Postcards from a Train, Part Two

The Last of President Biden’s America

I left you, dear readers, promising you a Part Two of my train journey West to East, across the country. Events have delayed me — thank you for your patience - and in retrospect I am glad. Because now I see that the last part of my train journey recorded the last of President Biden’s America, as opposed to its having recorded a journey across something that was simply “America”.

Writing this letter to you post-Inauguration, I now have something to which to compare that last gesture, the last gasp, of Biden’s America. (I’ll follow this with a Letter from President Trump’s New York, and a Letter from the Prison State of Canada.)

I was on the Empire Builder. The night before I was to travel to Portland, Oregon, to start my journey, as you recall, I had been waiting in a hotel room in the little agricultural town of Eugene, following the crazy drone activity and deciding on whether or not to fly. I’d gone out at last to get some dinner.

I was on the outskirts of the darling walkable historic downtown; I was in an area sprawling with factories and warehouses, and chain hotels such as the one in which I was waiting, unmoored, among parking lots and busy boulevards. It was a suburban No Man’s Land, tempered only by the low foothills visible in the middle distance, and by the exuberant outcroppings of evergreens and moss and granite that always, in spite of developers’ worst efforts, distinguishes the Pacific Northwest.

I asked the front desk if I could walk into the charming downtown; with trepidation, the front desk clerk showed me a map of the way. I set out. But immediately I saw that his concern was real and that the path ahead of me was only theoretical.

The Pacific Northwest has always felt extremely safe to me, cozy and friendly. But now, as the mist turned into a steady drizzle, and as I followed the GPS on my phone along a sidewalk flanked by gas stations and convenience stores, I realized that nothing at all was safe. I became aware that homeless people were all around me. That alone does not make me feel, usually, unsafe. But I became aware that homeless people who were out of their minds on various substances, surrounded me.

It was a landscape of the lost; of the deranged; of the damaged.

In the middle of the four-lane road, where I was supposed to enter the park - according to my GPs and the desk clerk’s directions — I saw a man in his sixties. His trousers were soiled with months of grime, including filth at the trousers’ seat. His grey beard was untrimmed. His skin was red and raw from exposure. He wore, in this cold, wet weather, only a ‘wife-beater’ t-shirt on his upper body. His poor exposed arms were frail. He had no belt. No hat.

He stood on the island between two rows on each side of whizzing traffic. He just stood there.

I realized that he was on some drug — I’d seen people like this recently in Brooklyn too — that immobilized him. He was bent forward somewhat, and could easily have fallen one way or another into the traffic. But he was as still as could be, unnaturally still. He seemed always on the verge of falling but did not fall. I was horrified for him. No one helped him. I too to my shame, did not help him. I did not know what to do.

As I was trying to decide if he was in urgent danger, I realized a woman was bearing down on me, coming at me on the sidewalk on which I stood. She was in her thirties. Black hair, in a tangle on her head. Thin; dressed also in just a sleeveless t-shirt, and in thin black jeans, though the rain was now steady, drenching. Her arms were held out at her sides as if she were a scarecrow and her eyes were black and manic. She was fixed on me and shrieking at me as if I had slain her firstborn. She cried out obscenity after obscenity and came at me at speed. I had to get out of there. I crossed at the cross walk to get away from her.

At the entrance to the park, where the map showed that a charming, curving 19th century bridle path led, along lovely waterways, through scenic meadows, and from there into downtown - I was stymied. I looked down under the bike overpass — all of this being part of the much-vaunted walkable and bikeable infrastructure of the little town — and realized I could not enter any further. A full encampment of drugged-looking homeless people was established under the bridge, the walkway that I was supposed to take. Full tents, full camping stoves, sleeping bags, groceries in boxes; items of clothing laid out to dry on whatever could prop them up; people in groups; people alone. It was a little city of drugged homeless people, now permanently erected under this bridge. It would have been insanely dangerous to have taken that path walking as a woman alone.

Further along, I tried another entrance to the park. Same issue: a fully established homeless encampment blocked access there too.

I gave up, and turned back. My shrieking nemesis had vanished, so I made it back to a bar near my hotel.

