As a fairly poor freelance writer/graduate student with a fairly modest but doable and predictable income, I’m somewhat insulated from the recession.

Which is more than I can say for this neighborhood, a mixture of blue-collar and below-blue collar owners, renters and drifters: a shrinking economy has been truly hard on the working poor.

Handimen are begging to mow my lawn (which is small enough that the lawncare companies don’t even advertise around here), and scrap metal collectors (Southeast Asian women, mostly) go through our trash for cans; and many others are underemployed at Taco Bell etc.

One of my neighbors, in the construction trades, hasn’t had work for some time, so was really happy even for the lousy job he’s got: on call at a cheese factory forty miles away. He’s got to be there by 4:30 in the morning if he wants a good shot at getting some hours.

“You try to be one of the first four in line,” he told me last night. “If you’re down around eighth, there’s no way you’ll get in that day.” How many people show up, I ask: “forty or fifty.”

Forty or Fifty, in line for day-wages repackaging returned cheese; no guarantees about tomorrow—“It’s like one of the jobs Roosevelt gave people,” he joked, while looking at my kitchen clock. “Got to go to bed.”

Roosevelt’s jobs—the CCC, the WPA, and the CWA among others—were backbreaking work for the unemployed. In the case of the CCC, the employees were young men in camps, with the wages being sent home to hungry families. This was the stuff of poverty. And it’s the stuff today’s underclasses could use.

Maybe it's always been that way. I don't know. But I haven't always cared, and I do now.