Fighting the Rats, Beating Off the Pundits : Inner city: The attacks on poverty lawyers wind up hurting those who are least able to defend themselves: the poor.
The badly shaken mother sat in the construction trailer that served as my office, surrounded by her four beautiful young daughters. In a quivering voice, she told me how she had been awakened by the screams of her youngest daughter. When she flipped on the light, she saw blood on the child’s face and bloody rat prints across the pillow case. She then opened a paper bag and showed me the football-sized rat that she had killed by bashing it over the head with a board because it was too large to be caught with a conventional trap. And that wasn’t the end of it. Her other three daughters also had been attacked by rats in their slum apartment building.
That was one of my first slum-housing cases that I handled from my little Skid Row poverty-law office, which I started 15 years ago to help families escape and to help the homeless get off the street. I thought that it would be the most shocking case of my career. Yet after I had gone to court and gotten repair orders for the building and had won some money so the families could move out, other parents started contacting me from all over the city with similar cases. Since then, I and my low-paid staff of attorneys have represented many children who have been injured in slum housing. Some have been attacked by rats, some have had cockroaches trapped in their ear canals, damaging their hearing, others have suffered crippling injuries when ceilings collapsed on them, and still others have been disabled from lead-paint poisoning.
The parents of these children work at jobs that pay minimum wage or worse and don’t have the money to move to better housing. One father told me how he worked all day at a job involving heavy manual labor, then tried to stay awake at night to watch over his family with a broom in his hand to fight off the rats that climbed onto the bodies of his sleeping wife and children. Another mother told me that she went to sleep in tears each night, praying that our lawsuit would be successful so that her family could escape their nightmarish existence.
Most Americans have no idea that this kind of housing exists in a city such as ours. They think of it in terms of the tenements of New York a century ago. However, as we who are on the front lines of the war against poverty know, entry-level housing for the poor is virtually synonymous with slum housing in Los Angeles.
Despite this reality, it has become fashionable for ill-informed political pundits to attack the very few lawyers in this country who devote their lives to changing such horrific living conditions. They say that we poverty attorneys are merely young, childless, yuppie advocates who are ruining the quality of life in many communities by defending the anti-social behavior of the poor.
These commentators might be surprised to know that in my Inner City Law Center, a typical small legal-aid organization, four of the five lawyers are in their 40s, and two of us are the mothers of young children. Some of us have lived in extreme poverty in order to do this work, and all have sacrificed the comfort and security that a conventional law career would bring. My courageous staff members put their bodies on the line every day by going into the most dangerous neighborhoods and buildings in this city to bring hope to those trapped on the streets or in the slums.
Some have claimed that it is a misguided “abstract compassion” that motivates us. But if you’d ever held a rat-bitten child in your arms, you would find nothing “abstract” about the experience. At my office, we do this work because we have grown to love the children and their families who come to us in distress.
Broad-based attacks on poverty attorneys have created a climate of hostility which has made it nearly impossible to raise funds to continue this work and the efforts of other legal-services organizations around the country. At this moment, Congress is moving forward with plans to decimate or even eliminate all federal funding for all legal aid to the poor. If we go, then the rats and slumlords will be free to prey upon the poor children of Los Angeles.
