Christale Thomas, of Jackson, Mississippi, the single mother of three young children, had a hard time finding a place to rent that she could afford as a cashier making just over minimum wage. Fortunately, she secured a spot at Commonwealth Village, a housing complex Yale 1964’s Joe Wishcamper redeveloped, taking advantage of the generous allowance of housing credits made available in the aftermath of the 2005 Katrina disaster. Wishcamper makes a point of treating tenants as customers, offering them a number of amenities, including a range of vital social services made possible with a generous endowment attached to the complex. When Thomas lost her job, management worked to help her keep her apartment while she looked for work. The Clarion-Ledger told Thomas’s story as part of a recent assessment of the growing gap between wages and housing costs. The story appeared June 1st, and within a week it had generated nearly 300 comments.
With the shock of economic decline reaching into every corner in America, one might have expected some sympathy for Thomas’s plight. That was not the case, however. Even by the standards of today’s worst excesses among unsigned commentators, this flurry of indignation stands out. “Blah Blah Blah,” Grumpu retorts. “Why should the taxpayers have to pay for her stupid choices?…Why isn’t she responsible for getting herself out of this mess rather than the taxpayer who made the hard and responsible choices?” “ I honestly don’t do well with excuses on anything, they are like buttholes, everyone has one. I don’t give out pitty parties,” Juswrong81 added. “I understand that at some point we all may need some assistance but I believe that this country is giving away too much to people who expect to be taken care of,” wrote Ms2ga. “I really believe that the government needs to reform the assistance programs that it administers. These funds given to takers that are not putting anything into the system but producing more takers and problems could be used for other needed agendas, such as education, infrastructure, the elderly, etc.”
In years past, we might have expected advocates for relieving the rich from taxes to be run out of office, but surely cutting the safety net is not perceived to be unpopular today, at least for those who follow the media. Programs that serve the poor are targeted for extinction, their beneficiaries made scapegoats for a system the well to do profit from . News articles can only begin to provide context to the disastrous convergence of imperfect social and economic systems that people like Christale Thomas so vulnerable. We need to interrogate that system before giving into simplistic moralisms that everyone should stand on their own, without government assistance. After all, those who own homes have benefited for years by deducting property tax payments from their federal returns. Helps make housing more affordable, even for those not working at minimum wage.