Land Bound in the Ozarks

by Darcy Courteau

Delbert Bolinger was operating a road grader for the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, smoothing its outer dirt streets some twenty years ago when a family in town invited him in. They all had blood on their feet. “I guess you butchered you a hog,” he told them as he helped himself into the house.

“You were nosy,” BettyJo Disney decided, reminiscing with Delbert as they sat on her screened-in porch, drinking iced tea. Best friends, they are both in their seventies now. BettyJo likes Delbert, she said, because he’s country. He grew up cutting hay with a horse-drawn rake before he ever used a tractor.

Delbert and BettyJo hardly knew me, but I was their neighbors’ daughter, they loved my mother, and I was trying to write a story, which meant I had a miniature dream of some independent thing I wanted to do, and that was something they—like so many people in the area—understood well. They wanted to help.

Cattle grazed outside.

Yes, Delbert admitted, he was nosy, and it had gotten him in trouble. The family had killed and cooked up not a tender pig but a goat, and someone in the house handed him a forkful of the stringy meat.

“I take a bite of that thing,” he remembered, “and the more I chewed, the bigger it got. I thought, How am I gonna get rid of this? Only one way to do it. I swallered it. About choked.”

Swallered. He seemed to take pleasure in the word, drawing out its clay-mudded second half before continuing. They asked how he was doing. “I said, ‘Oh, I got a crick in my neck,’ and this old lady, she stepped behind me. I didn’t think about it, and she hit me right there on the back, and her hand was cold as ice. And I said, ‘Well, my neck’s better,’ and she said”—Delbert took a breath—“‘Praise. God.’ And I thought, What? And I got back out there on the grader and I thought, this couldn’t be right, you can’t—”

“Heal somebody with a cold hand?” BettyJo offered.

“She prayed for me or something.”

Delbert told the story with Marco Polo-ish wonderment, glancing at me from the corner of his eye, making sure I was taking all this in. The witchcraft of the natives. The things they considered food, offering it to unwitting travelers, and all you could do was swaller.

Sophomore students at Elkins High School hold a bake sale.

This was the final day of a trip last October that began with the feat, performed each visit home, of relearning the way from the newish Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport. The route is now an obstacle course of housing developments and chain stores, industry having transformed the landscape near the farm where I was born and grew up. Two adjacent counties, Benton and Washington, are home to the headquarters of Tyson Foods, trucking company J.B. Hunt, and, of course, Walmart. Clustered around the discount retailer are roughly 1,250 of its suppliers—Procter & Gamble, Rubbermaid, Glad—marketing, manufacturing, or distributing thousands of products, a great number of them aiding in personal hygiene and food storage.

Although income inequality in Arkansas has widened starkly since the 1970s, the unemployment rate in the northwest region is lower than elsewhere in the state, and lower than in the rest of the South. In the 1940s and ’50s, Delbert’s parents would leave his grandma and older siblings to tend their milk cows in nearby Madison County, taking Delbert with them to pick apples in the orchards of Washington State. There, they worked alongside other cash-strapped folk from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas who made the seasonal trek, arriving in late summer and harvesting through fall.

Now total employment in Benton and Washington counties has almost tripled since 1980. People come here for work. Some even come for the kind of employment that lands them in huge suburban homes overlooking cattle pastures. In one Ozark farmstead after another, however, people—even those who have city jobs—still dream of having a self-sufficient, rural lifestyle.

The trees had begun to change color. Soon wood stoves would puff threads of smoke from the hills’ canopy: hickory, oak, maple, sumac, dogwood, redbud, paw-paw, sassafras, and persimmon.

The Ozark mountains—actually, not mountains at all, but the sturdier remains of a plateau eroded into a corrugation of hills—have gathered multi-generation farmers and hippie newcomers alike, all eventually marked with the land’s cussedness. After rains, the red clay pokes up arrowheads once chipped by the Osage Indians, who concentrated agriculture in the lowlands and hunted in the Ozarks. The soil is full of rocks. Later, settlers pulled those rocks from hollers and fashioned them into fences and church houses—some are still standing now—but their plows continued to churn up stones.

Mariah White and her cow, Scarlett.

Mariah White, 33, had wanted to be a vegetable farmer, but that took so much land, she decided to raise free-range chickens and pigs on her small place on the outskirts of Fayetteville. She sells meat and eggs at the local farmers’ market, where I found her with her sons. She joked with her middle-schooler and kept an eye on the toddler. A licensed midwife, she quit the practice to spend more time with her own children. Now she is working 12- to 16-hour days, but she is with her family.

She was the child of gypsies, she said, leaving it at that.

At her farm that evening, Mariah appeared tougher, a petite marshal in a ponytail. Northwest Arkansas is in the midst of a two-year-old drought, and she had hauled water from town. Eleven five-gallon buckets sat in the back of her pickup, waiting to be unloaded.

Her husband, Ira, 31, works as a carpenter. His car arrived at the gate, an electrified wire strung with Tibetan prayer flags. He stepped out, and for a moment Mariah relaxed. After some almost invisible communication between the two, Ira went to milk their single cow. In an unlighted shed, he baited the food trough with grain, and once the cow bounded in, he disinfected her nipples and lubricated them with coconut oil.

Neighbors say this shed was once a kennel for hunting dogs.

Milk jetted into the pail below.

A cat positioned itself in the straw.

Fourteen-year-old Ben Anderson feeds the cattle.

A couple of days later, when poultry grower George Anderson heard about the free-range chicken farm, he scoffed: “That’s what people in the city call ‘sustainable farming.’” The proper term, he said, is “subsistence.” Instead, he and his wife, Darla, produce 15 million pounds of chicken a year in houses equipped with the latest heating, cooling, and ventilation systems. To keep from tracking in viruses and infecting his flocks, visitors to one of his 19 houses must snap plastic covers over their shoes and swear they haven’t recently handled barnyard chickens.

Without other income, George figures, true subsistence farming means no electricity, and him driving a team of mules, harvesting just enough corn to feed them and his family. Frankly, he doesn’t want to go back to that. He’d love to have a little truck-patch farm if he could afford to. But he knows how that goes. “My mom’s dad always tried to do the subsistence farming. He had a few hogs, raised a little bit of cotton.” By the 1960s, his grandfather had started working in the woods of eastern Arkansas, where the cypresses along the river bottoms were being cleared for farmland. “He had his little farm, he had the hogs and doing what he could do, but he made his living dragging logs out of the woods with a mule.”