I later learned that what I was seeing, others also saw: a reader from Eugene told me that the town subsidized homelessness with cash, thus, in her words, providing ‘free drugs’, and had legalized heroin and ‘crank’ two years ago.

The bar was was warm and cozy and welcoming — everything I loved about the Pacific Northwest: wood-paneled walls and neon beer signs and old pool tables; a juke box, and low-key, bearded truckers and loggers.

I chatted with a young woman who lived in a RV with her dog. She managed RV camps as her profession. She would go from camp to camp, in a micro-economy for people who chose always to be transient, with jobs shared by word of mouth. Thus she saw the country and lived cheaply. The downside was that as soon as she made friends, she said, she would have to move on. The young woman was cheerful, upbeat, independent, but spoke with an undertone of melancholy — that resilient, lonely, wild American note that Jack Kerouac caught so well in his journey in 1957 across the nation. A classical American note that events since 2020 had so submerged.

A young man was shooting pool. A older man was explaining to the room, the jazz greats on the juke box.

The young man asked the young woman to play a game, but she declined. I got up and played — it had been years since I’d played pool. As I finally was managing my pool cue decently and making progress, the young man asked me about “your friend”, the young woman I had just met.

I had that moment of nameless joy that travel in America brings. A stranger, a friend, a passing moment, a destination. You can be anyone. You can have no identity at all. You can approach any life, have any conversation.

Unlike in other countries, you are not your caste, your ancestors or your CV. You can shoot a game of pool in a random lumberjacks’ bar, you can learn about life in the RV camp management subculture, you can benefit from and absorb every story. Americans are overwhelmingly accepting and collegial. This is our temperament. The nation and its narratives are limitless.

I bowed out at last, to go back to my hotel, hoping the young people would find each other before their paths were separated again by this massive continent.

Darkness had fallen, the scent of wet juniper had arisen in the cool night; the stars gleamed; and at least in the few hundred feet to my hotel’s entrance, the path was safe and clear.

*****

The next day I took a bus to Portland; in Portland’s majestic train station, I boarded the Empire Builder. I’ve shared with you the journey through the Rockies; the gleaming flanks of the mountains; the still white meadows, untracked by humans or animals; the grey dawn illuminating sheer cliffs of a scale beyond what any European had witnessed before.

How could the first European trappers, or explorers such as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, have possibly found words to express to those back home, the majesty they witnessed? We came down after two days into Montana’s foothills, then on to North Dakota, Minnesota, Illinois, to more and more flat open fields, to devastated former manufacturing towns and cities, to small ranch houses, past crumbling factories, arriving at last in Chicago.

The Chicago station was another turn-of-the-last century wonder. Marble columns soared; a dome arched over all of us, on polished wooden benches, like church pews. A Christmas tree overshadowed the center of the atrium; it was decorated with symbols of, and signs bearing the names of, old railway lines, some of them very poetic; the but there was not an angel, a crèche, a Santa, to be seen; no symbol at all of the Christian origin of the tree or the tradition. There were no Menorahs, even though Hanukkah was about to start. There was a quasi-religious poster in the corner, for some unnamed pagan civic faith. The atmosphere was inert, anonymous; not Christmas-y.

***

As we changed trains and pulled out of Chicago on the Lake Shore Limited, a genial fellow in his early forties joined me as my seat mate. He was chatty and full of information, and within minutes he shared everything about his job. He worked for a company that invests loans in developers’ plans for low-income housing. In a detailed, even tortuous description, he shared the minutiae of this industry. It seems that there is never enough low-income housing. But when I pressed, he explained that Section Eight — a HUD program — which provides low income and disabled people with vouchers to pay their rent was, in my view at least, massively distorting what would have been a free market real estate and development landscape.

Section Eight sounds benign, superficially. I had thought that it went to the poorest of the poor, so that they would not be homeless. I certainly in principle support policies that make housing more affordable.

I found out, as the train sped on, that my assumptions were completely incorrect.

