Students shouldn’t assume stereotypes about poor
The comments made around campus of low-income residents living at the Stonegate Villas are riddled with stereotypes and assumptions. Students at a place of higher learning should be above that.
COMMENTARY
Brandon Ortiz

I sat recently with a group of fellow students at a restaurant, sharing nothing else in common but a mutual friend.

The dinner topic was the Fort Worth Housing Authority’s purchase of the Stonegate Villas, an upscale apartment complex in the southwest part of town.

By Oct. 31, 58 units are to be designated for low-income residents from the downtown Ripley Arnold apartments, which are to be razed for Radio Shack’s new corporate headquarters.

One student, apparently still struggling to make up her mind on the issue, said she thought it offered motivation for poor families to move up in life.

“If they move into those nice apartments, they are going to look around and say, ‘I want this,’ and work,” I recall her saying.

“But if you just give it to them, then why should they work?” another person said, obviously annoyed.

Not surprisingly, the rest of my meal-mates overwhelmingly agreed.

I imagine there are more than a few at TCU who share false, stereotypical assumptions of the working poor.

That much is apparent by observing the recent exodus of students from the apartments and overhearing conversations around campus.

Why don’t they just get jobs? ... Why do they deserve to live in such a nice place? ... Why should I pay for them to live there? ...

The underlying assumption in all these comments is that the poor are somehow lazy, and thus inferior, to hardworking, disciplined college students.

How immature.

It is undeniable that some public housing residents abuse the system, just as some college students do nothing but party.

As someone who has family living in Section 8 housing, I can tell you that is not the norm.

And the cold hard numbers show it.

In a three-city study by Johns Hopkins University in October 2000, the average wage for workers who left welfare was $7.50 an hour. That’s roughly $15,600 a year.

It may be hard for us to grasp, $40,000 a year jobs are not abundant. (Indeed, many of you reading this probably hope to make much more that that immediately after graduation.)

The study is relevant because many families on welfare typically qualify for housing assistance. According to nationalhomeless.org, the wage a full-time worker must earn to truly afford fair market rent is $12.47 an hour. That’s about $26,000 a year.

A more shocking statistic, from the National Priorities Project, is that 79 percent of new jobs in 1998 in Texas did not pay a “living wage,” which it defined as a subsistence budget of $30,367 for the average family. That is 33 percent lower than the average family income, according to the study, and does not include money to go out to eat, go on vacation or save for retirement or college.

The hostility shown by students and area homeowners toward soon-to-be former Ripley Arnold residents is ill-founded.

They are folks down on their luck, struggling to get by. Some lack education; others are faced with a language barrier. Whatever their reasons for receiving housing vouchers, we should try to be more understanding of our new neighbors.

Isn’t part of college learning tolerance and the ability to think outside ourselves?

Editor in Chief Brandon Ortiz is a junior news-editorial journalism major from Fort Worth.