His teenage daughter and son belong to FFA, the agriculture education organization formerly known as Future Farmers of America. They led into the yard their project animals, two fat, shining goats.

George knows what people think: This kind of operation he has now is against nature. So be it. Slight and spectacled, there’s none of the sunburnt farmer about him. He has a degree in poultry science, and he can genially track the uptick in the U.S. population along with its declining number of farmers. The tractors, the silos—there’s no other way: “There’s so few of us left, even if I could feed my family and five more, there’s way too many of you.”

The goats bleated insistently, like shuddering machines.

Darla held on to one of them while her daughter fetched another project, a rabbit.

Darla and George will send the children to college, paying for it with chicken. The children will have better economic opportunities working with him, George said, but they can go on to careers in town, if they want.

He seemed doubtful they will. He’ll certainly never go back to the jobs he’s left. He couldn’t make it as an employee in the poultry industry, in which high-paying jobs are few. “I didn’t have the right presentation,” he said.

“He didn’t play the game,” Darla called over her goat.

“I couldn’t play the game.”

Do the Ozarks even make good employees? Living so far out, you get used to working on your own. J.B. Hunt, Walmart—family members have worked in both places. Walmart is a job, but it isn’t a dream. No, Walmart is where the boss says something you can’t swaller, and you give your notice and then just leave, crying in the parking lot and digging in your purse for cigarettes.

But if you leave the hills, migrate to a real city? Eventually, long after you’ve kicked the manure off your boots, you’ll give your country self away. One night your friend’s registered poodle will jump in your lap, and looking into his eyes, you’ll silently muse on the effects of your pastoral upbringing, how your attitude toward animals will forever be at once empathetic and callous because of some kind of shared fate you once had. You’ll keep these thoughts to yourself until your friend wonders aloud if she should have the dog neutered, and will let slip how much her mother paid for him. And you’ll yelp, “No—put him out to stud! Don’t cut off his testicles—those are worth 400 bucks apiece!”

So maybe you decide to stay, and stay country, even if that means having an industrial farm and a backyard garden, as George and Darla do, or hanging on to a job in town and coming home to feed cattle. The average Arkansas cattle herd is small, 30 head. Every other farmlet has one. The man who sells hay to my father also works as a truck dispatcher for a turkey processor, and on weekends sells grass-fed beef at the farmers’ market, next to Mariah. Even George keeps some cattle. When he has to move them from time to time, he rounds them up on a horse.

Dr. Tom Lowder with his bison herd.

Along the stretch of blacktop leading to miles of dirt roads and my parents’ house, there is another herd that appears like a mirage to passing drivers. Bison. They’ve been there for 20 years. Their keeper, Tom Lowder, or Dr. Tom—he’s an orthodontist but an informal Oklahoman, too—goes to the office three long days a week, and then heads home, rarely venturing from the ranch once there. “Thursday evening I come through the gate about nine o’clock, slap a padlock on it, and I don’t take that padlock off ’til Tuesday morning,” he said from his armchair nested in a cabin decked out in Old West leather and cast iron. “My best friend, lover, and wife, Marti, and I are the only two people out here in the center of 250 acres.”

My father has known Dr. Tom for years, since they met in the local grocery store once outfitted with tables and chairs for old-timers to sit and drink coffee. Dr. Tom apparently concluded that he’d encountered an authentic article, a genuine antique horseman. Today, when my father joined Dr. Tom in the cabin, Dad wore an oilskin duster and a Western-print shirt, as if not to disappoint his friend.

A rain that my father, afraid of getting his hopes up, had dismissed as a squall the night before had turned into the steady pour the ponds and pastures needed.

Thunder cracked in the trees above.

Walnuts fell on the roof.

Dr. Tom neither castrates his bulls nor vaccinates the herd, and feeds them no hormones nor antibiotics, which would contaminate their meat. He prefers to let the bison build up natural resistance to infections. Still, living free range is tough on the animals. Some die. He leaves the carcasses to the animals he reported seeing on the property: coyotes, bobcats, cougars, black bears. Then he collects the skulls, sets them on fence posts, and lets them bleach in the sun.

Like Delbert and BettyJo, Dr. Tom and my father were anxious to provide useful quotes. The rancher was explaining the health benefits of his animals’ meat, so much better for you than feed-lot beef, but don’t get him wrong, “our beef industry, like our poultry industry, feeds the world, and so they have to do things that they have to do to mass-produce; that is OK with me, but I like to have a choice”—when Dad redirected the conversation.

“Tom, your being in buffalo, does it possibly have anything to do with the fact that you, kind of like me myself, are a bit of a romantic?”

“Absolutely. Absolutely,” the rancher conceded. “It throws you back.”

Dr. Tom calls his place Wounded Knee Ranch. In 1968, he could only afford to continue studying dentistry at an underserved hospital on the Sioux Indians’ Rosebud reservation in South Dakota. There, he spent time with Henry Crow Dog, a shaman in a line of famous medicine men. To the young intern, some of the American Indian practices seemed directly in line with the Christian Bible.

Dr. Tom now wondered about the antioxidant properties of plants growing in the Garden of Eden, if they were like the plants ancient Indians gathered. In any case, the Indians’ diet must have been better than ours, he decided, citing as evidence a dentist’s early 1900s research on indigenous peoples who never ate refined foods. “It’s interesting to see the earliest photographs taken of these absolutely gorgeous faces,” he said, “wide faces, broad dental arches shaped beautifully.”

“If we use the wisdom God gave us, we can go out and collect plants and purify,” Dr. Tom imagined. “We won’t extend our lives beyond what he’s set the limit on to any great degree, but we’ll have healthy lives.” He and my irreligious father, now enthralled, talked about the storied Sioux who lived through Wounded Knee, eating lean, crimson bison meat, dying old.

The rain let up, and we walked outside.

In the yard were two wild turkeys, a brother and sister. A friend of our host had found an abandoned nest and incubated the eggs. The tom followed us around.

Along a fence was a line of horned skulls, each bobbling on a fence post: white, white, white, white.

