snipers positioned along the rooftop pulled on their military-grade night vision goggles, looking for enemies as far as a mile away. During the day, they studied torture techniques and hacked into the signals of local radio stations, broadcasting warnings and marching orders to hundreds of team members who were spread out across the city.
They called their headquarters “The Castle.”
It was sixteen stories high, the tallest building for miles. The group’s leadership was protected deep within. Anyone who entered the structure was patted down by armed guards. If someone protested, they were beaten. And if an enemy was found trying to enter the building, they were killed immediately.
If you think I’m talking about war-torn Syria or some Hollywood movie, you would be wrong. This was, rather, my home.
The Randolph Towers. A Chicago Housing Authority complex near the intersection of Sixty-third Street and Calumet Avenue. We lived in apartment 1107. Government housing. Two bedrooms, four kids to a room. We moved in when I was eight years old. My mother could not afford anything else.
Several years earlier, a Chicago gang called the Black Disciples had taken over the entire complex. It was centrally located in the neighborhood and housed some of the poorest people in Chicago. The poverty created an environment where people were willing to become pack workers, transporting and selling drugs. Guys were prepared to join the gang and become killers if called upon. The Black Disciples would drive up every afternoon in their twin Bentley cars, coming from somewhere else—somewhere nice where they all lived. They ran their operations well into the night, making as much as $50,000 a day from sales of crack cocaine and heroin in the building and $300,000 a day from their entire operation. Tenants could remain in the building only if they submitted to being regularly searched and sometimes assaulted. If they would not, the gang would run them out. Gunfire from rival gangs was a constant possibility. There were bullet holes in the concrete walls out front.
The police knew about all of this, but they rarely came into The Castle. They recognized it would take the U.S. Army’s First Armored Division to successfully clean out the bad guys. One night, the gang’s guards discovered an undercover cop on the premises. They shot him just outside the apartments as he tried to escape. His blood stayed on the concrete for weeks. Everyone, including the cops, knew who controlled the building.
Meanwhile, conditions inside deteriorated every year. My own bedroom walls were made of cinder blocks, but you could still hear the various fights and threats and babies crying all day and night. The elevator was usually broken. The garbage chutes outside every apartment were choked and unusable, home to thousands of roaches and an odor that made you gag. If you removed the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, you could crawl through to the adjoining apartment. Protective “fencing” lined the hallways, with the apartments on one side and open air on the other, with a chain-link barrier in between. It was the fenced hallways—more than the gangs, violence, and fear—that shamed me most. It felt like we were living in a cage.
Because, in reality, we were.
President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered his State of the Union address two months after winning a landslide victory. Minutes into his speech, Johnson introduced what would become one of his signature policy initiatives. “Many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both…,” he said. “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”
At the time, Johnson and the Democrats enjoyed a rare 2-to-1 majority in both the House and the Senate. If they wanted to institute their agenda, now was the time to do it. Their War on Poverty became a major aspect of the government’s Great Society program, a bevy of legislative and executive policies meant to help the “other America,” those who failed to realize the benefits that a majority of citizens enjoyed in the middle-class economic expansion that followed World War II. Martin Anderson, an economist at Stanford University, has called the War on Poverty “the most ambitious attempt to redistribute income ever undertaken in the United States.”
Estimates indicate that in the more than half a century since the program’s passage, federal and state governments have spent $15 to $20 trillion to eliminate poverty in the United States. That’s a lot of money. In comparison, the entire twenty-year war in Vietnam cost less than $1 trillion (adjusted for today’s exchange rate), and the Iraq War cost just north of $2 trillion.
So it’s fair to ask, more than fifty years later: What, exactly, did those noble and concentrated efforts to address poverty accomplish?
In 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau determined that 12.3 percent of Americans, or 39.7 million people, still lived below the poverty line. In 1964, the percentage was about 18 percent. While advocates might argue that a 6 percent reduction in poverty means the effort succeeded, others might claim, reasonably, that the cost of those programs should have delivered better returns.
Beyond the money spent, however, there was another, far greater unexpected cost: the quality of life for the very people Johnson hoped to help.
While Johnson and his fellow Democrats may have acted with the best intentions, they paved the road to generational poverty and disenfranchisement, brick by brick, in cities across America. As Ronald Reagan warned, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” This observation had everything to do with the way Johnson’s programs played out in reality.
