Odd. Loud. You have no Idea how LOUD people are and when you realize they’re LOUD you realize it’s because they come from a different space/social class.
I live in Washington Heights, Manhattan—-which on one hand seems like it would be toney—-and it is—-million dollar townhouses and condos, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital sprawling over multiple blocks. But it’s also an extension of Harlem—-so there is a heavy minority presence that is Black and Latino—-other than language and some cultural ticks—the same to me.
Growing up, I lived in all of the other boroughs—-Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, even Yonkers, living in Queens, Flushing, when I got back from undergraduate university. Then after a few years in Queens I made my way to Manhattan and have lived within the same 40–50 blocks for about 15 years. What I like about it is that it’s convenient to so much in the City that is open late as I am a night owl. Yes, that’s me going food shopping at 3 AM. Also I’m in a west side subway corridor that includes home, entertainment, Columbia University for work, and then further downtown for midtown work and entertainment and then even ease in traveling out of NJ to other states for work by train/car.
Historically most of my family has lived in the outer boroughs, I was actually conceived in Manhattan, my parents going to college here and then born in Manhattan, so I’m sort of spiritually tied to the whole shebang. I enjoyed the suburbia of Buffalo and then I lived in the mountains, when my mother bought a house, in Pennsylvania, commuting back and forth to the co-op in Brooklyn. And then she and her husband moved to Charlotte, eventually buying a house there.
I’ve been able to move through lots of places, around family and not, and because my parents were college educated, and my mother decided to have only 1 child with my father, and no more with her later husbands, there has been a level of financial control/stability and then increase in my life and childhood that is different from my cousins and their parents.
My cousins, or my aunts and uncle, had 7, 3 and 3 children respectively. My mother saw the chaos having multiple children with multiple parents brought/wrought—-which is why I’m an only child. But when I would visit cousins, she laid down social class based rules that I didn’t understand until years later when I was teaching about it and reading the research.
There were certain foods—-spam, scrapple, chitlins—-I wasn’t allowed to eat—-to politely refuse. It even went so far that when I visited, I remember bringing my own food. I remembered my uncle’s children drank powdered milk and I refused. There wasn’t the same food limitations at home—-one of my stepfathers was a chef so he brought home dozens of T-bone steaks, bags of shrimp, lobster, and could whip up anything in the kitchen. And we weren’t in the kitchen a lot—-I had to beg to be taught to cook—-because my mother and he loved making reservations, going to grand restaurants——because they could afford it. Not only did this vastly expand my palate—-there are only a few foods I don’t care for—-olives, milk, yogurt—-but it also meant that eventually even I could cook a wide range of foods. My mother would even offer to cater events and then come home and give me the money to feed 75 people with my cooking skills—-I was 16.
These things seem interesting on one level but there’s a level of social class mobility, elevation and in particular the middle class habituation of concerted cultivation: I was taught/educated to be and act as an adult at a very young age.
I also always seemed to have money—-there was envy and jealousy I know from my cousins—-because my parents assisted me in starting small businesses first locally and then nationally. I was able to develop those skills because of their entrepreneurial work and also being taken to my mother’s job at AT&T—-where I would photocopy and enlarge comic book scenes and sell them in the cafeteria at school. My mother gave me a Tax ID Number at 14 to better run my amateur comic book company. My cousins didn’t have these advancing benefits.
When I got around my cousins and would mention or try to explain, I often found them childish or ignorant or not worth talking to.
Poverty seems to me, extremely intellectually limited. The biggest thinking occurring from TV and movies. I can tell you now that I limit my company/friendships, even dating away from excessive TV watchers who don't have higher educations. TV/movies communicate warped values and mores, so often that’s what I hear and notice in people below middle class upbringing.
Also I notice lack of critical thinking and what I refer to in teaching as pinging. I notice that poor people are constantly announcing reality to one another as a form of reality-confirmation.
“Did you see the blue car?”
“Yeah, I saw the blue car!”
“Did you see the blue car drive fast?”
“Yeah, I saw the blue car go fast.”
Or asking of obvious questions. I’m sitting on the train reading a book.
“Are you reading a book?”
“You must like reading.”
“That’s a book.”
It’s a form of almost Captain Obvious level announcing of reality because poverty is deeply focused on relationships—-so communication is this constant attempt to connect. or to intrude. Middle class and higher, relationships take on different expectations, qualities, networking, infusions.