Dr. Tom opened a gate to the bison’s pasture.

The bulls’ faces were covered in cockleburs, and they roared like lions.

Bison skulls line rancher Tom Lowder’s fence.

Following the blacktop away from the pasture, and then bumping an inch or two down to unpaved road, it’s still several miles to my parents’ place, which is remote by anyone’s definition. At this point, my parents have dropped out of most society and much of the economy. My 79-year-old father spends his days with his horses. My mother, 60, is the hunter-gatherer. She carves spoons from green wood and sells them at the farmers’ market. She’s attracted a following that included, last time I was there, a train-hopping fiddler in sooty denims, a chicken house electrician, and a couple of women with a video camera.

She walks into the forest with a handsaw when she spots a straight persimmon, or a fallen branch of cherry, whose red heartwood makes the prettiest spoons.

A child prodigy and an Army brat, she grew up, according to her family’s lore, with a sketchbook in her hand and her fingers stained with charcoal. She went to Ireland to paint and find adventure in her late teens, and then came back to her family in the Ozarks. She got factory jobs, catching tortillas in stacks of a dozen at a Mexican Original plant, and gutting chickens for Campbell’s Soup. She’d work for months at a time, save her money, and then quit to drift and draw. When she was 21, she met my father, and—not tragically, at least not for her children—diverted most of her creativity into raising us, seven eventually.

She would often quote a verse to us, from Matthew: And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.

Now, the house’s paint is peeling. With no working cook stove, my mother fixes collards and curries on a hotplate. Packrats have moved in. From time to time, she texts me updates on the number of them she’s caught and released away from the house. Her latest triumph came illustrated with a digital rat: –,@,¥

After six decades of terrific health, delivering some of her babies without medical insurance, she isn’t feeling well. Her illness is not life threatening—surgery is optional—so there was only one doctor’s visit. This is the price of freedom, she says. She will eat better, rest, and heal herself.

Praise God.

One afternoon I followed the limestone path through the front yard toward the house. When my sister Sarah and I were preschool age, our mother had spent a day sewing us new dresses, orange calico for Sarah, navy for me. We’d waited for her to finish them, and pulled the dresses over our bare chests, and this was where we’d run outside to dance in our new finery, spinning the skirts in circles.

On the porch were horse tack, dog food bowls, a barrel of drinking water. In one corner was a stack of cathode-ray television sets, gifts from friends who thought that my mother and father could use all the material help they could get. Also, they’d moved on to flat screens. But my parents planned to listen to the presidential debates on the radio.

How hard a person must work to keep up with the times! And how much devotion it requires not to do so.

I tiptoed up the steps.

Through a screen door, I saw my mother sleeping in a chair near the wood stove, in the same room where she’d given birth to me. I’d brought her a new, scholarly biography of St. Francis of Assisi, which she read in an afternoon and, deciding to give it to a friend, immediately began rereading favorite passages, preparing to part with the book. It was open on her lap.

A floor lamp lit my mother’s waist-length braid white, white.

All around her the trees’ leaves were turning color, as if by witchcraft.

She kept sleeping.

Mother, mother.

Why do you still let us dream all these dreams?

–Darcy Courteau

Richard Courteau prepares to water his team.

—

PHOTOGRAPHS by Lucian Perkins / facingchange.org

TEXT AND CAPTIONS by Darcy Courteau, an associate editor at The Wilson Quarterly in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Oxford American, The American Scholar, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere.

PHOTO EDITOR: MaryAnne Golon

With support from Leica Camera

The industrial unions of prewar America that built the middle class in this country are no more. Today, organized labor can no longer claim to be a decisive political or economic power. Representing barely ten percent of the national work force, and besieged at once by multi-national corporations and conservative politicians, the unions are shells of their former selves. With the closing of the factories, and so many manufacturing jobs shipped overseas, yesterday’s industrial unions now cling to pension rights for their retirees rather than recruit new members.

In the modern service economy of post-industrial America, low wages and transient jobs have replaced skilled labor. These jobs are often performed by new immigrants who face many of the same bleak conditions that brought about the birth of the old unions. Paid a minimum wage that they can barely survive on, these newly arrived immigrants, many of them undocumented from Mexico or Central and Latin America, can be fired at will. All too often, the people who serve America face a dead-end: they have few rights in the workplace, and little, if any, chance to work their way up the social ladder into the middle class.

New York, New York May 17, 2012 Car wash workers at LMC Car Wash in East Harlem try on new union shirts for the first time after their shift has just ended.

As a photographer, I’m always looking for ways to document these historical changes. Not long ago, I learned that the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) was beginning a campaign to organize the men and women who work in carwashes across New York City.  Anyone who has ever taken their car to be cleaned at one of these shops can understand why the workers are ripe for exploitation. Many do not speak English; they do not have to interact with customers. They get paid a sub-minimum wage, and must rely on tips. Each day they are exposed to industrial-strength cleaning agents. And when it rains, they are sent home–without pay. As a place to begin to document a union’s attempt to organize the new service economy, New York City’s car washes, hidden below the entrance and exit ramps of the city’s outer-borough expressways, seemed a good place to start.

New York, New York May 17, 2012 Car wash workers watch a union rally held on the street outside LMC car wash in East Harlem. After their shift ended, several workers joined the rally.

Earlier this fall, I followed Chio Valerio, a union organizer working for New York Communities for Change, an activist organization that helps unions organize minimum wage workers across the city, as she visited carwash workers in Brooklyn and the Bronx.  A recent transplant from Chicago, Chio, 27, is one of those people who live to work.  Believing deeply in the rights of workers, Chio has little time for anything but organizing.  She constantly travels on the subways to the end of the lines, from the Tremont section of the Bronx to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, or wherever carwash workers have expressed interest in joining a union.

Usually Chio is buried in her cell phone, sending and receiving texts, except when she meets with the workers. Her office is a pizza restaurant nearby, or the closest White Castle or Dunkin Donuts. Then, no matter the venue, she comes alive, arguing, negotiating, cajoling in rapid-fire Spanish, as a half dozen young men huddle around her at a back table. There are work rivalries to settle, disputes over tip money and the scheduling of the all-important number of shift hours, testimonies of illegal threats from managers and owners to notarize, and a careful tally of how many workers can be counted on to support a bid for a union and how many will not.