During the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, welfare dependency rose.
Unemployment in the inner city rose.
More black men ended up in jail than ever before.
Fewer black students were graduating college.
More black children were being born out of wedlock (25 percent born to unmarried parents in 1960 versus 80 percent in 2017).
More than fifty years later, the War on Poverty has become the longest-running war in American history. And Johnson’s Great Society has become something out of a dystopian novel.
our lights, gas, and water often got shut off after we fell behind on the bills. One time, after our gas went out, we resorted to boiling water in a pressure cooker for meals and for cleaning. My little sister Ashley, who was about eight, had boiled some water to take a warm bath. As she picked up the pressure cooker to pour the hot water into the tub, it slipped and spilled over her entire body. She suffered third-degree burns on her arms, legs, and thighs. I can still see the skin hanging off her, like an overcooked piece of chicken.
Months later, we were living with my grandmother when my mother came into my room and collapsed onto a chair beside the bed. I have a vague memory of ironing my shirts, no doubt trying to bring some order to my world. I tried to remain focused on the task at hand, but this was clearly a night when my mother was on one of her drug binges. She pulled a blanket over herself, and I could see that she was shaking. She was high—I knew how to spot that by now—but tonight I noticed something else. She was sobbing and fumbling with her hands beneath the blanket.
“Mom, what are you doing?” I finally said. She didn’t answer, so I stepped over to her and raised the blanket. It was splattered with blood.
A box cutter in her hand, she’d been cutting her wrist. She was attempting suicide right in front of me. For her, a life in the inner city—a life with no real direction, no value; a life now completely dependent on the assistance of others—was no longer a life worth living.
I ran into the next room to get my grandmother. “She’s trying to kill herself!” I yelled.
My grandmother shouted my mother’s name, pleaded: “What are you doing? What are you doing?” She turned to me. “Call the ambulance!”
I share this story not to shock you, but because in inner-city America, such hopelessness and violence are daily possibilities. Everyone around me at the time had a parent who’d overdosed, a cousin or brother who’d been shot, a friend who was addicted to heroin, a father who’d put a gun in his own mouth. And we all knew that our friend, brother, or mother could be next. And we now see this continuing in places like the suburbs, where families are being destroyed by addiction to opioids. For too long, our country has been fighting the war on drugs without tangible results. Our elected officials must unite and bring sensible solutions to stop the pain that many have experienced in the inner city, the suburbs, and rural America.
My good friend Benjamin Hodges grew up with similar experiences in St. Louis. He recently moved to L.A. to pursue his career and works as a consultant to one of the largest defense contractors in the world. But he lived in the Blumeyer housing projects of St. Louis for much of his childhood.
Ben’s mother, having recognized the dangers of government housing, moved the family out of the projects, despite not having the money to live anywhere else. As a result, they often went through stints of homelessness. When Ben was eleven, his entire family got evicted from their home—not because they hadn’t paid rent, but because their landlord hadn’t used their rent to pay his mortgage. “We had barely twenty-four hours to vacate,” Ben recalls, “and spent all that night packing up as many things as we could to get into storage.” The sheriff showed up the next day with three guys and proceeded to move their furniture out onto the street, in the rain. “I was humiliated,” he says. “We all were.”
His family landed in a shelter while his mom saved money to rent another home. Mere days from making that goal a reality, Ben’s stepfather, a recovering addict, took every dime she’d saved and spent all of it on crack cocaine. “My mom couldn’t bear to look us in the eyes all that week,” he says. “And we were homeless again, with no money…again.”
Do I blame LBJ for this? For Ben’s stepfather? For the callous sheriff? For my own mother’s suicide attempt that night, and the ones on other nights to come? Do I blame LBJ for my parents not being together? For the armed drug lords I had to pass every day on my way to school?
No. People make their own choices.
But I also can’t pretend that the choices of my mother and others weren’t drastically altered by the intentions of our government—a government that all too often believes it can solve a problem simply by tossing money at it. Or, worse, by trying to control how others live.
My community didn’t need handouts and rules to live a better life. Our needs were far more real. And, admittedly, more difficult to solve.