Section Eight is a voucher system that does not just apply to publicly owned housing, such as urban “projects.” It gives vouchers directly to private landlords, and massive financial assistance to developers. And it is not the poorest of the poor alone who can use these vouchers. In Massachusetts, for instance, anyone in the lower half of the “AMI”, or “area median income”, all the way up to those making 80% of AMI, can get Section Eight vouchers. For a family of four in Boston, the AMI is $98,100. So in MA you can be family of four making $49,050 and the government will subsidize the difference between 30% of your income, and the cost of your rent. So if you make 50% of AMI in Mass, you can pay $1267 a month for a four-bedroom unit, with State paying the balance, even though the average cost of a four bedroom unit in the Boston area is, according to the real estate site Zillow, $4771 per month. Indeed, you don’t have to be in the bottom quarter of earners to get assistance with your rent. Massachusetts considers a family of four “low-income” and eligible for Section Eight assistance, even if they make 80 per cent of “AMI”, or $78,500.

Arguably it is useful to offer families help with rent, so that they can afford decent housing. But as I listened, I felt more and more unease. My seatmate’s company specialized in lending to developers who were building housing specifically for Section Eight renters. I researched this later, and I see why a subspeciality has arisen, to lend just to Section Eight developers. The benefits to developers include the fact that there is a steady stream of renters, with very low risk to the landlords, as the contract is between the landlord, the tenant and the government, with the government always paying the rent voucher.

Indeed, HUD offers help directly to developers in the form of the FHA Multifamily Mortgage Insurance Program, and New Construction or Substantial Rehabilitation assistance program. In other words, HUD gives developers money and loans to build Section Eight housing and then helps to pay the rents. It is a closed circle of profit, for developers, using our tax dollars.

The trouble with all of this? There are strings attached to keep you poor.

To keep your Section Eight-funded house or apartment, which can be a rather luxurious one compared to what one would be able to afford without the voucher, you have to stay lower income. In other words, you have to explain your financial and employment plans for the next five years and you have to stay within ‘income limits’. So the HUD boondoggle, if I may call it that, benefits developers, keeps the HUD bureaucracy employed, and uses our tax dollars to give families who may be fully employed, a much higher standard of accommodation than they can afford on their own; but the price those families pay to remain in their homes, is that they have to promise to not make any more money than they are making already.

$1267 a month won’t buy a family of four anything in Boston. That is in part by policy and design, I learned. And the many ways low income and poor people were able to survive and get a foothold to a better life, in terms of finding accommodation, are closed to them by a combination of the Section 8 program, and zoning. The combination funnels money from HUD to developers and landlords, closing off options for the poor and the low income.

Where did people with few resources used to seek housing, in America and Western Europe? Rooming houses, ‘bed-sitters’, crowded tenement houses, ‘flophouses’, meager inns.

I am not romanticizing slums; and crowded conditions can be dangerous. But right now, zoning prevents two families who can afford 1267 a month each, from joining forces privately to share a house, which immigrants used to do upon arriving legally in this country, til they could afford their own place. By the same token, rooming houses or ‘boarding houses’, in which widows or single moms often made steady incomes by renting out single rooms in their homes (and at times, offering cooked meals) are also zoned out of existence. You can’t legally rent out a room in your own home, in most areas now, except, oddly, on the Airbnb platform. The end of rooming houses as a housing option, closed off opportunities for low income students to attend college, as dorms or apartments are among the biggest expenses now when kids seek a college education. Single workers in cities in less well- paying jobs, who used to have the options of living in affordable ‘rooming houses’, must now spend up to half their income on rents for entire apartments, or else expensively commute long distances. And older people with homes, who might benefit from this income stream when their own kids are grown, can often no longer do so due to zoning; so they risk losing their homes if they miss a mortgage payment, or living on only social security. They can’t, in other words, use their property to grow their own wealth. This zoning forbidden room rentals, just opens up easy pickings for BlackRock.

HUD and BlackRock-friendly zoning, closed off all of these options.

I started to reel as I processed this closed system. I was having vertiginous flashes of all the 18th and 19th century rags-to-riches novels I had read, and the biographies of titans who had come from meager backgrounds, and I thought of my own ancestors’ journeys. The Section Eight system froze all of that potential social mobility of the past, in place.