Bronx, New York October 4, 2012 Webster Car Wash workers attend a union meeting in a local Bronx storefront church basement a week before their car wash union election.

Recently several workers at the Sunny Day Car Wash on Lincoln Avenue in the South Bronx read a newspaper story about a union election at another carwash, and inspired, organized themselves. They were immediately fired. Chio quickly joined them on a narrow picket line next to the concrete entrance ramp to the Third Avenue Bridge.   Standing a few feet away from their co-workers who decided to stay on the job, the small band of workers held up signs demanding better pay and urging passing drivers to get their cars cleaned elsewhere. Some cars honked in support, while others, about to enter the car wash, took a union flyer and backed up and turned around. But many kept their windows tightly shut, and entered the car wash. “Shame on you” Chio screamed at each driver. “You’d think in New York they would know better”.

In the history of American labor, the struggle of these workers is as old as the nation itself. These new New Yorkers fight for a decent living wage and working conditions just as the Irish and Italians and Poles and Russians and African Americans did before them. They have inherited a tradition from those who organized the great industrial unions of the automobile and steel factories and coal mines before them. Frequently fired for even mentioning a union, with scant resources to fall back on, many car wash workers can claim one thing that other Americans seem to have lost in their slow ascent into the middle class: a will to fight. Perhaps it is because they have so little to lose.

PHOTOGRAPHS + TEXT by Andrew Lichtenstein
Editors: Anthony Suau, Photo ; Andrew Meier, Text

Today the housing crisis in the Western states has become critical for reason other then out right fraud. Currently many inner-city neighborhoods are lined with vacant homes, not only because of foreclosures but because their prices have sunk to rock bottom so the banks and investors have snapped them up, only to hold onto them for future profit. Many of them operate from offices around the world, sending proxies to participate in live auctions and bid for the real estate on their behalf such as in auction.com.

The artificially inflated market, due to investors keeping a vast number of homes off the market, is especially booming in central California, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. Between May and August of this year, housing prices rose as much as 20% in Phoenix. Therefore, despite the thousands of vacant houses that sit in these areas, most people who need a home to live in are forced to build new homes in outlying areas.

Riverside, California July 16, 2012 A foreclosure auction held by Auction.com. Investors from around the world snap up homes in cities hit hard by the foreclosure and mortgage crisis as they believe prices have bottomed out and now is the time to purchase.

In central California, cities like Fresno have also dealing with the issue of “dual tracking,” where lenders initiate foreclosure sale proceedings, usually without the homeowner’s knowledge, even as the homeowner is still pursuing a loan modification. According to John Shore, the Executive Director at Community Housing Council of Fresno, this often occurs because of a miscommunication: one bank employee pursues the loan while another pursues the sale, unaware of one another’s efforts.

On October 2, the servicing standards included in the National Mortgage Settlement went into effect, including a provision to restrict dual tracking. Companies in the settlement were given 180 days to reform their dual tracking procedures, a period during which complaints about dual tracking actually increased.

Another problematic, if unanticipated, consequence of the housing crisis has appeared in central California in the form of mosquito-infested swimming pools. Many of the area’s foreclosed homes have swimming pools that, when neglected, fill up with rainwater and offer mosquitoes a ripe breading ground. As a result, entire neighborhoods have been infested — this year, 45 mosquito samples from Fresno County tested positive for West Nile virus.

Fresno County’s Mosquito and Vector Control District, which has come across thousands of filthy backyard pools, has tried to remedy the problem by dropping hundreds of small fish into the water. The fish eat the mosquito eggs, thereby cutting the mosquito population. The tactic has proven effective, but the Control District has still reported 26 cases of West Nile infection in California this year, in addition to two deaths.

In Phoenix, the housing crisis is evident by an abundance of vacant neighborhoods, which extend out of the city in all directions. Neighborhoods sprung up in Phoenix’s surrounding suburbs during the past decade, eating up farmland in small, outlying towns like Buckeye. But it all stopped in 2008, leaving gated communities to exist as ghost towns with roads, streetlights and electrical lines, but no homes. As weeds grow between the cracks of cement sidewalks and tumbleweeds roll over the empty lots, people like Lee Graham, who is 38 years-old, unemployed, and homeless, scavenge the ruins for anything of worth. Since neighborhood development stopped five years ago, what was meant to be an expansive, middle-class neighborhood has turned into a no-mans land. The communities are either half-empty or completely empty, and the empty homes are not for sale. The owners are waiting, somewhere else, for values to rise.

Buckeye, Arizona July 20, 2012 38 yrs old unemployed and homeless, Le Graham scavenges a neighborhood development that stopped 5 years ago when the housing crisis first hit.

In Las Vegas, meanwhile, communities like these are no longer the norm. The city, once infamous for its foreclosures, has very few today as a result of new state legislation. Passed in October, Nevada’s Assembly Bill 284 requires lenders seeking to foreclose to record a notarized affidavit, which would require them to prove their right to exercise the power of sale. The law has slowed banks from initiating foreclosures: according to a spokesman for ForeclosureRadar.com, only 116 notices of default were filed in the first three weeks of October, compared to 3,649 filings in September.

The new law was largely crafted in response to the robo-signing scandal that surfaced last year. Now, servicers of mortgage loans will be fined $5,000 if robo-signing fraud is detected. The new law protects homeowners from improper foreclosures, said Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, and protects the integrity of the homeownership system.
The legislation does, however, have a down side: many homeowners have simply stopped paying their mortgages, because they no longer fear foreclosures. Some have skipped payments for months.
Still, the law has forced banks and lenders in Nevada to reconsider their loan modification practices. According to Margarita Rebollal, the Executive Director at Community Services of Nevada, some banks and lenders are cutting the principle of homes in half to save the mortgage. Rebollal said that she recently saw a home, originally mortgaged with a principle of $324k, refinanced at a principle of $158k by the same lender. Because of the new law, lenders have little choice other than renegotiation.

Modesto, California July 9, 2012 According to RealtyTrac, an online service that markets foreclosed properties, Modesto had the nation’s third-highest home foreclosure rate during the third quarter of 2010, just behind Las Vegas, Nevada, and Cape Coral/Fort Meyers, Florida.