Networking and Aiding Family
Undereducated cousins my age, I don’t even bother trying to communicate with—-because their lives include mundane work, addictions, jail, poverty, irrational behaviors, tc.. I don’t consider them “less than human” but they’re living entirely different mindset lives than I am. The exclusion is also self-protective—-because I’ve earned a pretty decent living so I have helped some cousins/parents out—-worked at some popular corporate/educational places where one can assume I was making a pretty good salary. I’ve even helped cousins and friends get jobs—-like you walk into my office, I make a phone call and they got a job that day. I thought that was natural—-to send a qualified candidate—-but that’s unusual in poverty but the action, is attached to relationships and the intense relational connections assumed in poverty. But not everyone in my family is qualified/educated for those kinds of positional-hook ups.
Family Trying to Get/Steal Money from Me
I’ve been bamboozled out of money—-one cousin had me and my parents convinced she wanted to change her life, get off of welfare and move out of New York (she’d give n up her kids, severed parental rights and been on welfare for `9 years—-so my family worked on me for a year to sublet her huge Manhattan apartment—-I move in—-and suddenly she decides not to move. Which I confronted, if you needed/wanted a roommate you should’ve said so and then she had the two criminal adult children move in and then—-I moved out after 3 months.
Later my from poverty stepfather, that my mother bought with her largesse to have as a companion, as she lay dying, took me to court trying to get money out of me. I got to cross examine him in court—-jousting with his hired lawyer. He lost and had to pay the lawyer, court fees, etc.. I paid a nominal fee and left. He wanted me to replace my mother in his life—-financially—-which I refused. I would assist but there are normal levels of budgets an adult must manage for themselves. He refused to do this—the household losing half of the income when my mother went into the hospital. I gave him money for years and come to find out several of my cousins down there were giving him money to—-everyone kept in the dark as he made the rounds, never explaining he was getting from us all.
How Poverty Affects Folk
So family and even students from poverty, I have found mostly to be capable of great sympathy, help, support but also greed, fear, lies—-I would suggest that decades of poverty to adults suggests a terminality to life that is only solved by money. I would further offer that what happens with poor people is that insane amount of constant TV watching often suggests that stuff, riches, etc. is out there and they could-should have it/access. So my stepfather is making $10 an hour after taxes trying to drive and maintain and fuel a Mercedes—-about $200 worth of gas a week BEFORE the gas price hikes. But that goes to show a poverty mindset. I took the bus all around Charlotte, it literally stopping in front of their house. I think twice I took a cab/Uber. But the bus was 90 cents!
I think poverty affects people the same overall, but there are exceptions—-helpful, thoughtful, good people who happen to be poor. And those who are poor and scheme, lie, cheat, steal, sell drugs to try and rocket themselves out of poverty. None of that works long-term. Or more importantly the money flows in but they lack financial education so they don’t know how to bank, transform, multiply the money. My stepfather wanted to start a business, but my mother had all the money and acumen, so he wanted me to figure one out and manage it. That he would own. I nodded politely and kept running my media business from my laptop while I was there.
Karma
My sublet cousin, eventually lost the apartment over $18, ended up homeless in Atlanta, then in Charlotte, then back to a homeless shelter in NYC and then prison in Boston and then back to a shelter in NYC, two blocks from her former apartment.
Ironically I was headed to a meeting, on the lower east side, got off on the wrong stop so I had to walk—-a guy asked me directions and a lady pushes past us to cross the street—-I had stopped ta the block—-looking at the sublet I’d been with her years prior. A few months later I bumped into her sister who told me her sister’s tragic story and that yes, that woman who bumped past us was probably my cousin headed to the shelter.
I was in my Emporio Armani suit a Salvatore Ferragamo shoes, feeling all high paid teaching job cute.
I’d been deeply emotionally hurt after hr bamboozle attempt—-though she was so greedy to get the money from me that she mis-did the math. The maintenance cost through Welfare was $309 a month for a huge two bedroom with a dining room on the lower east side. When I went to discuss it with friends—-everyone was offering to chip in to buy furniture, etc., whatever she wanted to sell to give her a nest egg to go to Charlotte with—-my mother and stepfather ready to help her get a job (he did—-she was fired the first week)—-so I said I can go as high as a thousand—-but I meant $1000 PLUS the $309. She thought I meant $309 plus $350——so she demanded I give her $650 a month—-in total including electricity, etc. One of my friends hit me and I said yes.
