Unknown Speaker 00:01 Pentagon housing. And a project she lives in, was just like the one they blew up the food it was just like that she grew up there. Now, it's an incredibly beautiful thing. There's flowers and there's grass. And it's been everything's been redesigned in communication with tenants event. mothers need to be able to look out the window and see the playground. All kinds of things. People every week have an assignment about when they sweep their hallway. And the tenants themselves enforce a whole lot of rules about behavior, their behaviors that are absolutely not tolerated there. You don't urinate in the elevators, you don't draw on the walls, you do clean your halls when it's your turn. You don't I mean, there's a whole lot of rules, and and they're very strictly enforced, but it's not outsiders coming in and enforcing those rules. And I would bet I don't know, I'd really like to know what's going on there about teenage pregnancy. I know they've set up a daycare center. I know, they've insisted that the people who work in the daycare center be people who live in the project, they've done a lot of training. So they've created jobs there. They've created a whole series of businesses connected to them. Unknown Speaker 01:13 Do anyone written it up or Yeah, Unknown Speaker 01:15 it has been really a waste isn't Bertha Bertha gaoqi is an extremely powerful person herself. But that's another core model. That's much more rooted in communities. And and it has accountability built in. It has a lot of things that Unknown Speaker 01:40 not only was a friend of mine here at Morningside gardens, the project from the tenants of wanting style gardens, to set up a committee that deals with health and the care of the aged in the community so they can stay in the house. And they they got they can plant papers, social work, as well as the services, the community furnishing services within the housing project. So there are ways of doing this within these kinds of organizations, but in fact, very experienced now that she's done it. And we were talking last night, but there are some of these people who want it done. Sometimes you have to do it yourself. And it's not as widespread. They know how to link this up so that people know about it having been done in one place. Unknown Speaker 02:38 How big? Sarah, what about the funding for this? What some of the money come from? Unknown Speaker 02:43 Well, the first place they got this is public housing, right? They essentially got the administration of that public housing turned over to the tenants. And the tenant council now, I think most public housing did. In years, there's a structure for that. But they also think I eat egg money. They've built a lot more units. Since they, and they got money to renovate. They've been out they got money out of the Republicans for nobody else. of economic development projects. Yes, they have. They have a food service, they cook the food that is served in the daycare center. And in that there's a senior citizens. One of the buildings and senior citizens they cook the food is sorted the Meals on Wheels and stuff inserted and met. So that's business inside. They provide their own security, although I think they will now that the two ends, the security people don't work in the project where they live. Unknown Speaker 03:53 But the one important thing that they don't have to contend with is that middle class people who are licensed social workers, so whereas in a social agency, and the reason I laugh a little bit when you say how do we get our hands on money is you don't because by law, it has to go to people who are licensed for it, which is this whole sort of elaborate structure of people, tendons, WCS, WC several years of experience in couch government, that sort of thing. So that's what makes the social services difficult. Unknown Speaker 04:23 Except the welfare department in New York City is not staffed by social workers with degrees. This step by quick will paste this memo, Unknown Speaker 04:31 but still no license in my cell goes to people who are credentialed. There's a whole credentialing system. Unknown Speaker 04:39 You mean the people in the welfare department in New York that do the client outreach have to be lazy? I don't think Unknown Speaker 04:46 they take an exam. The welfare department job is to sell the services. And once you pass that exam for Unknown Speaker 04:52 people, people who are their bosses now Unknown Speaker 04:58 on top of that, But then again, when they make the psychiatrist to discharge over the younger bump this case was one was trying to mitigate the effects of the system. And they used him, particularly as a scapegoat at the time that he was trying to get through the bureaucracy to protect this woman and his diagnosis so that even events in Europe, they came down on him, we had the system Unknown Speaker 05:28 is really there to protect itself. It's not there to help you never go to social services. Because the same as you get into the system, you are in a plastic. I mean, sometimes it's it's good, you can get help. But it's there's always a double edged sword because you can also just, you know, by the time this woman is known to the system, as it's called, she's, she's like, you know, anything she does forget about my candles on the floor. Look, America, why did she didn't say the appropriate thing? To to baby him? Just? Yeah, she said she said it? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a very mild version of what's what constitutes inappropriately in between some social reforms. So it gets very problematic, you can get help, but basically, they want to protect the money, there's, there's always a punitive aspect to going to getting help because they got 40% is providing services, or 60%. of accounting for where the money's going. That's where the coercion, yeah, blaming. So really, the system, the reason that it's so punitive is to discourage people coming. I mean, it's major function is really to discourage. Unknown Speaker 06:38 And that's really rooted in the early days of the growth of the of the concept of public assistance in the 20s and 30s. Like the the mode of thinking when it really when this whole idea about helping others that have come out of it, when in fact the asylum mystery this is under what conditions poor houses and asylums, do you help others? Unknown Speaker 06:58 Are we Nelson Hansen, an article on the gendered nature of the welfare state, and she compares mothers a way with workman's compensation. And the difference is that with workman's compensation, you know, you lose a finger, you get $1,000, you lose an eye and get this, you just fill out the form, you check off the proper body parts and you get paid. It's not intrusive. In the end. All the programs designed around women in the family are designed to be extremely interested Unknown Speaker 07:37 in controlling if I pitch questions over. Unknown Speaker 07:42 The one thing that I think would be that a call talks about is that even when you're dealing with social services, or any kind of apology, you're always looking at people who are too poor to protect their privacy. Right? Do you believe in you don't have that kind of information about poor people, enriched badly