Alamance County poverty on the rise

from The Burlington Times News

Keren Rivas

Almost 17,000 people - or 12.5 percent of Alamance County residents - lived in poverty in 2005, according to new estimates released Wednesday by the U.S. Census.

Though the percentage is below both the state’s and country’s pov-erty rate for the same period - 14.9 and 13.3 respectively - the rate is still higher than what it was the year before.

Though the figures are not cur-rent, the numbers show that across the board, poverty rates have stead-ily increased since 2000.

The news is not surprising for those who work with the poor on a daily basis.

“We could feel that that was hap-pening just based on the numbers that we have seen in most of our programs,” said Linda Allison, assistant director of the Alamance County Department of Social Ser-vices.

For the 2005-06 fiscal year, the department set up 3,046 new cases, Allison said. These are people who had never participated in any of the department’s programs before. During the 2006-07 fiscal year, the number of new cases rose to 3,200.

The number of households receiving food stamps went from 3,976 in July 2005 to 5,071 in July 2007. Allison said most of these house-holds have some form of income.

“What we are seeing is more working families just not being able to make it” that are turning to the government for help, she said.

According to the Census, the me-dian household income in Alamance County in 2005 was $40,675. This means that half the households in the county made more than the listed amount and the other half made less.

The number of people in the county receiving Medicaid has also increased.

There were 18,743 Medicaid recipients in July 2007, almost 2,500 more than the 16,398 recipients in July 2005, Allison said. These numbers do not include recipients of state special assistance or N.C. Health Choice.

In North Carolina, 138,820 chil-dren under the age of 5 lived in poverty in 2005, according to the Census. This data was not avail-able by county.

However, the report showed that out of 24,282 students age 5 to 17 enrolled in the Alamance-Burlington School System in 2005, almost 15.6 percent, or 3,786, lived in poverty. In 2000, 2,925 students in that age range, or 12.4 percent, lived in poverty.

Allison said families and children are not the only ones suffering.

She said that a large number of elderly people are also living in poverty. She said that many in this age group live on a fixed income but have to spend $200 to $300 every month on medication expenses.

“We see a lot of cases with elderly people who are right at the poverty line,” she said.

THOUGH THE DEPARTMENT of Social Services doesn’t have a sci-entific method to survey its clients, Allison said that based on what they are seeing, unemployment is a big factor in Alamance County.

The average jobless rate for the county in 2000 was 3.2 percent, according to the N.C. Employment Security Commission. This means that about 2,197 people were with-out a job during that year. By 2005, an average 4,139 people were without a job, putting the unemploy-ment rate at an average of 6 per-cent for the year.

“It seems we’ve had a lot of un-employment,” Allison said, adding that people are still trying to bounce back from the recession of four years ago when many textile companies closed or downsized their operations in the area.

“We see a lot of those people on a regular basis,” Allison said, refer-ring to those who were laid off as a result of the closings. She said that many people are seeking assistance until they bounce back.

Sadly, she said, for many people it is taking a lot longer to get back on their feet than they had antici-pated. “If they worked in manufac-turing all their lives it is not easy to retool” for a different industry, she added.

Based on recent announcements of more plants closing, things are likely to get worse.
A.O. Smith Corp. in Mebane will close its plant by the end of the year, leaving 200 people without a job. GoldToe Moretz will close its manufacturing plant in March, which will add 425 more people to the already growing number of unemployed people in the county.

In addition to this, Allison said the department has also seen an increase in the number of families moving to the area from other states looking for a fresh start. “We hear that on a regular basis,” she said. “We don’t know what is driv-ing that.”

Many times, she said, the head of the household doesn’t have a job secured before the family moves here thinking that they can get a job once they are here, which many times does not happen.

OVERALL, ALAMANCE County is better than the surrounding counties.

Caswell County, our neighbor to the north, had the highest poverty rate with 17.5 percent of its popula-tion living in poverty. Chatham County had the lowest rate at 11.3 percent. The poverty rates in Orange, Randolph and Guilford counties fell in between at 13.9, 14.6 and 14.9 percent, respectively.

The poorest and the most prosperous counties, according to the Census report, were Robeson and Dare counties, with 32 and 8.3 percent of their respective residents living in poverty.
Meanwhile, in Tyrrell County, which is only separated from Dare County by the Albemarle Sound, 28 percent of its residents lived in poverty.