The law has also cut the number of available homes on the market, which means that contractors are working hard to meet any and all new demands for housing. But the markup price on a newly constructed home is extremely low, and many sellers will break even or just barely make a profit.
“Halting foreclosures for legal reasons doesn’t fix the underlying problem — underwater houses and people losing their jobs or other life events that require a sale or walk-away,” states broker Frank Nason of Residential Resources.
Foreclosure filings in Las Vegas’s Clark County topped 6,000 in July, August and September of 2011, but retreated into the 4,000-5,000 range this year, according to ForeclosureRadar. Still, the U.S. west struggles with its housing market. Unemployment has fallen, but families are generally relying on less income. Even today, many cannot cover their monthly mortgage payment.

Lake Eisinore, California July 16, 2012 New homes under construction and homes for sale. As investors and banks hold on to homes, many of those homes sitting vacant.

IF YOU ARE IN FORECLOSURE ASSISTANCE IN YOUR AREA: please – locate a HUD organization in your area that can help.

http://www.hud.gov/offices/hsg/sfh/hcc/hcs.cfm?weblistaction=summary

Photographs and Text by: Anthony Suau

Photo Editing: Mark Rykoff

“FOUR DEAD IN O-HI-O,” sang Neil Young in 1971, when the memory of Kent State was still fresh. “Four Dead in Ben-gha-zi,” chanted the Tea Partiers who stalked the President across the state as the 2012 campaign sputtered to a long overdue end. Ohio. Even in an off-election year, the state stands apart. But when it comes to picking presidents, Ohio holds the record. Since 1900, the state has predicted the winner in twenty-seven of twenty-nine presidential elections. No Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio, and few Democrats have either–Jimmy Carter carried it by one-third of one percent in 1976. Since then much has changed, above all, the population has shrunk, and its political muscle slackened, down to 18 electoral votes from a high of 26. But in the race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the longest and most expensive in the history of the republic, the state with only 7.7 million registered voters, came to be seen as the linchpin. To David Axelrod, Ohio was “the firewall,” and to Paul Ryan, “the battleground of all battlegrounds.”

There are, as the strategists and demographers say, five Ohio’s. The northeast is the Democratic stronghold—a war-torn assemblage of unions and minority enclaves in post-industrial Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown—that includes Cuyahoga County, the state’s most populous. (Last time around, Cuyahoga gave Obama one of every six votes that he won in Ohio.) The southeast, running from the unglaciated edge of Appalachia to the West Virginia border, is coal country—rural, white and treacherous for silver-tongued outsiders. (Clinton managed to win here twice, as did Bush père in 2000.) In the southwest, the suburban counties that hug Cincinnati are the Republicans’ answer to Cuyahoga: unfailing conservatives. The northwest is the farm belt, where fields of soybean and corn still cover the distance between rural half-towns and small cities, and the traditions remain defiantly Midwestern. In central Ohio, Columbus is the political fulcrum. The capital has weathered the Great Recession better than many of Ohio’s six big cities. It boasts an undaunted, and popular, African American Mayor, a surfeit of state jobs, and the safety net of Ohio State—at 64,077 students, one of the fattest universities in the country.

Both candidates began the final sprint here. Obama made his eighteenth visit, as Romney held the largest rally of his campaign in the southwest, in West Chester Township, John Boehner’s hometown. The Speaker of the House was there, among the GOP all-stars: Texas Governor Rick Perry, ex-Senator Rick Santorum, Rudy Giuliani, and Senators Marco Rubio and John McCain. The candidate followed Kid Rock to the stage, where he stood, hands clasped before him, to preach the coming of “real change.” He promised to revisit coal legislation, crack the whip on China, and raise Ohio from its knees. Others that night spoke of the dead in Libya. Not Romney. He offered a humble plea. “Walk with me,” he said.

October 29, 2012: Early voting polling station in Northeast Toledo.

TENT CITY is an annual event, a gathering of the homeless for three days at the end of October to stir the conscience of Toledo.   This year, it was bigger than ever.  Under steel-gray skies that unleashed more water than they threatened to, nearly a thousand souls–women, men, and children—filled the plastic tents on the Civic Center Mall in the center of Toledo, just across from the fire and police stations. Tent City had none of the mandatory gaiety of the political carousel, the extravaganzas in airport hangars and supersized gymnasiums. There was a rope line—to keep the “guests” in order as they waited for food—but none of the glad-handing, shoulder-clenching, or baby-smooching. Life has brightened a bit in Toledo, since 2008, when the last Census revealed it the eighth-poorest city in the nation, with nearly one of four residents surviving below the poverty line. The city, though, once a blue-collar bastion of autoworkers, remains numbed.

Ken Leslie runs Tent City, and has each year since its founding in 1990. He is, he says, a “uniter,” a Toledo son who strayed—“drugs and alcohol, what else?”—and ended up on the streets. Leslie was not homeless, as he likes to say, just “unhoused.” In the early 1980s, for years—he cannot remember how many; he never knew—Leslie lived out of his car. He cannot remember, either, what kind of car. (“It was yellow,” he says.) Then came a resurrection, a short-lived career in stand-up, a run of comedy clubs from Cleveland to Kansas City to Los Angeles and back. Since then, Leslie has tried out a few careers—producing documentaries, running a headhunting company, among them. But at fifty-two, he is no longer adrift. Tent City is his lifeline.

Each year more and more “guests,” as Leslie calls them, fill the tents. This year 1Matters, the volunteer outfit that runs the event, fed more than a thousand people. Toledo has seen its share of recent returnees, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the corps sleeping rough were Vietnam veterans, some in black leather, some without legs, and many with nothing left to fight for–or worse, nothing left of the world they fought for. Tent City gave them square meals, medical checks, and perhaps most important, the paperwork for the state’s new SAFE IDs. (In 2013, the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles, in effort to root out terrorists, will begin to issue the new identity cards.) Leslie speaks the native tongue of the President, the language of the community organizer. One phrase–“community collaboration leverage”—sums up his vision of the horizon beyond the tents. Many who crowded Toledo’s main square, including the veterans, appreciated the leverage. In a state where the presidential campaigns invested more than $197 million—the most of any state in the nation—none of the folks under the plastic reaped an election-year bonus.