There were no drug rehabilitation services in our neighborhood. There were almost no jobs, as crime and overtaxation and overregulation had driven most businesses away. The police had largely surrendered the blocks to the gangs. The year I was born (1986), only twenty-one people in all of Chicago’s public housing called 911 for help, even though crime was a daily reality for the thousands who lived in those projects.
There were also few fathers or even men in our neighborhood. Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill included the stipulation that people with criminal records be denied access to public housing. We lived on the South Side of Chicago. Respectfully, how many black men between fifteen and forty do you suppose had a criminal record? A small bag of weed meant that a father or brother or son was no longer allowed in the home. The law of our land effectively separated families in a place where stability and family were needed most.
Tragically, in inner-city communities there remains a cycle of generational poverty. Now young girls have babies, hoping to escape dysfunctional family environments by getting on government assistance. Section 8 will get you a house, and other programs will provide you with food stamps, subsidies for utilities, and cash. In your mind, the government is taking care of you. But this is a dangerous illusion that keeps those living on the margins drowning in poverty, with no end in sight. Ultimately, they can no longer imagine any other world beyond the aberrant microcosm of the projects.
Even when some folk move into a better area, that conditioning moves with them. We could spend $50 trillion, handing each person a $1 million check, moving them out of the projects to a nice community—safer, cleaner, with manicured lawns. But they would still jack the car up on the lawn, let the oil drain into the street, not cut the grass, pile trash in the backyard. Their addictions would follow them. As would the notion that people who work or go to school are the weak ones, just putting on airs.
Because it’s not about their new environment.
It’s that they didn’t change within themselves.
a member of the British Parliament, James Oglethorpe, proposed a bold idea for a new settlement between Carolina and Spanish-controlled Florida—a settlement specifically built for Britain’s most disadvantaged citizens. (Oglethorpe himself had spent five months in debtors’ prison.) His genuine hope was that “Georgia” would provide a new opportunity for the “worthy poor,” and his plan included a methodically designed city to anticipate all the community’s future needs. The colonists, most of whom had been selected from debtors’ prisons, had no desire to do the work Oglethorpe had planned for the community and demanded the colony instead bring in slaves to do most of the work. Oglethorpe surrendered control of the colony in 1750 and returned to England broke. Slavery came to Georgia that same year.
In 1999, more than 250 years after Oglethorpe’s original proposal, the CEO of the Chicago Housing Authority, Phillip Jackson, came up with a similar plan that also sounded like a great idea. He wanted to tear down the projects, to get rid of places like The Castle. They looked like cages and jails, he said. Instead of forcing people to live there, he’d give them housing vouchers and let them move into nicer communities and actual houses.
But some didn’t want to leave. They didn’t want to move out of the projects because that’s where they’d grown up. It was home, community. It was the only place they could see themselves living.
In the end, people had no choice. The buildings came down, and in some cases the police had to go in and remove people physically from their homes. The projects—the violence and gangs and drugs and poor conditions—had become the only reality these people could envision. The world beyond was too complicated for them. They couldn’t face it. And when their location did eventually change, by force or otherwise, they usually still lived like they had in the projects. In fact, that’s largely why things became systemically more violent in the city of Chicago. People who’d been gang leaders in the projects started recruiting in their new neighborhoods—areas where people hadn’t previously been involved in gangs.
Clearly, housing and checks aren’t a stand-alone solution. People need job training, computer skills, and financial education to learn how to handle their money. But these skills must be connected to deeper, more personal values. In Barry Goldwater’s seminal 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, he explains that “the material and spiritual sides of man are intertwined; that it is impossible for the State to assume responsibility for one without intruding on the essential nature of the other; that if we take from a man the personal responsibility for caring for his material needs, we take from him also the will and the opportunity to be free.”
Government can only do so much. Organizations can only do so much. People have to want the power that comes with personal responsibility, to even know that such capability and power exist. There is not one government handout that can pour into you the desire to better your own life.
In my experience, there are two kinds of people who get on government assistance.
There are those who get on it because they really don’t have a choice. They despise being on it. Their pride is stricken. The notion that someone else is taking care of them feels demeaning. These people see government assistance as a temporary measure, as assistance, to merely help them get through a rough patch and get back on their feet.
