Get A Job
August 28th, 2006 - 4:16 pm
A few days ago the News 8 Poll asked whether or not victims of Hurricane Katrina should continue to get government assistance. An overwhelming number of those who voted and commented on the poll had harsh and heartless things to say. They want the “freeloaders” to stop getting assistance, because “a year is long enough.” These people should “get jobs now” or “go back to New Orleans.” I have to assume none of the commenters has ever had a life crisis which caused them to lose everything in their life.
Today News 8 started a series on the Kartrina victims that made their way to Austin, and I wish the poll had been put up at the same time as the first installment so some of these hard-nosed commenters could hear about some of the problems these people have been having getting jobs and housing. Not that it would have made much difference, I think. When your heart is cold, your ears can’t hear.
It’s not as easy as it sounds to just go get a job and an apartment or house in Austin, especially if you are starting out with nothing at all. One of the biggest problems? Transportation.
Many evacuees relied on public transportation in New Orleans and didn’t need a car in the city.
“I’ve heard some of the cynical comments, ‘Well, some of these folks should get a job.’ Well, it’s very difficult when you don’t have a car and you can’t catch a bus,” Pastor Roy Jones of Community Action Development and Assistance (C.A.D.A.) said.
This is something I can speak to personally, since I often experience long periods of time when I don’t have a reliable car of my own. Our public transportation system sucks. It’s fine if you live and work where the busses travel, but there are many areas of Austin which are under-served by the bus system, and heaven help you if you have to be at work at 6 am or get off of work after 11 pm. The bus system closes up shop at night. Some of the commuter routes run even shorter periods of time.
When I was attending college classes here in Austin, I would have to catch the earliest bus available, make three transfers as I traveled across town, and after a two and a half hour trip, I would find myself getting to the North Transfer Station praying the shuttle which represented the last leg of my journey hadn’t already left. At least three times a week I had to run down the highway after the shuttle hoping they would see me and stop. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes the shuttle had been gone so long, my only option was to wait an hour for the next one and miss a class. By the time I had gotten to school, I had spent about 3 hours on buses just to get across town … a trip of about 20-30 minutes in a car. It sucked, but it was my only option.
Luckily, you can miss a few days of class and not get kicked out of school. The same cannot be said about jobs. If you are continually late or miss work due to transportation problems, you will find yourself jobless. In fact, many places in town won’t even hire you unless you have “reliable transportation of your own,” and they ask that right on the application. Even employers know the local bus system can’t be considered to be reliable transportation.
My next brush with using the bus system for something other than trips to stores or the library, for things that are time and schedule dependent, was when I was working at TJX. I would catch the bus outside my apartment door and ride it as far south as I could. Then I had to walk a mile through a cow field to get to the mall. The journey was repeated in reverse every afternoon. If the weather was stormy, I had to walk along the highway where there were a few stretches of sidewalk and hardened dirt paths (from all the other people who made that trek daily). This made the walking portion of my trip to and from work a mile and a half long, and by the time I got to work, I was soaking wet and covered in mud, so I always had to carry my work clothes in tightly-sealed plastic bags and change when I got there. In this case, rain or not, it took me about an hour or more of bus riding and walking to make a trip that would only take 10 minutes by car, and on those nights when I had to work until closing? I had to run that mile or more to get to the bus before the last one left at 11 pm. I often didn’t make it, and that meant walking another 4 or so miles to get home. It’s a good thing I was in my twenties then, because I have to tell you, I would not be able to keep that up for any length of time if I had to do it today. And all of that effort was for a job that, at the time, paid a quarter over minimum wage. If I’d been on my own and not with Lin, I wouldn’t have been able to pull any of it off or even survive. Not that we were surviving so well back then. Those were the lean years when Lin was going back to school and working as a bartender.
Simply put, unless you are lucky in where you live and work, the bus system is not going to be helpful to you. Unlike other major urban areas, we do not have reliable public transportation in Austin.
As to the housing, we were having a housing crunch before Katrina hit. It doesn’t surprise me they are having problems finding affordable housing in Austin. Oh sure, new apartments are being built all the time, but they are the upscale variety that even Lin and I couldn’t afford to live in, and they are nowhere near a bus line.
So how are people who have lost everything supposed to acquire an apartment, a car, and a job in this town? I agree, it would be great if everyone could be settled into a new and productive life a year after the event, but this city doesn’t make it easy to do so. Austin is no longer a cheap place to live, and if the comments on that poll are any indication, it’s not a very nice place to live anymore either. I pray none of the commenters never have to go through the experience of losing everything and being shipped to another state to start over. Though it might change their tune, I wouldn’t wish something that awful on anyone.