Many of Leslie’s constituents come from the North End, the boarded-up edge of Toledo where the unmoored drift. “It’s the rough end of town,” he said. “But it’s getting so, east side, west side, north side, south side–it’s all becoming rough, wherever you look in the cities here. Because America’s rough. Because when you look at the politicians, and really listen, there’s absolutely no regard for the people they should serve.” Leslie, like many across Ohio, was once a believer. “Last time around,” he said of the 2008 election, “I personally took 235 people from shelters to vote. One by one, I made sure they each got there.” He believed in political change. “And what did we get for it?” For a moment, he let the question hang in the air, before answering it. “We got fucked by both parties.”

October 28, 2012: Northeast Toledo.

IN OHIO, the Obama campaign debuted television ads with a new kicker: “Mitt Romney. Not one of us.” Gone was the “one America,” of the mesmerizing convention speech for John Kerry in 2004.  (“We are one people,” Obama had said in Boston, “all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”) “Not one of us.” The echo resounded with the old Segregationists’ cry. But Obama’s operatives intended a different line, not of the skin, but in the blood. Bermuda, the Caymans, Swiss vaults—this is not a man that families once dependent on car plants and corn fields could trust. Romney, the undercurrent held, is not like you and me. As Ohio’s popular former governor, Ted Strickland, quipped: “It’s a long way from Steubenville, Ohio, to Geneva, Switzerland.”

There are those who look at the ads and decry desperation. Obama, they say, has lost his essential art, his storytelling craft. If so, he needed only to remember Franklin D. Roosevelt, as he started out on the campaign trail in Columbus. To defeat Hoover, even in the darkness of 1932, Roosevelt had to go negative. “I regret that necessity,” the governor from New York said in his first road address, “for destructive criticism is never justified for its own sake. And yet, to build we must first clear the ground. We must find out why the Republican leadership…..built so unwisely. We must determine the causes that made the whole structure collapse.”   In Columbus, Roosevelt spoke in the modern vernacular of Occupy:

We find two-thirds of American industry concentrated in a few hundred corporations, and actually managed by not more than five human individuals. We find more than half of the savings of the country invested in corporate stocks and bonds, and made the sport of the American stock market. We find fewer than three dozen private banking houses, and stock-selling adjuncts of commercial banks, directing the flow of American capital. We find a great part of our working population with no chance of earning a living except by grace of this concentrated industrial machine; and we find that millions and millions of Americans are out of work, throwing upon the already burdened Government the necessity of relief.

“It is no wonder,” Roosevelt concluded, “that stagnation has resulted–a stagnation born of fear. But this is a distrust not of ourselves, not in our fundamental soundness, not in our innate ability to work out our future. It is a distrust in our leaders, in the things they say and the things they do.”

Lela Schnorf remembers the 1932 campaign well. She was Lela O’Callaghan then, “an Irish girl,” and now a widow who can claim one of the deepest memory-pools in the state. Lela will soon be 107 years old. Born and raised in Toledo, she is a registered Republican, but she voted for FDR—“all four times.” At twenty, and unwed, she went to work as a secretary for the top man at a brokerage firm downtown. She worked until she was married, raised two sons, both lawyers—the elder, now eighty-one—and she still lives in the family home in Old Orchard, the opposite end of Toledo, in every register, to the North End. The house is a big old Tudor, built in 1929, with a surrounding acre of green. “It’s still a lovely neighborhood, all Caucasian,” she said. “We’ve got doctors, and doctors’ widows. Engineers, bankers. Started off that way, and still remains that way.”

Nothing disturbs Lela much these days—except the phone calls. “Every half hour,” she said, “they call.” Across Ohio, it is a common complaint. The robocalls, billboards, television and radio ads—the carpet bombing has been unceasing. And both men, in the campaign’s final hours, returned to haunt the beleaguered. The last time around, Lela voted for Obama. But not again. It’s not the auto bailout, the Chinese, or Benghazi. It is the campaign, she said, that made her angriest. “The worst I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Such bitterness and bickering.” All the same, on Election Day she will get a ride over to the library–her son took the car away when she turned 100–and add her vote to the box. She will do so with an abiding hope in the promise of Ohio, a recognition that so much once taken for granted is gone, and a prayer that “one of these fellows will sort it out.”

–Andrew Meier

PHOTOGRAPHS by Stanley Greene
TEXT by Andrew Meier

With support from Leica Camera

Alan Chin Staten Island, New York, November 2, 2012 The Forster family unwinds after a long day of cleaning out their home flooded by the storm surge.

Alan Chin in Queens and Staten Island
What’s struck me about Hurricane Sandy beyond the tragic loss of life and massive destruction to property in coastal communities is how the nation has responded. The big picture — President Obama, FEMA, Governors Cuomo and Christie of New York and New Jersey, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City — all arguably reacted with far greater urgency and dispatch than their predecessors during Hurricane Katrina.

It’s the smaller details that have proven frustrating and telling. In the Rockaways and Staten Island, the Red Cross and National Guard were hardly to be seen even a week after. A gasoline shortage on top of the paralysis of public transit has left millions without the transportation necessary to get back to work quickly. Instead, local residents spontaneously organized to provide emergency food, clothing, and supplies. Their efforts are admirable. But they are no substitute for efficient, rapid action on the ground to implement well-meaning directives. And that’s meant that many people feel abandoned and forgotten.

Some discomfort is inevitable, and if the long-term recovery proceeds effectively, Sandy will become a historical footnote rather than a disaster of the first order like Katrina. The real test is in the weeks and months ahead, as winter descends.

Andrew Lichtenstein Queens, New York October 30, 2012, The day after “super storm” Sandy, the coastal community of Breezy Point, in Far Rockaway, Queens remains devastated by fire and flooding.

Andrew Lichtestein in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens
All week it has been disconcerting to be living two lives in the same city. My neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn was relatively untouched by the storm. Some very large, old trees came crashing down in the park and on various blocks, but we never lost power. The only minor hassle has been trying to keep my children busy since school has been closed while at the same time rushing out the door to photograph or staying up all night to file the pictures. Red Hook is just around the corner, Coney Island a twenty minute drive south, the Rockaways just beyond that. These coastal communities have been devastated. No heat, no power, no food or water, everywhere I looked, heartbreaking stories of destruction and loss. Often it has felt like the efforts to reach people has been completely community driven-neighbor helping neighbor. Unlike other disasters I’ve photographed, most of the week I’ve been surprised by the lack of official response. And then, in the evening, back to my neighborhood, in all of its untouched security, the lights blazing, the kids running around in their Halloween costumes like any other year.

