I live well below the poverty line, so I live in a cheap, slummy apartment building where everybody else is poor, too. For the most part, I like this setup. I grew up in poverty, and I’m not …

I suspect many of the people reading this will think “this is not relevant to me because I don’t live in an apartment building” or “because I don’t know my neighbors” or “because greedy people will just steal from it” or “because food pantries are the government’s job” or “because I’m not poor enough to need this so reading this won’t benefit me”.

If you see the title and think you don’t need to read it, that’s a sign you need to read it. Because it’s not just about the practicalities of setting up a shared pantry - it’s about how to think about poverty and community and charity and mutual aid.

It’s a wonderful article. Read.

  • Apathy TreeEnglish
    4•11 months ago

    I don’t live in an apartment anymore, and I moved out largely because I’m asocial, and want as little incidental contact with others as possible. I’d like to do something like this in my town but that’s not really likely to work because, again, asocial. I could set it up and nobody would know unless they saw it. And looked.

    But it gets me thinking… if a person were to just go into a random unsecured apartment building, such as the one I used to live in, and put up a small shelf with the community pantry building instructions laminated and pinned above it, and seeded it with some goods, if it would just spontaneously take off.

    When I used to work at an airport, we had tip jars that looked like decorative glass bricks. I took to putting a few dollars of my own money into the jar every day, in a very obvious way, and the tips came in much more steadily than not seeding the jar.

    I bet the same could work in apartments, even if you don’t live there. I’m going to try it; I have an old shelf and some dry goods I don’t really want, and I know the old apartment complex; it’s full of people who move out in the middle of the night because they can’t pay rent, car break-ins happened not infrequently, but never anything within the building, neighbors let you know.

    It’s one of the cheapest places I ever lived, and it’s still in the same condition I left it a decade back, despite renting for almost 200% what I paid then with wages not keeping up. The windows were rotting out trash from the 70s and haven’t been replaced, something I can tell from the parking lot and I let them know about before I moved out. If they haven’t fixed that, they haven’t fixed any of it, and are letting it degrade willfully. Desperate people always exist.