Next U.S. census could show more poverty in Phila. area
By Alfred Lubrano,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
Americans enjoyed a small bump in income last year, while the nation’s poverty rate stayed virtually the same - 12.5 percent, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released Tuesday.
Among the seven counties surrounding Philadelphia, some got richer and some got poorer, while Philadelphia held its spot as the ninth-poorest big city in America - with nearly one in four people living in poverty.
Once again, New Jersey trailed Maryland as the wealthiest state in median household income. Pennsylvania ranked 26th.
But this year-old snapshot has already been superceded by rough and powerful economic times - a tsunami swamping the relative good news about rising income and steady poverty.
When the Census Bureau eventually crunches 2008 numbers, analysts say it will see what many already know: Life is getting tougher.
“The year 2008 will be drastically worse than ‘06 or ‘07,” said Carey Morgan, director of Philadelphia’s Coalition Against Hunger.
“The numbers for this year will see a rise in poverty,” said Mark Price, labor economist with the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg.
“I have to be honest with you: 2006 and 2007 were bad, but not as bad as this year,” said Alice Peterson, executive administrator of Today’s Child Learning Center, a daycare facility in Sharon Hill, Delaware County. “People are struggling more than in ‘06. They’re struggling double.”
Nowhere is that more true than in Camden, where 38.2 percent of people lived in poverty in 2007. The census ranked it the second poorest among the nation’s mid-size cities, though it cautioned that there was a statistical dead heat among the list’s four most impoverished.
Residents offered a laundry list of reasons they believe they are struggling: higher food and gas prices, a lack of affordable housing, people illegally in the country taking jobs, and a bias against hiring people with criminal records.
Grace Maldonado, 30, who supports five children on her Wal-Mart salary and whose husband is in jail, says she cannot always buy birthday presents for them.
“They understand as long as they get the birthday cake,” she said. “I’m making it work.”
The census data cover 2007, and evidence suggests that things in Camden are worse in 2008. Cathedral Kitchen, the largest soup kitchen in the city, is serving 1,000 more meals a month, said executive director Karen Talarico. More visitors stop by on their way to work.
“They’re coming here to save some money to pay their bus pass, to fill their gas tank,” she said.
If past is prologue, it helps to see how things were just last year.
The median household income in America (adjusted for inflation) had risen 1.3 percent over that of 2006, reaching $50,233, according to the census’ Current Population Survey. For blacks and non-Hispanic white households, this represented “the first measured real increase” in annual household income since 1999, the census reported.
Perhaps one harbinger of bad times was among poor children. The number of children under 18 living in poverty nationally jumped from 12.8 million in 2006 to 13.3 million in 2007.
Closer to home, the number of people living in poverty in Philadelphia decreased - from 354,135 to 333,142, according to the census’ American Community Survey.
Similarly, poverty rates decreased in Chester, Montgomery, Burlington and Camden Counties, while they increased in Bucks, Gloucester and Delaware Counties.
In Delaware County especially, poverty jumped - from 8.5 percent to 9.8 percent, even as median income climbed from $55,000 to $60,000, evidence of a growing gap between rich and poor.
In Gloucester County, there was also a paradoxical increase in both median income and the poverty rate.
More food stamps are being issued, said Ed Smith, superintendent of the Gloucester County Division of Social Services, even as younger families with higher incomes move into the county.
He called Gloucester County a “microcosm of the nation.”
“The gap between the rich and poor will become bigger,” said Morgan, of the Coalition Against Hunger.
Don’t expect anything to close the gap soon, said Price, of Keystone Research Center.
In Pennsylvania, the top 1 percent of families received 79 percent of income growth in recent years, he said. “And we expect the inequality numbers in Pennsylvania to get worse,” he said.
“I expect poverty will go up in every one of Philadelphia’s suburban counties when 2008 numbers are calculated,” said David Elesh, principal investigator of Temple University’s Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project. “The decrease in Philadelphia’s poverty seen between 2006 and 2007 will be erased.”
Peterson, of Today’s Child in hard-hit Delaware County, said that this year, half the families who use her day-care center are behind in payments, something she had never seen before.
Some parents get government subsidies and pay only $5 a week in copayments.
“They are behind, and their children may be terminated from the program because they can’t pay $20 a month for day care,” Peterson said. “That’s how bad it’s gotten.”
Happily for 25-year-old Kadi Schenk, 2008 is looking better. In 2007, she was laid off from her job managing a cell-phone store, and was unable to get child-care subsidies for her children, ages 4 and 2. Her parents have jobs and cannot look after the children.
“Oh, it was so hard,” she said. “I’d go on interview after interview. . . . A resume without a college degree didn’t help.” Now she works for an insurance agency.
“And,” she announced joyfully, “I can move out of my parents’ house soon.”
Contact staff writer Alfred Lubrano at 215-854-4969 or alubrano@phillynews.com.