That is how the system was created to work. There was some hope of this becoming a reality with the 1996 Welfare Reform Act—a bipartisan compromise between then–Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and then–President Clinton—a welfare reform plan that significantly changed the nation’s welfare system to require work in exchange for time-limited assistance. Its official name was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.
Personal responsibility.
When I first started working for the federal government as a teen, my work trainer was receiving the benefits of the Welfare Reform Act. It provided her with an opportunity to work a full-time job while still receiving her welfare benefits and at the same time learning valuable skills. In a matter of months—months!—she was able to get off the system entirely and continue working full-time.
But then there’s the other folk.
They get on government assistance, get comfortable, and often figure out how to manipulate the system as much as possible so they can continue on that same pathway going forward. They seek to make this new arrangement as permanent as possible.
I’ve seen such thinking take down even the strongest of people. For years, my grandmother (on my mother’s side) was our saving grace. She would visit our apartment in The Castle with bags of groceries and shoes that she bought from Payless. She tried to take care of us from afar, but eventually she had seen enough. “You need to move out of here,” she said. “This is a bad situation.”
My mom finally acquiesced. She headed to rehab across town, and my siblings and I moved in with Grandma. She was a no-nonsense woman of faith and industry. She was quick to set us straight but always made sure we were safe and provided for. Grandma worked ten hours a day as a private duty nurse, serving mostly wealthy clients. We were doing okay for a while, living in a more decent area of Chicago.
But that arrangement didn’t last for long.
I still remember that day. Grandma left for work as usual that morning, but it wasn’t long before she came back. She was trembling, eyes wide. “Somebody hit me,” she cried, collapsing to the steps, hands to her neck. “They ran off.”
She had been in a car accident, a hit-and-run, and it changed her life. The driver had been drunk. We found out later that he’d been in three other accidents the same day and had no insurance to speak of. Grandma’s car was totaled, and her neck and back were not in much better shape.
This woman, who’d worked hard her entire life, could no longer do her job. Her back brought agony with every step. Weeks later, she tried to work a reduced schedule. She was now doing overnight shifts—harder on her life and well-being, but easier on her body—but then she couldn’t even do that anymore. Despite her best efforts, within a year she’d lost her house, a house she’d owned for almost a decade. She probably could have kept it had she turned to us and said, “Okay, y’all are going into foster care.” But she didn’t. She had committed to caring for us. So we moved again. The government checks began to arrive again. Not for my mom anymore, but for my grandmother.
When you get into this dependency mentality, it changes everything.
You can be an individual who has worked your whole life, but once you begin to get on government assistance programs, your focus can…change. Your thought can become How can I get more? More housing, more food stamps, more cash, more assistance to pay for your lights and gas.
My grandmother’s desire to work the system all too quickly took on a life of its own. People in the community would come around and say, “Listen, these are the kinds of things I’ve been pulling off to get more of this and that.” And my grandmother would lean into it. I’m not saying she broke the law, but when you start engaging in this behavior, you completely lose your pride as you try to figure out how to survive by working the system. Even more tragically, you begin to pass down these tactics to your family and those around you.
There were times in my teens I was told not to work because it could jeopardize the government assistance our family was receiving. Even then, the idea was astonishing to me. Poverty and government dependence don’t just affect your bank account. Eventually, they come to affect your mind. You make decisions you normally wouldn’t make because you’re trying to survive. Your mental state can become extremely limiting. You see nothing but what’s in front of you. And when what’s in front of you is a politician with another handout, watch out.
How many Americans have accepted the narrative that things will never get better and that only government handouts are the answer to all that ails? Too many.
When we lived in The Castle, gang members would try to recruit me. When I said no, they’d beat me. Worst of all, these same guys were my classmates at school. How many young people have joined such gangs not for the money or because they thought it would be cool, but rather for survival? To avoid being beaten or killed. Too many.
When Goldwater warned of the balance between “the material and spiritual sides of man,” he understood that those trapped within government assistance would eventually devalue their own lives. So much so that life itself would take on little meaning. Thus, gangbangers ready to murder without hesitation, as easily as grabbing a bite to eat. Thus, an abortion rate much higher than the national average. Thus, mothers attempting to kill themselves with drugs and box cutters.
More often than not, the people around me weren’t simply deciding to give up. They were living in a culture of dependency that had been passed down from birth. My mother and grandmother gave in to the culture. And they expected me to figure out the best way to live on that same track, to game the system and not even try to escape.
