Our Good Intentions Are Not Enough

COLE THALER | November 14, 2018

Safe and Stable Homes Director Cole Thaler discusses the limits of our good intentions—and how we can move beyond them.

I’ll never forget the morning I brought my client, Annie Jones, to an informal hearing with the executive director and deputy director of her rural public housing complex. We were there to argue that they had miscalculated her rent, misapplying HUD guidelines and charging her an amount she couldn’t afford to pay.

Across the table from us, the directors, two men, glowered at my client. In the middle of my legal argument, the executive director interrupted me:  “I see that her money struggles didn’t stop her from going out and getting her hair done since the last time we met with her,” he sneered. In the shocked silence that followed, my client raised her hand to her head. She held the director’s eyes in a steady gaze as she snatched the wig off of her scalp.

“Oh,” he said.

In the shocked silence that followed, my client raised her hand to her head.

In my work, I’ve been privileged to meet many lawyers, landlords, and advocates who serve low-income communities with deep cultural competence and understanding.

But sometimes, I or others get it wrong. We misunderstand life in the “war zone” of poverty, as poverty scholar Donna Beegle describes it, and attribute bad or devious intentions where there are none.

For lawyers, these mistakes damage our relationships with our clients, making the representation less effective. For landlords, teachers, judges, and others, the mistakes similarly poison relationships and communication, creating a toxic cycle that it’s hard to break out of.

In our hearts, we all want to help. But if we don’t commit to gaining cultural competence in working with impoverished people, we sabotage our own efforts.

To those without cultural competence: 

Chronic stress can look like rudeness.
Creative, resilient survival can look like thriving.
Depression can look like laziness.

Chronic stress can look like rudeness.

Chronic stress, sometimes called toxic stress, is a growing area of study among public health researchers. Chronic stress is a common effect of poverty and has negative consequences for mental and physical well-being. For example, research has found that the stress associated with childhood poverty can harm adults’ working memory.

Similarly, the stress caused by living with a scarcity of money or other resources affects cognitive capacity for planning for the future or otherwise making long-term goals.

Chronic stress is a common effect of poverty and has negative consequences for mental and physical well-being.

In 2014, researchers Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir explored this phenomenon in a bookcalled Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives. “Scarcity alters how we look at things; it makes us choose differently,” the authors explained. This comes at a cost:  “our single-mindedness leads us to neglect things we actually value.”

So when your low-income client is late to an appointment, or forgets about it entirely, you might mistakenly assume that she is being rude or disrespectful of your time. After all, in the world of well-resourced professionals who live by our digital calendars, there is rarely an excuse for such lateness. Instead, your client’s missed appointment is more likely due to what Mullainathan and Shafir call “bandwidth scarcity” – one effect of the chronic stress caused by poverty.

Creative, resilient survival can look like thriving.

At a public reading by Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, an audience member sheepishly raised her hand. “I work with young mothers living in poverty, helping them get diapers and formula,” she said. “But yesterday I had a client with a fresh, beautiful manicure, and it was all I could focus on.”

Linda nodded, and without missing a beat, asked if it was possible that:

• The woman’s friend painted her nails in exchange for the woman doing her hair.
• The woman splurged on a manicure because she had a job interview and needed to look professional.
• The woman received the manicure as a gift from a friend or family member.
• The woman bartered for the manicure in exchange for providing child care.
• The woman had a date, and wanted to make a good impression on a potential family provider.

I thought of that exchange months later, at an AVLF Saturday morning clinic, when a volunteer attorney walked into our conference room after having interviewed a client. “Well, her landlord broke the law, but I have a bigger concern,” he told me. “I don’t think she’s eligible for AVLF’s services.”  Why is that, I asked him?  “Because she has a cell phone that’s nicer than mine,” he replied.

Living in poverty forces people to rely more on family and friend networks. They must think outside the box, using nontraditional means of getting what they want and need to survive.

I wanted to ask if it was possible that she had gotten the phone second-hand or from a pawn shop; that she had received it as a gift; that she had bartered for it; that she had bought it before she lost her job and savings. Instead, the volunteer attorney assumed that she was being dishonest about her finances.

Living in poverty forces people to rely more on family and friend networks. They must think outside the box, using nontraditional means of getting what they want and need to survive. These creative strategies can lead someone without cultural competence, like the housing director at the beginning of this essay, to assume that someone is hiding reserves of money. But a culturally competent person knows that a client who appears to be thriving is often simply displaying her own resiliency and determination to survive.

Depression can look like laziness.

Perhaps the most pervasive stereotype about poor people is that they are lazy – that they could “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” if only they got motivated and worked harder.

One lawyer told me how dismayed he was, when visiting a client’s home mid-morning, to find her lying on the couch in pajamas while her toddler son, wearing only a diaper, watched cartoons.

And more than one property manager has complained to me about low-income tenants who are too lazy to clean their own apartments.

I want to show them the many studies finding that people in poverty are more likely to suffer from depression – which surely surprises no one.

In response, I point to the diagnostic criteria for depression that appear in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), including:

• Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day.
• A slowing down of thought and a reduction of physical movement (observable by others).
• Fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day.
• Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt nearly every day.
• Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day.

And I want to show them the many studies finding that people in poverty are more likely to suffer from depression – which surely surprises no one.