Setting aside the appalling squalor that is detailed in the opening of the profile on Dasani, at no point in his USA Today column does Jonah Goldberg deal with the following reality:
In the short span of Dasani’s life, her city has been reborn. The skyline soars with luxury towers, beacons of a new gilded age. More than 200 miles of fresh bike lanes connect commuters to high-tech jobs, passing through upgraded parks and avant-garde projects like the High Line and Jane’s Carousel. Posh retail has spread from its Manhattan roots to the city’s other boroughs. These are the crown jewels of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s long reign, which began just seven months after Dasani was born.
In the shadows of this renewal, it is Dasani’s population who have been left behind. The ranks of the poor have risen, with almost half of New Yorkers living near or below the poverty line. Their traditional anchors — affordable housing and jobs that pay a living wage — have weakened as the city reorders itself around the whims of the wealthy.
Instead, he sets up a false dichotomy about the different ways that liberals and conservatives view income inequality. It’s all very boring, but what’s really appalling is how Goldberg concludes his argument.
Dasani is certainly a victim, but is the system really to blame? Dasani’s biological father is utterly absent. Her mother, Chanel, a drug addict and daughter of a drug addict, has a long criminal record and has children from three men. It doesn’t appear that she has ever had a job, and often ignores her parental chores because she’s strung out on methadone.
I don’t think anyone would dispute that Dasani doesn’t have ideal parents. No one would choose to have an absent father and a heroin addict for a mother. But what kind of resources do we set aside for unfortunate children like Dasani? What kind of treatment do we provide for her mother?
Let’s get back to that squalor:
Her family lives in the Auburn Family Residence, a decrepit city-run shelter for the homeless. It is a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers.
It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.
Nearly a quarter of Dasani’s childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and seven siblings.
Is it wrong for me to ask what the hell Michael Bloomberg was thinking when he was building his millionaire’s playground while he allowed the homeless to be housed in these conditions?
Could it be argued that perhaps too little money was being devoted to the problem?
But, for Goldberg, all this means nothing.
Family structure and the values that go into successful child rearing have a stronger correlation with economic mobility than income inequality. America’s system is hardly flawless. But if Dasani were born to the same parents in a socialist country, she’d still be a victim — of bad parents.
Isn’t that wonderful?
The answer to Dasani’s situation isn’t to devote the resources that would allow her homeless shelter to be mold and cockroach and rodent and feces-free. The solution is to lecture heroin addicts about the virtues of abstinence and a strong nuclear family.
As stupid and thoughtless as that is, the debate about income inequality is about more than how we treat the homeless. It’s also about “affordable housing and jobs that pay a living wage” and the exploding cost of college education.
Rather than talk about any of that, Goldberg wants to blame the parents and argue that nothing can be done.