Photographs and Text by: Alan Chin, Andrew Lichtenstein and Anthony Suau
Editor: Daria Bonera

Alan Chin Queens, October 30, 2012 – Residents survey the damage from Hurricane Sandy on Rockaway Beach Blvd.

Andrew Lichtenstein Brooklyn, October 31, 2012 – Two days after the super storm Sandy arrived, residents of hard hit Coney Island begin to clean up, even though they remain without power.

PHOTOGRAPHS : Alan Chin, Andrew Lichtenstein and Anthony Suau

Photo Editor: Daria Bonera

Vice President Joe Biden, famously a Scranton native, was parodied on Saturday Night Live by actor Jason Sudeikis calling it “the single worst place on Earth.” Real stores sell T-shirts and bumper stickers for Dunder-Mifflin, the fictional paper company featured in The Office TV show.

Over a hundred years ago, though, the first successful streetcar trolley in the United States started running in Scranton, giving this Pennsylvania industrial town the nickname of “The Electric City.” Growing to over 140,000 people by the Second World War, coal mining, steam railroads, and the manufacturing of lace and plastics created a booming destination for immigrants and businesses.

Decline came with “progress”. Interstate highways killed the railroads. Coal ran out and silk and textiles were outsourced to other countries. The Capitol Records factory that pressed Beatles records became a warehouse for architectural salvage – wood and metal craftsmanship ripped out of condemned buildings – the irony is that nothing of equal quality is made anymore in places like Scranton. The population is half of what it used to be; many downtown buildings stand vacant and shuttered.

Punch lace pattern cards for the looms, abandoned in 2002.

The Scranton Lace Company employed over 1400 workers in its prime. It’s a sprawling industrial complex that had its own power plant, bowling alley, theater, and landmark clock tower. The huge looms were imported from Nottingham, England at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the factory closed ten years ago, and ghostly pieces of fabric are stuck in the machines that were turned off mid-shift, never to be restarted. A real estate developer is gutting the property to turn it into residential lofts, hoping that the city’s fortunes will rebound.

Scranton still tries hard. The handsome Lackawanna County Court House in the central square is surrounded by a well-manicured park, a comfortable coffee shop, and several restaurants. The Art Deco Masonic Lodge houses a large theater that hosts touring Broadway shows and concerts. The Steamtown National Historic site was developed as a tourist destination and the old train station turned into a fancy hotel.

But the recession hit harder. Half the stores in the mall went under. Small bookstores and theaters closed. The zoo in the city park, a modest structure built by the WPA in the 1930s, was shut down after lack of funding made it one of the worst zoos in the country for animal cruelty.

The factory floor at the Avanti Parodi Cigar Company.

Residents individually fight to maintain the working and middle class livelihoods they once took for granted. A lot of employment is low-paid and part-time, without benefits. Service jobs are a poor replacement for skilled manufacturing, and young people do their best to leave for better opportunities elsewhere. But some come back after finding those hopes illusory, and the cost of living too high in New York and Philadelphia.

By July, there was less than $5000 in the city’s treasury. Mayor Chris Doherty took the draconian step of putting hundreds of municipal employees, including the police and fire services – and himself – on $7.25 an hour, minimum wage, for two weeks. A desperate deal was brokered which asks for “voluntary” contributions from the region’s largest employers: non-profit hospitals and universities that pay no taxes. While not technically bankrupt, Scranton’s financial crisis is only the most recent and visible indicator of its persistent struggle. The local unemployment rate remains above 9% even as it’s dipped nationwide.

PHOTOGRAPHS + TEXT by Alan Chin / facingchange.org

Photo Editor: Mark Rykoff

Hay Springs, Nebraska is not a town easy to forget. I first traveled there in the winter of 2004 for the funeral of Sergeant Cory Mracek, a paratrooper killed in Iraq. Despite the bitter cold, every car on rural Route 20, which cuts across Sheridan County, pulled over onto the side of the road to salute the passing funeral procession. In the very small towns of Hay Springs, Rushville, and Gordon, residents bundled up in coats lined the street with American flags. I am a person who remembers things visually; so this summer, when I was searching for an American story, I immediately thought of those pick-up trucks on the side of the road. I had not made a picture then, but I knew it was a place to return to, a place that, in my mind, spoke of an older, more traditional America.

Residents of Hay Springs, Nebraska, line up to watch the funreal procession for Cory Mracek pass by,
February 4, 2004.

In the heat of August, I decided to photograph the drought that has paralyzed the farms and crops across a giant stretch of the American heartland. While the drought is very real, and its effects have been devastating for many who earn their living growing and harvesting the food that we all eat, I knew before I even left that I was thinking about more than the physics of the weather. Like with any news event, the drought becomes a prism through which to perceive something more meaningful to me, something harder to explain in a sound byte. I wanted to explore our own country, its conservative bedrock, and gain a better understanding of some of the deep divisions that separate that hinterland from the coasts. If the drought was what got me there, I hoped to stay for the chance to visit a culture very different from my own here in Brooklyn.

Sheridan County is in the remote northwest corner of Nebraska. Named after the Indian fighter General Phillip Sheridan, who systematically slaughtered the buffalo that roamed the high plains in order to starve his Sioux and Cheyenne enemies, many attitudes feel as if they have been fixed in time. Though just a dozen miles south of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Sheridan County is ninety-nine percent white, and local prejudice against the Native Americans on the reservation runs deep. The cattle that quickly replaced the buffalo are watched over by the descendents of the immigrant settlers who labored to tame the land, killing the wolf, bear, and lion. These men and women lived outside of any city’s gates. They fought and died to claim this land as their own, in spite of whatever obstacles faraway easterners from New York or Washington placed in their way.

During my stay in Hay Springs, my hosts were Jim Mracek and his wife Pat, the parents of Cory, whose death had brought me to Sheridan County eight years earlier. Generous to a fault, always willing to help a neighbor, or stranger, in need, the Mraceks are at the same time wary of the larger world that seems to have moved on.

