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California's hard times driving people back to the 'Dust Bowl'
Phillip Reese, Sacramento Bee
Fleeing the Great Depression and a drought unprecedented in American history, a vast wave of Oklahomans and Texans dubbed "Okies" loaded everything they could onto crowded vehicles during the 1930s and headed west for California. Today, in huge numbers, their grandchildren are moving back.

It doesn't take Loren O'Laughlin much time to come up with a reason why, in between bites of a burger at an Oklahoma City diner. "There aren't really people lined up on the streets here competing for a few scraps," said O'Laughlin, 23, who grew up in Sacramento but recently graduated from Oklahoma Christian University and opted to stay put. "Small businesses thrive here because networking is so easy."
(14 June 2009)

Retailers Head for Exits in Detroit
Andrew Grossman, Wall Street Journal
Shopping Becomes a Challenge as Auto-Industry Collapse Adds to City's Woes
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DETROIT -- They call this the Motor City, but you have to leave town to buy a Chrysler or a Jeep.

Borders Inc. was founded 40 miles away, but the only one of the chain's bookstores here closed this month. And Starbucks Corp., famous for saturating U.S. cities with its storefronts, has only four left in this city of 900,000 after closures last summer.

There was a time early in the decade when downtown Detroit was sprouting new cafes and shops, and residents began to nurture hopes of a rebound. But lately, they are finding it increasingly tough to buy groceries or get a cup of fresh-roast coffee as the 11th largest U.S. city struggles with the recession and the auto-industry crisis.

No national grocery chain operates a store here. A lack of outlets that sell fresh produce and meat has led the United Food and Commercial Workers union and a community group to think about building a grocery store of its own.
(17 June 2009)
Suggested by Jeffrey Brown ("westexas").

Too Poor to Make the News
Barbara Ehrenrich, New York Times
THE human side of the recession, in the new media genre that’s been called “recession porn,” is the story of an incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee’s.

... But the outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward mobility — the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of their own. From their point of view “the economy,” as a shared condition, is a fiction.

This spring, I tracked down a couple of the people I had met while working on my 2001 book, “Nickel and Dimed,” in which I worked in low-wage jobs like waitressing and housecleaning, and I found them no more gripped by the recession than by “American Idol”; things were pretty much “same old.” The woman I called Melissa in the book was still working at Wal-Mart, though in nine years, her wages had risen to $10 an hour from $7. “Caroline,” who is increasingly disabled by diabetes and heart disease, now lives with a grown son and subsists on occasional cleaning and catering jobs. We chatted about grandchildren and church, without any mention of exceptional hardship.

As with Denise Smith, whom I recently met through the Virginia Organizing Project and whose bachelor’s degree in history qualifies her for seasonal $10-an-hour work at a tourist site, the recession is largely an abstraction. “We were poor,” Ms. Smith told me cheerfully, “and we’re still poor.”
(13 June 2009)