An interview with Carmen Porco
Breaking down poverty
Breaking down poverty
Carmen Porco has managed subsidized
housing in Madison and Milwaukee for over
36 years.
housing in Madison and Milwaukee for over
36 years.
By Jonathan Gramling
Part 1 of 2
Carmen Porco has been in the business of providing housing — and a chance to improve one’s life
circumstances — to economically challenged families in Madison and Milwaukee. As the director of housing for
Housing Ministries of American Baptists in Wisconsin, Porco has been intimately involved with working with the
families of the Northport, Packers and Bram Hill subsidized housing complexes.
Porco brings a passion to his work whose foundation was laid during his childhood in the hills of West
Virginia. “I didn’t know I was poor until I got on the school bus to go to the new high school,” Porco recalled
during an interview with The Capital City Hues. “As we got on the school bus, they said ‘Oh, here are the poor
kids.’ I didn’t understand what that meant. I learned now when we don’t feel comfortable with someone, we have
to classify them. That gives us control and comfort. Poverty is the pollution of the mindset that needs to be
cleansed.”
Probably due to his upbringing and the religious zeal that he brings to his work, Porco doesn’t mince words
when he talks about poverty and the “industries” that have grown up around poverty. His views are bound to anger or turnoff many people in a city like Madison.
One gets the feeling that Porco doesn’t really care.
In Porco’s view, many of society’s institutions — no matter what their political or economic status might be — have been designed at the expense of the
poor. For instance, the criminal justice system helps sustain many people. The poor are not among them. “When people feel that they are left out of the system,
they are going to create a system of survival,” Porco said. “For a lot of people, that’s the drug system. It’s a big business. It’s also a big business for law
enforcement because they can use those statistics to build a larger police force and obtain more equipment. Eventually we spend $350 million building prisons.
And now we are coming to a point of saying that the whole concept of prevention and community-based servicing is getting a new wind because what we are
realizing now is that we cannot institutionalize everyone. We are increasing the sensitivity to what is a crime. For example, if someone is caught stealing a loaf
of bread and they have a pattern of criminal activity, there’s a good chance they will go uptown sort of to speak. My goodness! When I was a young kid, we stole
whatever we needed to steal, bicycles, cupcakes or whatever. The community wasn’t that frightened. Those were not seen as things the law should deal with.
The parents were supposed to deal with that. So I look at it and say there has been a whole interesting change in attitude. Now there is a mindset that kids selling
marijuana is such a threat. We have to get them. So we look at kids at an early age as they are grouping together as gangs. We’ve romanticized this because it’s
become part of a big industry. And that is poverty.”
Porco is equally critical of many components of the “welfare state” that resulted from President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s. While Porco
feels that the War on Poverty resulted from good intentions and sounded good, he also feels that it has evolved into a system that benefits many people except
the people it was intended to serve, the poor.
“I think we need to recognize that what we have grown after the War on Poverty is an economic order that I would describe as the equivalent of the military-
industrial complex,” Porco emphasized. “I would call it the education-economic welfare complex because we ended up having to create this ability to get a
handle on the ‘problem people.’ We created many different schools of thought about social work, psychology, education and theological theory all the way
through. We then counted on the institutions of higher education to do the studies that said ‘Here’s what we are finding. Here’s what we’ll do. Here’s an approach.’
Then we counted on many, many organizations who would come in with funding to work on a group of people in communities that they didn’t know. And they
became the experts. But they didn’t have to live with the problems. And when you examine that, you see a tremendous rise in employment in those industries
and at the same time, creating more and more people on welfare. It decimated many African American families when they were checking to make sure there
wasn’t a man living in the house because they received Aid for Families with Dependent Children. It seems ironic that children somehow came into the world
without a man. And the system went on and multiplied in different dynamics of repressiveness that I think we are just now beginning to say ‘We need to change
that.’”
In many ways, the poor have been used as a scapegoat for all the things that may go wrong in society. The image of the poor has certainly suffered over
the past 30 years. “The poor are people whom we tend to look at and blame — because of a lot of public policy mind setting and imaging making — as the
cause of our problems, Porco said. “Certainly President Reagan tried to highlight it.”
But the poor have also been a buffer in our society, suffering through long bouts of unemployment so that the rest of society — particularly the middle class
— can enjoy the good life. “Why is it that we have not been able to develop a zero unemployment society,” Porco asked. “I think the last time we came close to
that was in the 1960s. But now if you pay attention to the news and that, when the unemployment rate goes down to about 3.7 percent, you have an interesting
concept called inflation. The economy is heating up too much. And there are all kinds of brakes put in place that then cause unemployment rate to increase
again. In a sense, the question becomes ‘Can we design a system, an economic order, that can obtain full employment?”