What I mean is that in Charles Dickens’ London, accommodation may have been appallingly dirty and uncomfortable for the poor. But 18th and 19th century novels are full of poor young men and women who save their pennies to set out to the big city, whether that is London or New York or Philadelphia, and sleep in some filthy inn, or rent a miserable room, perhaps sharing it with others. For all the discomfort and dirt and disease this situation entailed, it did allow the poor basic autonomy and mobility. They could base themselves in cities, and work their way up the less-miserable and finally not-miserable ladders of housing: from slums to “bed-sits” to one-bedrooms to family homes. The point was, they were free to move and free to prosper. Nothing penalized their success.

This story is Oliver Twist’s in the Dickens novel of that name, and Rebecca Sharp’s in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and all of Horatio Alger’s heroes; it is the arch-narrative of the upward mobility of the 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries. But to start their upward journeys, the poor needed poor housing that they could afford, and that put no conditions on them.

I thought, as I noted, of my own ancestors. From their arrival with nothing at Ellis Island, to the crowded tenements in the Lower East Side, where immigrants slept many to a room; to their journeys to Ohio, to slightly better work and slightly less dire housing; in all cases they moved to where the jobs were, or to where networks of friends or family could help them, and by starting in terrible, very cheap slum housing that had no restrictions on their income or mobility, they were able to change and improve their lives, ending their days in solid bourgeois comfort in a single-family Cleveland home.

I thought of what would happen today, if Oliver Twist or Becky Sharp, or my grandpa Joseph and grandma Rose, accepted Section Eight housing. They would be scared to earn more money; they would not risk following the jobs or networks, as they would lose their much-discounted homes. Affordable housing, I realized, is not unavailable because no one in a free market wants to build cheap, bad, accessible accommodations anymore, though many past affordable housing options, as you saw above, have been zoned out of existence; it is unavailable because Section Eight has ended the free market for what used to be poor people’s housing, often derided and even cleared away, as “slums”.

The Section 8 program makes it more attractive to build housing for people who are no longer their own life agents; no longer poor but free, poor but in charge of their future earning potential and their mobility. Rather, it is now more attractive to build always-subsidized housing for what are now, in the Section 8 system, the institutionalized, permanent quasi-poor, who must never make more money, must never leave their towns, if they wish to keep their market-advantaged roofs over their heads.

What does this situation do, long term? I am not trying to romanticize slums or poverty, heaven knows, or to criticize people who seek help with housing; but the experience that Becky Sharp or Oliver Twist, or my grandparents, had, of starting out in terrible but very cheap housing with no strings attached, and the mobility and entrepreneurial efforts to which their unencumbered if poor state drove them, helped, I would argue, to sharpen the skills and awareness of generations of poor people who eventually achieved upward mobility. If a group of low (or really just lower) income people is incentivized, in contrast, by the Section Eight system, never to make more money and never to consider moving, this creates generation after generation of a culture of limited horizons, and dependency on the State.

Aghast, I watched the states roll by. Having pieced together this set of policies that explained so much of the despair and immobility I saw, I went on to meditate on policies on the West that seemed also to incentivize drug addiction and to use the homeless as tools in social engineering in a given town.

I thought of the homeless people whom I had seen in Eugene, whose encampments had made a beautiful park unusable by a good portion of the non-homeless population of the little city. Was these desperate people’s homelessness not being weaponized by the state as well? I thought of Corvallis, which I had recently visited. The homeless people who had been living in the Central Park of the little town had recently been provided with permanent bathrooms there, and signs had been erected, even since my previous visit, saying that they were welcome to pitch their tents right in the park. The homeless encampment in Corvallis used to be at the edge of town. Now city leaders repositioned it right in the center of a peaceful residential area. A free ‘market’, offering clothes and food for no money, opened in the park every Saturday. That seems ‘nice’; but is it really?

