Portraits of Home

November 30, 2005 12:11 PM

Portraits of Home: A set of 55 wonderful pictures relating to housing issues in greater Minnesota. This comes from a "Photography Exhibit Documents the Housing Challenges Facing Minnesota's Working Families".
posted by edgeways (10 comments total)

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posted by edgeways at 12:11 PM on November 30, 2005

Good photos. Sucks to be poor, sucks even more where it's cold.
posted by scratch at 12:54 PM on November 30, 2005

Awesome photos.
posted by jsavimbi at 12:54 PM on November 30, 2005

Thanks for posting this. The photos were great, and the captions do a good job illustrating how people ended up in these situations and how hard it is to get out. Poverty in Minnesota can be non-obvious, especially because so much of it is outside the metropolitan areas and off of the main roads. The pictures from Duluth in particular struck me, as an area that I thought I knew well but has obviously changed or has more sides to it than are readily apparent. (I say this having lived there for 16 years and traveled extensively in the Twin Cities, Duluth/Superior, and Aitkin/Bemidji/Brainerd areas.)
posted by whatzit at 12:57 PM on November 30, 2005

Fox News and Bill O'Reilly could best fight for the Christmas Spirit by bringing some of it to these folks.
posted by nervousfritz at 1:09 PM on November 30, 2005

My first thought was, where are all the Asian folks? I guess because they didn't focus on the metro area, Asian people didn't show up much.
posted by jiawen at 1:31 PM on November 30, 2005

whatzit, depending on how long ago you were here (in Duluth), i'd say it's just about many facets. the worst part about being on the edge in this town is what the landlords get away with charging rent for. mold, leaking roofs, broken windows, floors with holes in them, precarious plumbing ... all rather too usual, unfortunately. lots of people won't report these things because they can't afford to move or the risk the landlord will fix things then up the rent. good-paying jobs are scarce, and it's only the privileged who manage to make it with what's available.

i know a guy who lives just out of town who heats his home with some sort of contraption using an old bus engine. (don't ask me how it works.) i know people who haven't turned the heat on yet this winter (right now, it's 17 degrees), and don't see how they can afford to until January. (heating assistance is there, but it is usually delayed, and i know the budget's being stressed unbelievably.) i used to work in a bookstore where i dressed like Bob Cratchit all winter with the fingerless gloves and heavy clothes, because the boss couldn't afford to pay off the bills from the previous winter so the steam could be turned on. (try to get customers that way and see how you do.) (BTW, that caption about steam heating "all of Duluth" is just wrong. it goes through downtown, but that's it.)

and all this doesn't even address the real street people like Sylvester (otherwise known as The Black One-Dread Man) who wouldn't live in your shelter if you gave him an engraved invitation. i have no idea what he does in the winter.

there are many Duluthians that manage to stay out of the way of seeing downtown, and blame the problems with homelessness and poverty on the people themselves or their supposed penchant for "coming here to get on welfare." (as if anybody would move to Minnesota for a measly hundred bucks.) my favorite is when they blame the concentration of non-profits downtown who are actually working to solve the problems for "attracting a bad element." luckily the guy who ran for city council using that as a bonding phrase with his racist suburbanesque constituency lost the election. i'm still toasting his disappointment.
posted by RedEmma at 2:00 PM on November 30, 2005

i should have written "a measly few bucks" since i don't know the exact amount of difference between our welfare and other states. i just know it's piddly.
posted by RedEmma at 2:09 PM on November 30, 2005

RedEmma, thanks for the update. It's been almost 8 years now since I stopped living in Minnesota, and I don't see nearly so much of the region anymore, so perhaps things are looking quite a bit different. Your perspective definitely adds to what the pictures were telling...
posted by whatzit at 2:43 PM on November 30, 2005

Just reinforcing redemma's point in general and: I didn't realize there was another active duluthian on mefi
posted by edgeways at 3:09 PM on November 30, 2005