Chasm of poverty grows deeper

from The Kansas City Star

So many, surviving on so little

Eagle staff and news services

The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high. A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty.

A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 -- half the federal poverty line -- was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

Kansas ranked fifth in the nation in its increase of the most extreme poor -- 126,446, up 42 percent from 88,904 in 2000.

"The face of poverty is going to be different, based on really where that family lives and the resources available for them, even in our own state," said Tawny Stottlemire, executive director of the Kansas Association of Community Action Programs in Topeka.

KACAP helps coordinate community resource programs for the needy across the state.

"In some cases, we're going to be talking about homeless families," Stottlemire said. "In other cases, we're going to be talking about large rural families, isolated from community services, job opportunities and transportation."

Needing the basics

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period.

One of Kansas' richest areas, Johnson County, led the nation's largest counties with a 358 percent increase in severely poor, from 2,100 to 9,608.

Sedgwick County, with 26,824 severely poor, saw an 88 percent increase in the five-year period.

In Sedgwick and Johnson counties, the growth in deep poverty far outpaced the growth in poverty.

Catholic Charities of Wichita has seen requests for emergency services, including food and utility assistance, more than double. In 2001, the charity's emergency services served about 4,000 people. In 2005, that number increased to more than 10,000.

"There's been so much growth with people just coming in for basic needs," said spokeswoman Teresa Kunze. "That includes our food pantry, and you can't get any more basic than food."

The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn't confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

"They can be living at 150 percent of the poverty level and still not be able to pay their bills," said Marion Nichols, Community Service Director for the Mid-Kansas Community Action Program in Augusta, which serves the poor in 13 counties outside of Wichita.

Living at half the poverty level qualifies people for food stamps, but that doesn't pay for laundry products, cleaners or toiletries.

"Most of the folks we serve are working couples," Nichols said. "But they probably don't have health care for the adults, just medical cards for the kids. They don't have dental care for anyone, and just staying housed is quite the chore."

A growing population

The growth of the severely poor comes during an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind.

At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income for working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty -- the highest rate since at least 1975.

The share of poor Americans in deep poverty has climbed slowly but steadily over the past three decades. But since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown "more than any other segment of the population," according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"That was the exact opposite of what we anticipated when we began," said Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, who co-authored the study. "We're not seeing as much moderate poverty as a proportion of the population. What we're seeing is a dramatic growth of severe poverty."

The growth, which leveled off in 2005, in part reflects how hard it is for low-skilled workers to earn their way out of poverty in a job market that favors skilled and educated workers. It also suggests that social programs aren't as effective as they once were at catching those who fall into economic despair.

According to the KACAP, more than 40,000 Kansans lost higher paying industrial and manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2003.

By June 2004, more than 18,000 Kansans had exhausted their unemployment and were unable to secure additional benefits.

And they remained jobless -- the third-highest number of unemployed Kansans without benefits in 30 years, Stottlemire said.

That includes not having health insurance, so anyone needing medical attention faces a disaster.

"If you're living right on the edge of scraping enough money together each month -- each week -- each day, just to live, an unexpected health care issue can blow the ground right out from under your feet," Stottlemire wrote in a follow-up e-mail to The Eagle.

A question of when

Nationally, about 1 in 3 severely poor people across America are under age 17, and nearly 2 out of 3 are female. Female-headed families with children account for a large share of the severely poor.

It's the same in Kansas.

"We have a really high population of single mothers who live in poverty," Stottlemire said. "Anytime you increase the household, you're increasing the needs but not necessarily the income."

According to census data, nearly 2 of 3 people in severe poverty are white (10.3 million) and 6.9 million are non-Hispanic whites. Severely poor blacks (4.3 million) are more than three times as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be in deep poverty, while extremely poor Hispanics of any race (3.7 million) are more than twice as likely.

As more poor Americans sink into severe poverty, more individuals and families living within $8,000 above or below the poverty line also have seen their incomes decline.

Woolf, of Virginia Commonwealth University, attributes this to what he calls a "sinkhole effect" on income.

"Just as a sinkhole causes everything above it to collapse downward, families and individuals in the middle and upper classes appear to be migrating to lower-income tiers that bring them closer to the poverty threshold," Woolf wrote in the study.

One in three Americans will experience a full year of extreme poverty at some point in his or her adult life, according to long-term research by Mark Rank, a professor of social welfare at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

An estimated 58 percent of Americans between the ages of 20 and 75 will spend at least a year in poverty, Rank said.

These estimates apply only to non-immigrants. If illegal immigrants were factored in, the numbers would be worse, Rank said.

"It would appear that for most Americans," Rank wrote in a recent study, "the question is no longer if, but rather when, they will experience poverty."