager in America, necessarily pushing boundaries, making expected mistakes. Here there is no margin for error: a mistake, no matter how insignificant, dashes any small hopes to break the cycle of poverty. Here in Kibera the world is relentless and unforgiving.

Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.

I thought, if we could just come together as a community, even if that just meant playing soccer together, that could be the beginning of something good. Coming together as a community, as a people, creates more power than exists when individuals are fighting each other for scraps. Soccer has always brought people together. Soccer was where I would begin.

It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor; but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is about. Poverty will not make a man worthless__e may be of worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value__ thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of broken basin, or dirty rag.

The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope with it.

It is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.

The master doesn__ need to chain his slaves; their needs will chain them to him. You can end slavery by the stroke of a pen, but the pressing call of necessity will reestablish it.

It was an old tradition: landlords barring children from their properties. In the competitive postwar housing market of the late 1940s, landlords regularly turned away families with children and evicted tenants who got pregnant. This was evident in letters mothers wrote when applying for public housing. __t present,_ one wrote, __ am living in an unheated attic room with a one-year-old baby_ Everywhere I go the landlords don__ want children. I also have a ten-year-old boy_ I can__ keep him with me because the landlady objects to children. Is there any way that you can help me to get an unfurnished room, apartment, or even an old barn?_ I can__ go on living like this because I am on the verge of doing something desperate._ Another mother wrote, __y children are now sick and losing weight_ I have tried, begged, and pleaded for a place but [it__] always __oo late_ or __orry, no children.___ Another wrote, __he lady where I am rooming put two of my children out about three weeks ago and don__ want me to let them come back_ If I could get a garage I would take it.__hen Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them.

In white neighborhoods, only 1 in 41 properties that could have received a nuisance citation actually did receive one. In black neighborhoods, 1 in 16 eligible properties received a citation. A woman reporting domestic violence was far more likely to land her landlord a nuisance citation if she lived in the inner city.In the vast majority of cases (83 percent), landlords who received a nuisance citation for domestic violence responded by either evicting the tenants or by threatening to evict them for future police calls. Sometimes, this meant evicting a couple, but most of the time landlords evicted women abused by men who did not live with them.

Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums: __aximum profits came, not from providing first-class accommodations for those who could well afford them_ but from crowded slum accommodations, for those whose pennies were scarcer than the rich man__ pounds._ Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.