People Who Have Never Lived In Poverty Should Stop Telling Poor People What To Do
When I tell someone about my experiences with poverty, I’m met with a cascade of advice on how to do better.
The brownstone I lived in for eight months in 2009 and 2010 had few amenities — the building often smelled like leaking pipes, the carpets were threadbare in many places, and the steam heater in the corner was completely out of my control, resulting in quite a few freezing mornings and sweltering nights. It did, however, have a gas stove and oven which, the landlord had told me, was pretty new and “worked great.”
Unfortunately, everything else in the unit was electric, which meant that I’d need to set up separate utility accounts and pay for the gas every month just to run the stove and range.
“It’s like $10 to turn it on and then another $20-$30 per month depending on how much you use it,” she explained.
Yeah, I’m just not going to do that, then, I thought, doing the math in my head.
At that point, $30 was just a little bit less than my take-home after a day of making lattes, which is what I was doing every day that I wasn’t at my public radio internship. The rent on the apartment — which was the least expensive I could find in…
