CLEVELAND, Ohio — I wasn’t home when sheriff deputies came and evicted a family that lived in a green house down the street. I didn’t know the family, who hadn’t lived long in the neighborhood.
I have no idea, on the eve of New Year’s, how they fell into the economic black hole that led to eviction. I have no idea where they could have gone for financial help.
Their church? Maybe.
Friends and kin? Probably.
The state of Ohio? No.
Listen to politicians and you’ll hear them bemoan the shortage of revenue. They hate taxing people for more; they hate even more doling out money to the poor. To the rich, not so much … particularly when they own sports teams. Politicians can find millions to shovel into their pockets.
I don’t know how we can see poor people and shy away from offering them a hand. Politicians in the Ohio Legislature have more millions they can tap to keep the poor from becoming homeless. Yet they care only about keeping sheltered folks who make a living off sports.
Money’s everywhere for them — money with few strings; money that, more than likely, will require millions more to keep athletes and the people who pay their wages in palaces with domes, heat and air conditioning.
It seems to me those millions — 600 of those millions, actually — can be better used to keep the poor housed or to offer below-market mortgage rates to families with stable jobs who want to buy homes.
But politicians invest in the fiction that a Super Bowl every few years, a Men’s Final Four and Taylor Swift concerts add more to a regional economy than an explosion in homeownership or a robust rental market.
I wish politicians and myopic sports fans understood stadiums are a financial drain on cities; a stadium (and an arena) is a gift to the uber-rich, a gift that requires a constant influx of public money. I have a word for the men and women who accept such gifts: grifters.
They grift because we let them; they grift at the expense of those who have no ability to dip their hands into the public’s till — to take our tax money or tap into our unclaimed funds and build a life richer than it is.
Six-hundred-million dollars can help needy families pay down medical debts and avoid bankruptcy; $600 million can remake public education; $600 million can rebuild our roads and bridges, creating jobs that pay well. Six-hundred-million dollars can do a great good for a great number.
Six-hundred-million dollars can keep more families from having their property carted to the curb in the chill of a December day.
Regrettably, I don’t know what became of the Black family that lived in the green house down the street from mine. I do know it’s too late for them to save their wooden tables, their bedroom furniture, their sofas and their living-room chairs that sheriff deputies dumped on the streets.
The plight of poor people like this family doesn’t matter to our politicians, who prefer to enrich the rich. Now, should that suggest letting more people become homeless, then …
I’m confident Ohio politicians can find six-hundred-million ways to assist those who have so little, even if it means giving less to those grifters who have so much.