Welfare & The Co-Op Game
The side to this was that Welfare creates coops to lower expenditures to Welfare recipients’ landlords. Welfare “sells” the co-op apartment back to the tenant and thereby doesn’t have to “send” the rent check anywhere and always gets paid by owning the building.
The tenant has to give two downpayments to get in—-$300 times two and then $309 a month, as maintenance. So after 19 years my cousin is watching the real estate market, seeing apartments in the neighborhood going for $2 million and that her Welfare coop sales term, transfer of ownership is up year 20. When I left, she’s back in arrears after a couple of months—-the first thing she did with the rent/security—-$1300 was run out and go shopping—-I should’ve known then….
So she’s back in Housing Court but no me, no sister, no one to borrow the spent rent-maintenance on—-yes, they give it to adults as cash to then send off—-it’s mainly if you’ve been a long time recipient they do this—-someone wised up in the past decade. So she’s in arrears $618. She doesn't have it but offers to sell out arly and they can cut the $2 million according by two years. They politely explain that she’s misunderstood them and real estate, particularly how a coop works. A coop is not ownership of the property but of “shares” like stock that are the valuation of the property.
By buying the building, Welfare then could set the value of the apartment which was the double payments to get in $600. Thereby the equity in the apartment is $600 and she’s been paying the maintenance. So to “sell” she can sell it back to them—-and they’ll credit the value $600 to her arrears. Does she have the remaining $18?
She did not. They threw her out.
That’s the machinations of poverty—-they’re always back to square one—-while being loud I notice. Or too many child, as my mother noticed about her siblings—-without consideration that each child is at a minimum of $10k to rais, house, clothe, feed—— so less children, especially if you divorce the other parents, is probably best.
I see in my family, like the aboves—all still living in poverty and in my students that we’re trying to get out of poverty—-a too close/impulsivity that often undermined getting out of poverty.
My cousin, if she had listened, and even followed the family plan—-would’ve understood her co-op situation but my mother was willing to make a sizeable offer to the co-op after my living there to Year 20—-Welfare would’ve just re-upped her—-but she could’ve been receiving an extra $1000 a month on top of the maintenance fee—-plus working in full time in Charlotte—-even at a nominal salary that would have covered her apartment ($500 in Charlotte), car, food, etc. and she’d have her paycheck to herself. But she wrecked it herself so there was no second bite at the apple (me or her sister).
My cousin is technically mentally ill with narcissism, entitlement, etc.. I won’t even go to her funeral.
My Black Stepfather
My stepfather wouldn’t listen that the house was slightly underwater from the housing recession—bought at $100k (overpriced) and he was advised by my middle class/higher cousin a retired mortgage broker—-sell the house to Kyle before his mother dies—-2 years is when the stat/Medicaid attaches to property—-so you have to get it out of the ill person’s name and their spouse—-then he rents it back to you. My stepfather was terrified of this so he was eating turkey neck soup and driving a falling apart, gas guzzling 2005 Mercedes and trying to get money out of all of us. I bring my mother back to NY, she dies and he’s stuck with a house that is worth $70k but has dropped in equity value to essentially $0—-as if they’d just bought it, all the equity eaten up.
My second offer to him had been I’ll help you put additions onto the house to the of $25k which in 7 years, real estate appreciating at 3 to 5 percent a year will get you back to the original sale price PLUS $25 of build ons, to equity. My cousin said he was too stupid to accept this.
My third alternative was that Welfare/Section 8 there rents out your house and pays directly to the owner/mortgage—-you simply list your house online and it’s then inspected. He balked at this.
So for another 7 years he sits in the house, paying the mortgage, then a buyer comes along and buys it for $116k—-$6k over the original price they bought it for. After taxes and expenses on the $6k he moves to an apartment. Essentially having paid rent on a house for 15 years, that he doesn’t own.
The couple who bought it? Nice little old White couple—-who had it appraised and the value was $156k. So they made $40k at the signing. Which speaks to generational wealth based upon race, education and how poor people stay poor by their own impulsive greed and lack of education.
So that’s kind of what I think and notice about poorer Black and Latino people unless they show a greater capacity to learn, earn and understand.
#KylePhoenix
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