To the editor:
The spectacle of children sleeping on the floor at Logan Airport was resolved, much to the relief of the flying public and the airline industry, only to be replaced by people sleeping outside of subway stations. In the former case, the situation had to be resolved because it was bad for business. Now, the homeless “problem” on city streets must be urgently addressed because it is a crucial political liability for candidates. In both instances, what should have been seen as a national disgrace to be met with compassion and reason has become a nuisance to be eliminated at whatever human cost!
It is true, in a restricted sense, that we have reached our limit, but the operative word here is “our.” This is the Malthusian limit, that brainchild of the well-fed 18th-century clergyman who lamented the fact that provisions given to the poor in workhouses subtracted from the amount that would be more wisely directed to the industrious and worthy members of society. It operates on the erroneous presumption that the ingredients of human sustenance simply go around. They do not; they go around on the terms of those who own them. If you can not meet these terms, they do not go around to you! Though it has never proven correct, due to agricultural industrialization, it stubbornly remains the pet theory of the parsimonious cruel. It is the distribution formula of a bully splitting a candy bar with little kids that he can beat up!
There is in fact an abundance of housing in this state. In some places, you can’t see the ocean because of the proliferation of still more luxury residences. Corporate real estate and financial interests are wise enough to know that it makes more sense, and considerably more money, to sell hundreds of condos as private residences than to sell traditional single-family homes. So they buy up all the land, and the houses on it, to make room for still more condos, thus rendering single-family homeownership logistically, as well as financially, unattainable. Many towns are trying, vainly, to halt this metastasizing of what are basically glorified apartments. Obviously, the migrant poor cannot access this housing, nor can the hundreds of thousands of American homeless and their children, who, not at all incidentally, suddenly become the cherished favorites of those opposed to migrants: “What about our own homeless?” They’re not our own; if they were they wouldn’t be homeless! And, increasingly, many young couples can not access it either, nor stay in it if they do. In their shared but differing degrees of deprivation these groups subsidize the all-important economic order on which we all see our own security to be based.
This makes for a unique, ironic, and perhaps unwelcome bond among the migrant poor, the American homeless, and those who can’t find affordable housing: all are inferior, all are unwanted, and all are a problem to be dealt with! As greed is good, so is deprivation necessary. It keeps us safe; it is the engine oil of our ruthlessly exclusive system. If you can’t pay, you are the migrant!
Joseph R. Noone
Lynn
