It is a little past noon on a sweltering day a short ride from downtown Detroit, one of the last gasps of summer before the brutal Michigan winter settles in. Already the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, run by friars from a nearby monastery, is winding down.
This is a rough neighborhood. Alison Costello, the former fine-dining chef who manages the kitchen, keeps her eyes fixed ahead of her on her way home to avoid looking too hard at the drug houses that line the street. Many of the people at the tables have low-paying jobs and simply struggle to make ends meet, part of a swelling class of the working poor.
"I drove in here yesterday and I saw all these people streaming in to the soup kitchen, and I thought `there is so much suffering in this city.'" said Brother Jerry Smith, who runs the soup kitchen.
This is the US most don't see. It has taken a catastrophe to rekindle the national debate on poverty in the US. The wretched images of the poor left to struggle on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with no means of escape, provoked widespread shock. But the conditions exposed by the hurricane are not confined to the south. After barely registering as an issue for a decade, poverty is back on the political agenda.
We had all seen the evidence of "deep, persistent poverty" on television, US President George W. Bush said in an address after the hurricane struck; poverty that "has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America."
According to the US census bureau, poverty has been on the rise for the past four years, despite a robust economy. The number of people living in poverty increased last year to 12.7 percent of the population, some 37 million people, the highest percentage in the developed world. Since Bush took office an additional 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. In 1970, the rate was 11.1 percent. Almost 8 percent of white people are classified as below the poverty line and almost 25 percent of African Americans.
"Katrina merely blew the mask off the face of poverty," says Agostinho Fernandes, president of the Gleaners Food Bank, which supplies food to soup kitchens and emergency food services in the Detroit area.
"Why did it take a disaster for our leaders to respond?" he said.
In Detroit, 34 percent of the population live in poverty, including almost half the children under 17. In the neighborhood of Highland Park, once the home of Chrysler and now all but abandoned, shops are boarded up and the bones of burnt out buildings haunt the streets. Local community workers are fighting contractors from other parts of the city using its streets to dump rubbish.
Detroit's population has plummeted from two million to 950,000 in the past 50 years, largely because of white flight to the suburbs after race riots in the 1960s. There have been cuts in police and fire departments, the city is crime-ridden and schools are a shambles. The Capuchin Soup Kitchen has become accustomed to dealing with the mentally ill after budget cuts caused the closure of local mental health facilities.
Community workers are skeptical about whether US will see another "war on poverty."
"What the president says doesn't mean much to me," says Genevieve Clark at the Hunger Action Coalition in Detroit. "He is speaking for the moment to make people feel warm and fuzzy today and then he will move on to something else."
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