Collected Prose

or a senator stepping forth to propose that this law be changed. In the past few years, welfare programs for the poor have been all but dismantled, but housing subsidies for the rich are still in place.
    The next time you see a man living in a cardboard box, remember this.
    The government encourages home ownership because it is good for business, good for the economy, good for public morale. It is also the universal dream, the American dream in its purest and most essential form. America measures itself as a civilization by this standard, and whenever we want to prove how successful we are, we begin by trotting out statistics which show that a greater percentage of our citizens own their own homes than anywhere else in the world. “Housing starts” is the key economic term, the bedrock indicator of our financial health. The more houses we build, the more money we will make, and the more money we make, the happier everyone will be.
    And yet, as everyone knows, there are millions of people in this country who will never own a house, who struggle every month just to come up with the rent. We also know that there are many others who fall behind with the rent and are forced out onto the streets. We call them the homeless, but what we are really talking about is people who have no money. As with everything else in America, it comes down to a question of money.
    A man does not live in a cardboard box because he wants to. He might be mentally deranged, he might be addicted to drugs, or he might be an alcoholic, but he is not in the box because he suffers from these problems. I have known dozens of madmen in my time, and many of them lived in beautiful houses. Show me the book in which it is written that an alcoholic is doomed to sleep on the sidewalk. He is just as likely to be driven around town by a chauffeur in a black hat. There is no cause and effect at work here. You live in a cardboard box because you can’t afford to live anywhere else.
    These are difficult days for the poor. We have entered a period of enormous prosperity, but as we rush down the highway of larger and larger profits, we forget that untold numbers of people are falling by the wayside. Wealth creates poverty. That is the secret equation of a free-market economy. We don’t like to talk about it, but as the rich get richer and find themselves with greater and greater amounts of money to spend, prices have been going up. No one has to be told what has happened to the New York real estate market in the past several years. Housing costs have soared beyond what anyone would have thought possible just a short time ago. Even I, proud homeowner that I am, would not be able to afford my own house if I had to buy it today. For many others, the increases have spelled the difference between having a place to live and not having a place to live. For some people, it has been the difference between life and death.
    Bad luck can hit any one of us at any time. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of the various things that could do us in. Every person lives with the idea of his own destruction, and even the happiest and most successful person has some dark corner in his brain where horror stories are continually played out. You imagine that your house burns down. You imagine that you lose your job. You imagine that someone who depends on you comes down with an illness, and the medical bills wipe out your savings. Or else you gamble away your savings on a bad investment or a bad roll of the dice. Most of us are only one disaster away from genuine hardship. A series of disasters can ruin us. There are men and women wandering the streets of New York who were once in positions of apparent safety. They have college degrees. They held responsible jobs and supported their families. Now they have fallen on hard times, and who are we to think that such things couldn’t happen to us?
    For the past several months, a terrible debate has been poisoning the air of New York about what to do with them . What we should be talking about is what to do with ourselves. It is our city, after all, and what happens to them also happens to us. The poor are not monsters because they have no money. They are people who need help, and it doesn’t help any of us to punish them for being poor. The new rules proposed by the current administration are not just cruel in my opinion, they don’t make any sense. If you sleep on the street now, you will be arrested. If you go to a shelter,