Mean City, USA
As reported in this week’s print edition of the Economist, the number of people living below the poverty line in Florida’s Sarasota-Bradenton metropolitan region increased from 9.2% in 2007 to 13.7% in 2009. A remarkable jump, to say the least. Joining the ranks of the homeless are former professionals such as Angie Sammann, a one-time loan officer at a bank, who now lives in the sprawling tent city of Pinellas Hope. “I don’t care if I scrub toilets,” she pleads. “I just want a job.”
So what is to be done about Sammann’s plight, or any of the hundreds of others who share in her predicament? Nothing, apparently, except to cut taxes that fund homeless services like the one operated by Richard Martin, who runs a local charity. As the article goes onto say:
Much of the money for such schemes comes from different local, state and federal government agencies. But all are tightening the purse strings. The county’s revenues have fallen with property values, so it is cutting back. The state, meanwhile, has cut its grants to Mr Martin’s outfit by 80% over the past four years. Many of the federal grants come courtesy of the stimulus bill of 2009, and so are quickly drying up. When the federal money runs out, says Carolyn Mason, a county commissioner, “that’s pretty much the end of the road.”
Moreover, cities like Sarasota are unsympathetic places for those down on their luck. One of the reasons they grew so fast in the boom years were their low taxes, leaving little money for social programmes. Homelessness is often seen as a threat to migration and tourism. Sarasota city council made several attempts to outlaw sleeping rough, finally finding a formula that passed muster with the courts in 2005. That year it was named the meanest city in America by the National Coalition for the Homeless. All other cities in the top ten were also in the sunbelt.
Not so much a “land of opportunity,” is it, and sadly, I think, a harbinger of things to come in the next few months and years as local and state governments struggle to balance budgets and cut deficits.