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6 Responses to “Get A Job”
“I pray none of the commenters ever have to go through the experience of losing everything…”
Many of them will when the bubble collapses and they can’t find any lender to cover the balloon payment on their no-principal mortgages. Especially the pretend Rambos who used paper equity to buy Hummers. They’re probably the very people you’re upset with. It’s happened before in Texas and it’ll happen again.
The bus business. About the only places I’ve seen decent bus service is in the big northeastern cities. The rest of the country goes through the motions because federal matching money is involved. A lot of the seemingly bizarre practices in public education, policing, construction, healthcare, et cetera, is motivated by the desire to grab as much ‘free money’ as possible.
It’s my understanding that hardly any of the billions of Fed money has never been spent. I guess they wanted to continue on with the theme of royally botching the handling of this natural disaster. They still aren’t done finger pointing and never will be.
“Many of them will when the bubble collapses…”
No doubt. I see my friends doing it too: Buying way too much house, just because they can. I try to tell them to imagine the worst case scenario and make sure that no matter what happens they will always be able to make that mortgage payment, but no one listens. Sure the house we bought is a crappy little old house in a somewhat crappy little neighborhood, but even if the whole economy took a nose-dive and Lin’s job went bye-bye, the two of us could work at Burger King and pay our bills and keep the house. The same cannot be said for people who allowed themselves to buy into the idea of “needing” a McMansion and two new SUV’s. I assure you the realtors and lending agents would have loved to sell us more house and would have gladly done so. Luckily, we had some sense and didn’t listen to the hype or give into the pressure to get the “perfect” house in the ‘burbs.
We’ve needed light rail here for ages now. If the folks who want to live in McMansions out in the ‘burbs want to live an hour from work, fine, let them. The bus system shouldn’t be wasting money sending buses out there, but they do, and the funny thing is … they aren’t the people who need or use the buses. It’s those of us inner-city folks who use the buses. It used to be better here, but then they started with all the commuter routes, and the service within the city went downhill. It peeves me to see empty buses coming from the ‘burbs while the most-used bus routes are sometimes so overcrowded stops are skipped because there’s no room on the bus. And for heaven’s sake … limited all-night service would be a god-send.
“It’s my understanding that hardly any of the billions of Fed money…”
From what I can tell, that’s the case, but Bush assured us yesterday that the work is going great and is JUST STARTING. It’s been a year. The work should have been STARTING a long time ago.
“Only 50 percent of New Orleans has electricity. Half its hospitals remain closed. Violent crime is up. Less than half the population has returned. Tens of thousands of families still live in trailers and mobile homes with no real timetable for moving to more permanent housing. Insurance settlements are mired in red tape. The city still has no master rebuilding plan. And while much debris has been cleared, some remains as if the clock stopped when the storm struck. –source”
I have friends that are all caught up in still waiting for insurance pay-outs and help with rebuilding, and while the images of the Gulf Coast you see on TV show pretty McMansions all fixed up and the tourist locations looking good, the actual town itself doesn’t look much better than it did once the water receded. 50% of the town still doesn’t have electricity?! There is no reason for that to be true a year after the event. An electrical grid is one of those things you have to have, and it’s one of those things that can be fixed by throwing money at it. Meanwhile, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars a day are spent on the Iraq boondoggle? The last time I heard a number attached to that I think it was $250k a day.
The finger-pointing won’t be done until you and I are long dead and historians can look back and sort it all out. From my vantage point, there have been failures from top to bottom, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone willing to step up to the plate and get stuff done. Everyone just wants it to go away, but that’s not going to happen unless the government does something about it, and they don’t seem to want to do what needs to be done … probably because the people who voted them in are the very people I am complaining about in this post: people who don’t care and think people who need help after a major crisis are nothing but freeloaders. I try not to wish bad things on people like that, but I do wish they would consider the old adage of “walking a mile in another man’s shoes” and really contemplate what it would be like to wake up tomorrow with nothing at all. Of course, you have to have some measure of compassion for that to have an effect on you, and I think people like this lack compassion (but I bet a lot of them go to church every Sunday and see themselves as “godly” and “christ-like too).
“The last time I heard a number attached to that I think it was $250k a day.” You meant $250 million a day, and that’s accepting the gov’t’s lowball guess.
Oh, yeah … million. I wish it was just thousands.
Hell, we have people here that are still hurting from Charley back in 2004. These people live in the same city I do, even.
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Neighbors/DailyJournal/evlDJ01082406.htm