I was listening to an interview this past weekend with Nicholas Kristof, the award winning journalist for the New York Times. Kristof is renowned for his coverage of human tragedies all across the globe from the genocide in Darfur to the Tiananmen Square uprising to the Arab Spring. He has seen the worst of our collective humanity and has attempted to document it. The images he paints about the unfathomable struggles that many across the globe face daily can be emotionally draining. Given this knowledge about his work, I heard an interview where he said something about sweat shops that simply made me stop in my tracks and then relate it to some of the work of Beyond Housing. Kristof stated,
“I’m one of the few Americans who is truly sympathetic to sweatshops really because of the time I spent in Asia and seeing the way they became an avenue for people to ride the escalator up and that they provided a lot of employment for people, which tended to be wretched jobs, but usually not as wretched as working in a rice paddy or in construction jobs or selling cigarettes in the street or, you know, a million other jobs that tend to be available. My fear has been that the hostility to sweatshops has meant that manufacturers don’t go to Africa. I mean, Africa’s problem isn’t that it has sweatshops; it’s that it doesn’t have any sweatshops. And typically, the only thing worse than a sweatshop is indeed no sweatshop at all, no employment whatsoever.”
The only thing worse than sweat shops is no sweat shops – wow! I don’t think many of us would have ever come to that conclusion. It is just hard to understand a topic like this unless you, as Kristof has done, can get close to it. Close enough to feel the oppression of a sweat shop but also close enough to understand that in the context of that community, it is indeed a move forward. This does not mean in any sense that a larger more humane solution doesn’t need to be found. But in the short term, sweat shops may have to do. This is not an easy conceptualization to get one’s head around. So I began to think about the not quite as serious work that Beyond Housing does day in and day out.
In particular, I was reminded about my own perceptions about payday loan shops and corner markets in our 24:1 Initiative. When our work began in 24:1 and I started really seeing all the parts of the Normandy School District, I was shocked by the number of payday or title loan facilities in our footprint. There are 32 of these non-traditional lending shops in the 24:1 Initiative’s footprint compared to 3 regulated banks. My first reaction to these places, that in some cases charge up to 400% interest, is that they should be wiped off the face of this earth. How terrible these people are taking advantage of the people who live here. What I have come to find, upon being close enough, is that while I do not abide by the usury business practices of some of these places, they serve a purpose that no other entity is performing as of today. These places provide liquidity otherwise known as cash to hard working families that just don’t have enough resources from paycheck to paycheck. These families have few if any alternatives when they are in a bind for a car repair, food, rent, utilities or whatever challenge faces them on a regular basis. Until we find a real alternative to these “money changers”, we cannot remove them from our communities. They serve a purpose today– the only thing worse than a payday loan is not having access to a payday loan for emergency cash. Tomorrow, I want to see products like the ones at the St. Louis Community Credit Union that recognize the situation families are in and work with them to bolster their credit and get into more mainstream products. When we complete the construction of our four story, 42 unit senior building with a new full service Midwest Bank Centre facility, my hope is there will be more opportunities to leave the “money changers”. The closer I got the better I understood.
The other revelation I had in my early tours of the 24:1 footprint was the large number of “corner markets” throughout the area. During this period, we were finalizing the financing for our soon to be built 16,000 square foot Save-A-Lot grocery store in Pagedale. I became a bit of a “food desert snob” where only full service grocery stores were good enough and these corner markets with high prices and extremely limited fresh foods just needed to go away. Again, somewhere done the road I would like to see this happen, but not right now. These stores, like payday lenders, serve a purpose in the communities they reside in. For instance, if you do not have a car and live let’s say 1.5 miles from the Save-A-Lot, how would you get there and back? Walk three miles total and the second 1.5 with a bunch of heavy bags? So where can they go? The corner market, the same market that has been in the community for years. We met an owner who gives some longtime customers credit if they need it in an emergency. Again, these corner markets serve a purpose today. I wish everyone had access to easy transportation and a full service grocery store nearby. We are working on making that happen in the future. Today, however, that is not the case. As I get close enough to better understand, my perspective deepens.