do poor people, you can't go into how many phones you have, how long this man is you? How much money does he give you? You're pregnant again, this is by the same man or is this, you know, and I think a real good representation of this is Phil Marsha Mason, where there's a white prostitute who has a black child, and he's also on welfare. And the social worker comes to visit and doesn't find any milk in the frigerator and says, no milk and refrigerate emotions, kids are walking on the ground. And it's just just the kind of interaction that goes on in the truth. And that's just really, Unknown Speaker 08:52 privacy is a tricky issue. But New York has very stringent privacy laws about what kind of information is available to the public. And, yeah, I think what it really does, because you can always get information, if you really want to really dig and you're prepared to go to family court or something and stand around waiting for people to come out there lots of ways to find out information about anybody who has anything to do with COVID agency, what it really does is protect the agencies themselves, because we cannot get them officially to release records to so in fact, they're not. So they're not they're really not. So they're always confidential, then they're very, they're all tied up with their computers and smoothly. Bomb internal bombs that will destroy destroy the information if anybody gets into it. And it's all it really is doing is protecting these people who protect cases that they will not up there. So it's not always but it's certainly important Unknown Speaker 09:47 to the First Amendment run here. There's one other thing I'd like to that I'd like to talk about because I think it doesn't doesn't get saved very often and that is it. A I think one of the things we're also seeing is quite apart from much of what we've talked about, I think we're seeing the emergence of a new form of an American. One in which Karen Lindsey has written a book called friends, as family be compressed a few years ago. And, you know, it's this interesting little book and what she's basically saying is that the the valuing romantic love, the valuing of nurturing and, and being in nurturing situations, that valuing is still remaining a big constant amongst a lot of people, but that it is now having to confront things like one a highly migratory and transitory population. You know, certainly this is more of an issue for the middle class, but it still is an issue for some segments of the working class, where an opportunity for a better job or another situation comes up in another city, you get up and you leave your biological family behind. What do you do with this new place. And she argues that, if you really watch some of what you're naturally inclined to do, you will begin to recreate family, but this time it doesn't have like connections, it may begin to take on some new and different forms, it may involve previously, at least, onshore non traditional kinds of relationships, and one that seems to me to be coming to be coming to the fore enough for us to look at more seriously, is for me, it particularly in the context of the black family, the growth of situations where even amongst middle class families or even working class families, there is a conscious decision to recreate friends and or lovers as men. And at least from my thinking, the people talking about the situation of black families or white families or green families, they're not talking about that seems to be so potentially threatening. And yet, it seems alright, seems right here doesn't seem to be something that's only going on in one small pocket of the country. It seems to be glaringly evident in all major cities in which I spend more than a couple of weeks. So in some ways, for whatever set of historical reasons and circumstances there also seems to be another level of definition or redefinition or recasting of the family. I'm not sure all what I would attribute it to, but it does seem to be Unknown Speaker 12:35 in fact, it's already affected some more about housing in New York City, you know, it's getting filtered down this way. My building I live in is Co Op. And it's not a very large building. But the number of different rate, different household arrangements is so different from when I moved into that building, to now. There was a single parent household. There's not as much extended family in terms of the ages. But there's a tremendous amount of variety in what constitutes a household in that building has changed. I guess it's really the last seven years, but really annoyed. And given the physical west side, there's a middle class kind of very, the consciousness with which this has received it. Goblins blinking any eyelashes. It's all very traditional. Conventional, is the word traditional. Unknown Speaker 13:44 But it seems there's still this huge gap between what's held up as white middle class American norms and the goodness and rightness and what is the reality. And it's that it's that norm, which, which causes a great deal of this. Unknown Speaker 14:04 But a lot of the reason I think is that it's women who are doing it and it's it's a big threat to pay the patriarch of a family. Unknown Speaker 14:12 I in fact raises up because I think it's very incumbent upon this generation of feminists to help rewrite recast that language in ways that make it proceed or at least help to have the help towards the perception of it is the normal. Unknown Speaker 14:27 Well, I think the entree was the male gay couple. That was the entree very often in this kind of lip and these living arrangements in these households in these neighborhoods that were size changes Yeah, no changes. But wherever it's coming from, at least, it's got the beginnings of recognition Unknown Speaker 14:59 in If we're putting on Unknown Speaker 15:01 the American Psychological Association Unknown Speaker 15:03 recognized insurance plans or lifestyle, you're kidding, how did they get to insurance companies to go able to buy life Unknown Speaker 15:13 insurance? What's the arrangement their significant other is insurable. Big precedent? Well, okay, I believe we have 25 up, so maybe they want to come back together. But anything else? I have a question about Unknown Speaker 15:41 the cult, pop culture of poverty people is that based on a Marxist analysis? Unknown Speaker 15:50 No. St. Louis. Children's Sanchez. Sanchez. It's essentially this I mean, but whether it's the children's centers in Mexico or Brazil or Harlem, the basic argument is that the poor have one thing globally in common their poverty, which is true, but the inference is that they don't really have separate and autonomous or cultural traditions that, that we're not really talking about expressions of values or culture, which are separate from economically deterministic. They're very economic determinism says they are who what they are who they are, because therefore, if you change their economic situation, they will resemble more like the rest of us. Because the assumption is, is that once you went to the middle class, the middle class is essentially right. Blender differences disappear. Well, my graduate one of my graduate advisors who I'm very fond of used to say a dime in good intentions.