Your City Is in Worse Shape Than You Realize

The subject of food security has gotten a much higher profile over the past week. Here is a blog post about the a new report from USDA, "Household Food Security in the United States, 2008". Needless to say it is disturbing. On Saturday, Memphis got a shout out in the New York Times. "In more than 750 counties, the program helps feed one in three blacks. In more than 800 counties, it helps feed one in three children. In the Mississippi River cities of St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, half of the children or more receive food stamps." Here's the article.

In order to get a better idea of where exactly all these families are, the map above gives a breakdown of what percentage of households are on food assistance. I wish this was shocking but it isn't. 160,000 people in Memphis live below the poverty line. That's almost 3 full Liberty Bowls. Only 600,000 people live in Memphis. When I sit here and think about the $30 million we spend on a goddamn boat dock, the tens of million that will be spent for a sports complex at the Fairgrounds, the $265 million for the Forum, and a couple million for a skate park (WTF?) I am continually stunned by how perverse the values of our city are.

Let me give you a little story at how truly bad of shape this city and it's citizens are in. A friend of mine told me this. He knows an immigrant that runs a gas station in Southeast Memphis. The gas station attendant says that he has a group of regular customers. These customers drive large SUV's. The driver's of these SUV's come in 4 or 5 times a day and buy about $1.50 in gas at a time. My friend was perplexed by this behavior and asked the attendant what they were doing. Turns out these are drug dealers. They never want to have more than $10 of gas in their vehicles in case they get busted by the police. Think about that for a second. The DRUG DEALERS are so broke they worry about losing $10 in gas if arrested. Yet this is only part of story. Another group of customers engage in an even stranger behavior. These customers will pay for drink. Then go and get a pack of gum, get back in line and pay again. Then they go get a bag of chips, get in line and pay again. After seeing this behavior over and over again from numerous customers, the attendant finally asked one of these customers why they weren't just paying for everything at one time. Turns out the customers can't do the basic math. The customer has $5, but doesn't know if the the $5 can cover the $1.50 coke, $1.19 stick of gum, and $1.25 bag of chips. This attendant from a third world country finds it hilarious that so many people in the United States can't even do the most simple math. Even if by some miracle US trade policy changed and we had manufacturing/decent jobs for even some of the unemployed, our citizens aren't employable.

I guess my point of all this is that you can build all the lifestyle white elephants to attract the creative class, but it will not matter. Until this city actually addresses poverty, all these investments are just mal-investments that drain resources and services that could address some of our real problems.

Screw it, let's go skate boarding and criminalize homelessness.