Very Close to Home

The New York Times has finally noticed that the recession has spread to where I live, in a small wrong-side-of-the-tracks neighborhood in downstate New York that is surrounded by large areas of affluence:

This winter day begins a new year of the mortgage crisis. Nothing is certain about the miseries ahead except that they are growing. It is, for example, a freezing morning on Long Island—a national symbol of the single-family suburb. Its two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, boast well-run governments, an educated work force and a long history of stability and affluence. Comfort and consumption are the twin strands of their DNA. But the struggle there is acute.

In Nassau County, New York State's richest one, the foreclosure whirlwind hit hard. Shelters are filling up and food pantries are emptying. More than 500 people sought emergency housing from the county in a recent December week. Most were families with children. ...

As people lose not only homes but also jobs, pain is cascading to the bottom rungs of the economy. The Workplace Project, a longstanding defender of immigrant workers' rights in Hempstead, has seen an alarming rise in reports of unpaid wages, said Nadia Marin-Molina, its executive director. Contractors are cutting costs by missing payrolls and are counting on an undocumented work force not to complain. ...

Those are the same contractors who haven't been calling my husband, Ed, for the last 4 months to ask him to subcontract for them.

"I've been doing this for over 30 years, and I've never seen it like this," Ms. Lassandro of Nassau County said. "Nobody's exempt from it."

Hear that, father-in-law of mine? Nobody.



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