There’s a reason “The Florida Project” is opening this weekend to stellar reviews.
It is a story that is beautiful and awful, innocent and gritty.
But as much as anything, it is real.
The film is the tale of impoverished families cobbling together hard-knock lives in a cheap motel in Kissimmee — parents struggling to find each week’s rent and the scrappy children who manage to find joy and adventure in parking lots, abandoned buildings and at a soft-serve ice cream stand.
It’s the story not shown in Orlando’s travel brochures — one that reveals the underbelly of a community built on the backs of people who change bed linens and work griddles for a living.
“That is us,” said Eric Gray as the final credits began to roll at a screening last week at the Enzian Theater in Maitland. “All of it. It’s just … us.”
Gray knows. He works on the front lines of Central Florida’s war on poverty. As the director of United Against Poverty in south Orlando, he helps the city’s working poor with food, health care, education and job training.
His clients aren’t bums or deadbeats. Most have jobs, yet still can’t make ends meet.
This is Orlando’s story.
We are so many wonderful things — awash in culture, cuisine, diversity and unrivaled recreation.
But we are also poor.
The average job here pays lower than most any major metro area in America.
The latest quarterly Census data show Orlando 23rd in population and 138th in wages.
We trail places like Detroit; Huntsville, Ala.; Charleston, W.Va.; Corpus Christi, Texas; and gobs of places where the cost of living is lower.
Our affordable-housing shortage is so severe we have just 18 rental units for every 100 low-income families, says the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
When Habitat for Humanity offered 50 homes last year, it had 1,700 applications.
There is simply no amount of spit-shining that can make us look like anything other than what we are — a low-wage mecca.
We need to talk about it more. I hope “The Florida Project” makes us do that. Because, to fix a problem, you must first admit you have one — something elected leaders have been reluctant to do. They crow about rapid job growth and hope you won’t notice what those jobs pay.
“Orlando Area Remains State Leader in Job Creation” trumpeted one recent press release. Unrevealed in that release was that the biggest gains were in tourism — where the average annual pay is $26,000. In a region where rent averages around $16,000 annually.
This is not a piece opining on what I think jobs should pay. It is a statement of facts about what they do pay — and an explanation of why our welfare rolls are strained, our nonprofits are overburdened … and why so many people live in cheap motels.
Perhaps it is no surprise that, when casting the film, director Sean Baker had to look no further than the very motel where he was shooting the film — the $38-a-night Magic Castle motel on U.S. 192 — to find a little boy living there to share screen time with Willem Dafoe.
You can find them everywhere.
Whenever I write about this topic, some people instinctively respond with some variation of the argument: Well, those people just need to better themselves. Work harder. Go to school.
It is an argument proffered without thought. Even if every single motel resident in Central Florida suddenly got a doctorate and a $100,000 job, the tables would still need to be bussed. The region’s scores of hotel rooms would still need to be cleaned. The rides would still require operators.
Low-wage jobs are the engine that fuel our economy. It is simply a fact.
So what do we need to do?
Invest more in education. Work harder to attract entrepreneurs and start-ups. Court venture capital and better-paying jobs. Improve our technical and vocational training. Fund buses and transit at a respectable level. Boost housing options.
But we also have to start doing things differently.
Right now, this community spends hundreds of millions of tax dollars every year subsidizing low-wage jobs — through convention-center expansions, tourism promotion and special tax breaks for theme parks.
We spend way more money cultivating low-wage jobs than high-wage ones … and then act befuddled about why our wages are so low.
I have yet to see an elected leader from either party challenge the status quo in a big way when it comes to the economy. They nibble around the edges with incentive deals here, incubators there and the occasional ribbon-cutting. But they continue to invest far more resources into a low-wage industry than anything else.
So we remain what we are: Poor. Transient. In motels.
When you have an economy full of low-wage workers, you can do two things: 1) Help the workers try to make ends meet; 2) Try to improve the economy as a whole.
Blessings on people like Gray who do the first. And shame on any of us who refuse to do the second.
smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com