And over the past 50 years, the acceptable level of unemployment needed to keep inflation in check has been rising to the point where middle class
families are now in danger of falling into poverty. “The unemployment rate is going above the four percent mark and is getting to 5-8 percent and will probably
get to 10 plus percent,” Porco said. “As you really look at that some in our country say that as the economic base of employment transitions from the industrial
base to a service economy or a technology society, that it will create a like number of jobs to offset the loss in the industrial base, I don’t think so. I think if you
look at how short-term the cycle for the service economy was — it was a 12-year period — and look at the difference of the industrial base in a 75-100 year
period, you have to ask the question ‘Can we regenerate a 100 year cycle of an economic engine that gives full employment?’ I think we’re going to be looking
at is that it is going to go from 4 percent to a 6-7 percent national average over the next 25 years.”
Next issue: Making subsidized housing community
One gets the feeling that Porco doesn’t really care.
In Porco’s view, many of society’s institutions — no matter what their political or economic status might be — have been designed at the expense of the
poor. For instance, the criminal justice system helps sustain many people. The poor are not among them. “When people feel that they are left out of the system,
they are going to create a system of survival,” Porco said. “For a lot of people, that’s the drug system. It’s a big business. It’s also a big business for law
enforcement because they can use those statistics to build a larger police force and obtain more equipment. Eventually we spend $350 million building prisons.
And now we are coming to a point of saying that the whole concept of prevention and community-based servicing is getting a new wind because what we are
realizing now is that we cannot institutionalize everyone. We are increasing the sensitivity to what is a crime. For example, if someone is caught stealing a loaf
of bread and they have a pattern of criminal activity, there’s a good chance they will go uptown sort of to speak. My goodness! When I was a young kid, we stole
whatever we needed to steal, bicycles, cupcakes or whatever. The community wasn’t that frightened. Those were not seen as things the law should deal with.
The parents were supposed to deal with that. So I look at it and say there has been a whole interesting change in attitude. Now there is a mindset that kids selling
marijuana is such a threat. We have to get them. So we look at kids at an early age as they are grouping together as gangs. We’ve romanticized this because it’s
become part of a big industry. And that is poverty.”
Porco is equally critical of many components of the “welfare state” that resulted from President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s. While Porco
feels that the War on Poverty resulted from good intentions and sounded good, he also feels that it has evolved into a system that benefits many people except
the people it was intended to serve, the poor.
“I think we need to recognize that what we have grown after the War on Poverty is an economic order that I would describe as the equivalent of the military-
industrial complex,” Porco emphasized. “I would call it the education-economic welfare complex because we ended up having to create this ability to get a
handle on the ‘problem people.’ We created many different schools of thought about social work, psychology, education and theological theory all the way
through. We then counted on the institutions of higher education to do the studies that said ‘Here’s what we are finding. Here’s what we’ll do. Here’s an approach.’
Then we counted on many, many organizations who would come in with funding to work on a group of people in communities that they didn’t know. And they
became the experts. But they didn’t have to live with the problems. And when you examine that, you see a tremendous rise in employment in those industries
and at the same time, creating more and more people on welfare. It decimated many African American families when they were checking to make sure there
wasn’t a man living in the house because they received Aid for Families with Dependent Children. It seems ironic that children somehow came into the world
without a man. And the system went on and multiplied in different dynamics of repressiveness that I think we are just now beginning to say ‘We need to change
that.’”
In many ways, the poor have been used as a scapegoat for all the things that may go wrong in society. The image of the poor has certainly suffered over
the past 30 years. “The poor are people whom we tend to look at and blame — because of a lot of public policy mind setting and imaging making — as the
cause of our problems, Porco said. “Certainly President Reagan tried to highlight it.”
But the poor have also been a buffer in our society, suffering through long bouts of unemployment so that the rest of society — particularly the middle class
— can enjoy the good life. “Why is it that we have not been able to develop a zero unemployment society,” Porco asked. “I think the last time we came close to
that was in the 1960s. But now if you pay attention to the news and that, when the unemployment rate goes down to about 3.7 percent, you have an interesting
concept called inflation. The economy is heating up too much. And there are all kinds of brakes put in place that then cause unemployment rate to increase
again. In a sense, the question becomes ‘Can we design a system, an economic order, that can obtain full employment?”
And over the past 50 years, the acceptable level of unemployment needed to keep inflation in check has been rising to the point where middle class
families are now in danger of falling into poverty. “The unemployment rate is going above the four percent mark and is getting to 5-8 percent and will probably
get to 10 plus percent,” Porco said. “As you really look at that some in our country say that as the economic base of employment transitions from the industrial
base to a service economy or a technology society, that it will create a like number of jobs to offset the loss in the industrial base, I don’t think so. I think if you
look at how short-term the cycle for the service economy was — it was a 12-year period — and look at the difference of the industrial base in a 75-100 year
period, you have to ask the question ‘Can we regenerate a 100 year cycle of an economic engine that gives full employment?’ I think we’re going to be looking
at is that it is going to go from 4 percent to a 6-7 percent national average over the next 25 years.”
Next issue: Making subsidized housing community