Jim is a caretaker for a 5,000-acre cattle ranch. Like many people who live off of the land, Jim seems to have paid close attention to his surroundings. Dependent upon God’s creatures, it’s easy enough to conclude that the world is a harsh, unforgiving place. At the same time, there is a natural order, an accepted balance, and a rhythm to life that doesn’t have to be questioned or struggled over. On the ranch, there is no such thing as can’t. Hard work and patience and then more hard work solve almost any problem, of which there are many: another fence to mend, a stray calf to find, a pivot to check.

I failed at fully understanding the political beliefs of this deeply conservative part of the nation. The gap between basic political assumptions in rural western Nebraska and my own was just too large to build a bridge over. But self-reliance, hard work, an older, more intimate, connected America; these were all attributes where I could find great beauty, visual and otherwise.

Looking above, into the vast, blue Nebraska sky of the open prairie, I could see the jet streams of the airplanes flying from coast to coast. This is what I wanted to try and photograph, I realized. A place, an American Place, that the rest of the nation only sees from the plane window, those grids of intersecting dirt roads mapped across the seemingly endless expanse of land, viewed from 40,000 feet above.

UPDATE, Sept. 27: The Commerce Department’s report released today downgraded the growth rate of the GDP from 1.7% to 1.3%, citing the effects of the severe drought reducing crop yields and farm inventory.

PHOTOGRAPHS + TEXT by Andrew Lichtenstein / facingchange.org

Editor: Jamie Wellford, Photo

With support from Leica Camera

September 13, 2012

After photographing the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, and the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina back to back, Lucian Perkins shared his thoughts from on board a train to Philadelphia:

Buttons, Hats, Signs, Red, White, and Blue colors are everywhere. They aren’t kidding when they say that political conventions are a circus-like atmosphere. These are some of the familiar signposts that both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions share along with the excitement of being in a hall with thousands of like-minded partisans.

There were little or no policy or issue-oriented decisions made on the spot this year. There was little of the infamous smoke filled, backroom politics of yore or grand bargains that occurred in the storied past — JFK asking LBJ to become his vice-presidential nominee while RFK ran up and down the stairways of the Ambassador Hotel trying to stop it; Los Angeles, 1960 — or Ronald Reagan flirting with former President Gerald Ford before finally choosing George H. W. Bush at the last minute; Detroit, 1980. The biggest controversy was at the RNC in Tampa where many Ron Paul supporters were very angry with how their candidate and delegates were treated. For the Democrats in Charlotte, who have a greater reputation for intercenine squabbling, the only minor glitch was the wording of the party’s platform regarding God and religion. Supporting incumbent President Obama, everyone showed excitement with the hope of Four More Years.

Street protests at both conventions were billed as potentially big and explosive. But in Florida, no more than several hundred demonstrators took part in sporadic protests and marches throughout the week. They found themselves, as did many delegates and local residents, in an armed encampment. Downtown Tampa looked like a dead city — blocked by fences and barricades — full of police on vigilant patrol. When protesters did parade through the city, their biggest audiences were police and journalists. In North Carolina, the atmosphere was more festive and relaxed. A thousand demonstrators walked through the center of Charlotte, to be greeted by a friendly and curious crowd eager to photograph them. But the heavy police presence and physical obstacles shut down commerce in both cities. It is a grim reminder of the walls we’ve build around ourselves.

Bereft of substantive debate, the key is getting the message out.  Both Democrats and Republicans did this well. The most singular theme at either convention was the Republican meme of “We Built It,” based on an out of context quote from President Obama. Nevertheless, speaker after speaker talked about self-starting and creating their own businesses. In the end it mattered not what the President had meant in what he said. The RNC defined that for him.

If there is one area where the two parties are pointedly very different, it is in the demographics of who forms the crowds. The RNC is a sea of white faces. Compared to past Republican conventions, this may be somewhat less so, but it’s still very noticeable. Whereas the DNC comprises a heterogeneous collection of different cultures, religions and ethnic groups –  far more than ever before.

Neither party can afford to slip up on the opportunity of being on public view for three full days. On some levels both parties accomplished what they wanted — they broadcast their messages with passionate orators arousing their delegates and supporters.

Which was better? When I left the RNC, I thought the Democrats were in trouble. The Republicans worked hard to regain the votes of women and Hispanic-Americans. But the DNC countered those appeals with their own eloquent women and Latino speakers, and powerfully projected their belief that President Obama and the Democratic Party are propelling the nation forward with communitarian values. That vision seemed to carry out of their convention. Where this Presidential race will be in a few weeks is unpredictable, but for now the post-convention bounce gives President Obama a small lead over Governor Romney.

*****

PHOTOGRAPHS + TEXT by Lucian Perkins / facingchange.org

Editors: MaryAnne Golon, Photo ; Alan Chin, Text

Lucian covered both conventions for The Washington Post.

On the last day of the Supreme Court’s term for this year, everybody in Washington DC knew that its ruling would be announced on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), as the national health care reform law is officially known.

So an hour before the Supreme Court released its 193-page decision, in what has become a ritual before important cases are resolved, the sidewalk in front of the court was packed with protesters, bystanders, Tea Partiers, community activists: a host of pro and anti Obamacare people. A circus-like atmosphere prevailed as belly dancers, a plastic Jesus statue, and costumed Revolutionary War soldiers flooded the sidewalks. It was almost impossible to walk through the densely packed crowd.

Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann was the big draw for the conservative partisans, exciting the crowd and whipping Tea Party activists into a frenzy. Advocates supporting the law carried signs reading “Moving Forward > Supporting Our Care” and “Medicare For All.”

Sometime after 10am, reporters dashed out of the courthouse to awaiting TV cameras. Moments later CNN and Fox News misread the first pages of the decision to declare that the crucial Individual Mandate part of the Affordable Care Act was struck down. But the crowd in front of the Supreme Court found out quickly the law was, in fact, upheld. Very few people expected that the drama would play out as it did, that the mandate would stand and that Chief Justice John Roberts would side with the law in a landmark decision.

–Lucian Perkins

PHOTOGRAPHS by LUCIAN PERKINS / facingchange.org