My friend Ben agrees. “Most of the time, what you see in the housing projects are generations of families,” he says. “People accustomed to this lifestyle. It becomes comfortable, so they don’t move away, and even their children stay and raise kids in the same environment.” In neighborhoods like the ones where Ben and I grew up, there is no perceived incentive to advance. After all, the checks for housing and the food stamps and other assistance arrive every month.
This is why the system must be reformed. Welfare should exist only for a certain period of time, unless you’re disabled and can’t physically work. It should not last for a generation or more. There are millions of jobs open, without enough people to fill them or, rather, without enough people who have the necessary skills and training. This is where the government should come in, providing incentives for real-world training and educating recipients about a life beyond government dependence.
Many in such conditions often ask, “What about slavery?” or “What about racism?” They speak of a “five-pound bag” they’re carrying: the institutional racism and generations of poverty that have made it tougher for them to succeed. We can’t deny that racism has a genuine impact on inner-city (largely black) communities. However, citing racism as the sole reason for their lack of success is just another trap meant to keep underprivileged people wholly dependent on anyone but themselves.
To be clear, I understand and see the systems that have worked against me in life. But the moment I accepted that five-pound bag—that bag of Oh, I’m not going to make it because I know these folk are racist. They won’t give me a shot because of where I’m from or how I speak and all the other reasons too many of us have been conditioned to use—I would have been done for. It’s okay for me to acknowledge the barriers. But it is not okay for me to accept them as some unconquerable burden that leaves no possibility but for me to fail. Don’t dare give me that bag.
have hindered the elimination of poverty in America over the past fifty years. The conflict in Vietnam, racial unrest, “white flight” from cities to the suburbs, the decline of American industrial growth, black middle-class movement from urban centers, rampant economic decline in the agricultural South, and other issues all have blocked the possibility of a major decline in or total end to poverty in America.
The true tragedy is the loss of human dignity created by an environment of government dependence where self-reliance is rarely even presented as an option and all too often mocked.
I grew up in a household with eight siblings. Some have been to jail, and most are struggling with career and finances. If I hadn’t been around my paternal grandfather on the weekends—when I saw him earning a legitimate income, working hard, signing checks, going to the bank, reaching out to customers old and new, hiring workers, paying taxes, working with local politicians and businesses—I, perhaps, would be just as lost as the rest of my family.
How would the seed in me, that desire to start working, have been watered? Where do such qualities come from? Mine came from the examples of my grandfather and grandmother. For years, I watched my grandmother go off to work every day, even in great physical pain after her accident. And I felt good when my grandfather paid me $10 a day to hold the flashlight while he did his plumbing job. Earning that $10 every weekend meant the world to me. He was teaching me a work ethic, nurturing a burning desire to work, to earn money, to have control of my own success. The conditions I saw around me only motivated me to go beyond my present world. And there is one moment I remember when that spark of determination turned into a raging fire.
One day, I was getting dropped off at The Castle after spending the weekend with my father. My aunt was with us. As we pulled up to the building, we found ourselves in the middle of a high-speed chase. Three police cars, lights flashing, sirens wailing, were pursuing a car (a “steamer” as such cars were called, clearly just stolen) that spun onto the sidewalk in front of my home. Two men jumped out and ran into the apartment building as the police poured out of their cars and gave chase. Several had drawn their guns.
The guys must have caught a rare working elevator or made it into a friendly apartment because the police came back out of the building minutes later. The men had escaped, and these officers weren’t going door-to-door for sixteen floors to find them. It was shocking they’d gone in at all.
I looked at my father and aunt, feeling humiliated about where I lived. I’d never told them about the beatings I sometimes got on the way to school. Or the gangbangers who approached me as a recruit. I didn’t tell them about the needles in the hallways or bullet holes in the stairwells. Or how mom left me with her “friends” while she went and did drugs, and then brought men around. I guess I didn’t have to.
I could see the pain in their eyes, but all three of us knew there wasn’t a thing to be done about it. I was supposed to live with my mother. I stepped from the car and walked toward my Great Society housing.
I am not a victim, I told myself with each step. I’m getting out of this hell.
That was big talk for a little kid. But I meant every word.