Halftime In America...

"Well, we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they're killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line..."
- Billy Joel, Allentown

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - When you head over to the Eastside here, it's a part of Austin you won't see pictured in travel brochures or spotlighted in the local publications. The Eastside is the poor side of town, home largely to Blacks and Hispanics, some Asians. Along East Cesar Chavez Boulevard, it is a long string of bars, finance companies, used car lots and cheap housing that moves you away from the political power at the State Capitol, the partying on fabled Sixth Street and the expensive high-rise condos one sees when first driving-in from either north I-35 or the southern stretch of the same busy interstate.

That portrait of poverty isn't often associated with hip Austin, home to the Texas Longhorns, the annual South-By-Southwest music and film festival and a cavalcade of fairs and festivals that have made the Texas capital a national attraction.

Yet, even with the Willie Nelson songs greeting you at most bars, the tune also part of the local soundtrack is one whose lyrics say Austin has joined the Top 40 on that American poverty list. In fact, Austin's 20.8 percent poverty rate places it No. 36 in the rankings of cities with more than 250,000 population. With its whopping 37.6 percent, Detroit remains Number One as home to the poor, according to the latest study's author, Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College in New York City.

Cleveland placed second with its 34%, while Miami is third with 32.4.

The highest ranking Texas city is Dallas, with 23.6 percent, earning it 17th place. Houston is in at Number 22, with 22.8%. El Paso is six places below that with 21.6%. Corpus Christi is Number 38, with a poverty rate of 20.1% among its residents - tieing it with much-larger New York City.

Surprisingly, Los Angeles and Denver tied El Paso, with their own 21.6%.

The nation's economy is hurting. There is no question about that. And smaller communities suffer the same pain, perhaps even more meaningfully. One unemployed person in a town of 10,000 is not the same as one in a city of 250,000. It is for that one person, but cities tend to exist under a Big Picture scheme that says progress is measured by the collective. Past the Eastside's depressing mood here, a bit farther east, a major Indy-type racetrack is taking shape, funded in part by the state. Hit I-35 at the Highway 71 intersection on the way to the airport and see an army of panhandlers, and it's not just at that location. Panhandling is a job in Austin. If it isn't homeless, crippled veterans, it's shaggy-haired, middle-aged women asking for change to feed themselves. Poverty may be the next grab for soulful country & western songwriters.

In Detroit, America's Tijuana, things had deteriorated to the point that school officials earlier this schoolyear announced they planned to close half of the city's schools and send layoff notices to every teacher in the system. According to a 2010 article in The Wall Street Journal, Detroit at the time had 90,000 abandoned or vacant homes. Much of that was caused by the demise of the area's auto manufacturing industry, a job market that appears to be making a comeback, but a fall that cost Detroit workers good-paying union jobs. Homes were lost, the unemployment rate rose dramatically.

It is this economic meltdown that has given rise to a belief in America that income inequality is a real problem in our capitalistic society. Money has flowed upward lately, toward the bank accounts of the rich, crippling the capitalistic tenet that says such an economy worls only when money makes a full circle, goes from pocket to pocket. But poverty is only one symptom, that is true.

Still, it remains a mind-numbing eye-opener...

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