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In raising interest rates again and again, Greenspan has been warning "of the risks that are still lurking." With falling household and business savings, skyrocketing personal debt, a record trade deficit and a staggering $250 billion borrowed on margin to play the market, there are growing indicators that even this best of all booms will not, after all, last forever.

It's against this backdrop that the poor are making a comeback in the mainstream media. This week on PBS, Bill Moyers put a human face on the numbers in a two-and-a-half-hour documentary, "Surviving the Good Times." As Jackie Stanley, the matriarch of one of the blue-collar families in the film, put it: "It's a good economy, but it's just not (coming to) our house."

She's not alone. The bull, as we're learning, has had a very selective itinerary. U.S. News & World Report ran a cover story last month titled "The Rich Get Richer." This week, National Public Radio did a three-part series on the two faces of Seattle -- the city with nine billionaires, 10,000 millionaires and crumbling public schools. "My students, they've been left out of this wonderful period of prosperity," said Charles Hasse, a fourth-grade teacher reduced to moving desks around to protect his students from falling ceiling tiles. "I think we've squandered an opportunity, really, to build for the future."

And there's been a dramatic shift in the way major newspapers have been covering the homeless. There were, for example, no front-page stories on homelessness in the New York Times in all of 1998. But since November, the paper has run at least a dozen Page One stories on the subject, including a recent cover story in its Sunday magazine, "The Invisible Poor." Quoted in it was Michael Sandel, a professor of government at Harvard: "Today's accumulation of enormous wealth is unparalleled since the last Gilded Age, but the Gilded Age of a century ago brought in its wake a wave of progressive reform and public investment -- in parks, libraries, schools and municipal projects. Today's gilded age, by contrast, hasn't generated any comparable resolve to ease the effects of inequality by strengthening public institutions."

There has also been a spate of recent stories about how the high-tech Gold Rush has turned parts of California into what one poverty-fighting activist termed "a Dickensian universe" divided between the super rich and the desperately needy.

In San Francisco, the dot.com-driven economy is booming -- but so are evictions, with a 300 percent rise in tenants getting the boot since 1995. In the shadow of the city's cash-rich Multi-Media Gulch -- dubbed the center of geek civilization -- a throng of homeless crowds the streets and alleys of the fashionable SoMa district. A minimum-wage worker here would have to put in 150 hours a week to make rent on an average two-bedroom apartment. Maybe if they called themselves the "iPoor" or incorporated as "Poor.com" they'd get to share a little bit of the wealth.

In Santa Clara County, which encompasses a large portion of Silicon Valley, 34 percent of the area's homeless have full-time jobs but are unable to afford the area's sky-high rents and soaring home prices -- which are more than double the national average. Some have resorted to paying $3 for an all-day pass, so they can spend the night taking a series of two-hour naps on a bus that is now known as "the rolling hotel." Others among the local working poor have to live in horrendous conditions, such as 26 men sharing a house -- each paying $400 a month.

The anecdotal evidence of an alarming decline in affordable housing was confirmed this week in a new report issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development showing a record number of working-poor families living in substandard conditions or having to devote more than half their income to housing.

"Our clients, who have always been on the bottom tier, now can't even compete for the miserable housing they've had," housing advocate Christine Minnehan told the Los Angeles Times. "People in San Jose are even renting their living-room floors. People don't live like that unless they have no choice."

Could this sudden explosion of stories on the invisible poor be, as the first swallows are to spring, a harbinger of an economic downturn that we refuse to even contemplate? Are the mainstream media tapping into an inchoate fear among the multitude of debt-laden, savings-strapped, middle-class Americans that "there but for the grace of God and tech stocks go I?"
salon.com | April 3, 2000

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