Predictably, fewer elderly people used that park now; the disabled did not venture in; kids did not play freely there any longer; trash and food, attractive to rodents, had been scattered thoughout what had been a pristine rose garden. The homeless now owned the park

I thought of how in every city up and down the West Coast in which the homeless were being redirected in these bizarre ways, many homeowners would eventually give up and move away, and then - bingo! BlackRock would come through and scoop up the real estate. That happened in Corvallis. Bids by private people on newly available homes in the formerly desirable areas now made dangerous by subsidized drug addiction and homelessness, were being trounced by BlackRock. The cynicism of these policies was overwhelming.

I asked my new friend, the HUD lender, about this weaponized homelessness that I saw in Western cities now ranging from San Francisco to Los Angeles to the littlest towns in Oregon. I mentioned that when I lived in New York in the 1980s, “SROS” - single room occupancy hotels - seemed to do a much better job than did today’s policies, of sheltering the homeless.

“SROs work”, he said. “But you have to sign a code of conduct. You need to use methadone, for instance, if you are a heroin addict, and they kicked you out if you did drugs or dealt drugs.” In other words, there had been strings attached to stay in an SRO (which was really the equivalent of an old-fashioned rooming house). But the condition helped people’s autonomy and ended drug marketplaces. Current Section 8 ‘strings’ just incentivize further poverty and do not have consequences for drug use.

Another reason for the decline of SROs are that improved housing standard regulations made it, paradoxically, difficult for landlords to maintain the units. So once again, “slums” — or low-quality, maybe unattractive, but basic housing that poor people can afford - have in retrospect an unrecognized utility in society. We cleared the slums and replaced them with government-managed housing with some loss to the poor who lived there, as urban policy critic Jane Jacobs had warned. Also — gentrification mobilized against SROs. Many such hotels were renovated into luxury housing. The government no longer wanted to fund housing that worked - but that was not also a boondoggle for developers.

So there you have it — you can get help with shelter now if you agree to stay poor. You can’t find, any longer, a simple hotel room with a hot plate, or a boarding house, that lets you stay off the street. Towns are incentivizing homelessness — despite $3.7 billion in 2024 for Homeless Assistance Grants — though policies such as those in Corvallis, policies of “welcome”’ to prime shared green spaces like city parks, really incentivizes drug addiction and drug markets in what had been shared common urban green spaces.

And the Federal Government spends billions — HUD’s budget in 20924 was $73.3 billion - to creates systems, including housing systems, that at final assessment, are designed to keep developers from having to undertake any risk, and are designed to keep people immobilized and poor. A reader notes that Catherine Austin Fitts at HUD created a system to track where the money went locally; she was soon fired and her career and reputation targeted. What bribes and payoffs and cozy relationships, that do not bring tax payer money to house the poor, will President Trump’s America now reveal?

That closed system, that built-in despair, that un-American penalization of thriving or of mobility, was all happening, institutionalized, in President Biden’s America. I saw the wreckage in town after town, through my train window.

*****

As we came into the East side of the nation, the mood darkened considerably. My HUD informant had gotten off a few stops after Chicago.

We travelled on into the night and morning — past Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Schenectady. Groups of male immigrants, it seemed all of them from Venezuela, got on the train in what looked like trafficked units of twenty or thirty men at a time. They had almost no luggage, just backpacks and new sneakers. Their faces were impassive.

A elderly man got on in Utica to sit beside me to tell me that if I was not Roman Catholic, I would end up in Hell. He got off in Schenectady. A woman in her sixties got on in Schenectady, heading to Albany. She asked me about my writing — I confessed to her when pressed, that my most recent book dealt with injuries and deaths from the MRNA vaccine — and she described to me the Christmas she was planning to spend alone, and the fact that six of her friends, and her parents, had, since 2021, passed away.

My heart broke for my country and my fellow Americans. I thought about the coming Inauguration, and prayed it would all go smoothly and safely.

###

That was President Biden’s America.

I watched as my final leg of the journey, the bleak impoverished outskirts and the empty brick factories of the towns that had once been manufacturing giant, passed the windows. All the jobs had gone away.

There was no hope left there now — or only the hope that people could rustle up individually, or as families; as if they were huddled around individual dying fires; not collectively as a society; not one big mighty bonfire.

Would the new Administration tackle this inertia, this heartache, these un-American policies? Would it herald a new day?