The Line

I've learned so much from "poor" people over the past four decades.

There is more to learn, and so much more to do to battle poverty.

I pray to God we can lift our eyes and see our sisters and brothers
linked to all of us.

Spent: play the game

CitySquare team members worked with well over 50,000 different people during 2012.

The vast majority of these neighbors are not homeless.  Rather, they are people who work, but who don't earn enough to make ends meet, or they are children, disabled and/or elderly.

The challenges facing these individuals and families define our work and our mission.

During 2013, we've set an audacious goal for ourselves:  to move at least one person onto the road out of poverty or to see a person move above the poverty line every day during the year.  For a family of four success will mean the ability to earn more than $23,050 annually or $1,921 per month.  For a single individual the goal is to earn more than $11,170 a year or $931 monthly.

The benchmark of success for us is objective.  Still, there are a couple of matters that we must keep in mind as we venture out into the new year.

First, earning $1 above the dividing line doesn't really mean that a person is not facing the challenges of poverty any longer!  But $1 above the line is real progress for a family currently earning less than $20,000 per year, which is true of a sizable portion of the inner city population in Dallas.

Second, we must work hard to capture the stories and the data necessary to document success in our rather ambitious goal:  1 person every day above the poverty line during 2013.  But, we are willing to do the work to document the progress and to evaluate our effectiveness.

Most of us have no understanding of the day-to-day realities that poverty delivers to thousands and thousands of our neighbors in a city like Dallas.

To get a sense of the difficulty factor try playing a game of "SPENT" by clicking here.

The Line

If you are concerned about poverty in the U. S. and/or if you work to overcome the devastating consequences of poverty on men, women and children, this is a video resource that you need to see and be able to use.  Available on October 2, 2012!

Survival rate better snapshot on poverty

Last week a front page story published by The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that to survive in Philadelphia without public assistance a family of four would need to earn $59,501.  That earnings number is up from $53,611 that was reported to be the "survival" pay scale in 2008. 

The report and the study behind it substantiate what we see here at Central Dallas Ministries.  Simply because a family is earning wages that places them above the artificially low federal poverty line (about $22,000 a year for a family of 4) does not mean that they can survive and certainly not thrive.  People without skills to earn a living wage need guidance and partners who will help them craft a plan for life that includes enhanced skills development, counsel about public benefits and encouragement from a community that regards them as neighbors and real friends. 

Here's how the Philadelphia report begins: 

Study: To survive, family of four needs nearly $60,000
By Alfred Lubrano
Inquirer Staff Writer

To survive in Philadelphia without food stamps or other government assistance, a family of four needs to make nearly $60,000 a year - a hard-to-fathom "sticker-shock" number that shows how expensive life has become.

According to a study being released Thursday, two adults with one preschooler and one school-age child have to take in $59,501 a year to live on a bare-bones budget in the city. In 2008, the same family of four needed $53,611 to make it in Philadelphia.

That's the word from the Self-Sufficiency Standard for Pennsylvania, a highly respected University of Washington analysis that comes out every two years.

The problem is that nearly 62 percent of Philadelphia households take in less than $50,000 a year, according to census data analyzed by Dave Elesh, a sociologist at Temple University.

Life is pricier in the suburban counties, where the same-size family needs to take in even more money to survive without assistance. Salaries must range from $62,543 in Delaware County to $71,846 in Bucks County for a family to achieve self-sufficiency. A similar study for New Jersey in 2008 put the self-sufficiency incomes at $60,912 in Burlington County, $49,739 in Camden County, and $56,752 in Gloucester County.

A family of four is considered poor if it makes $22,050 a year - the federal poverty level.

That measure, which has been used for nearly 50 years, has long been criticized as failing to take a full measure of what it costs to live in America.

To read the full story click here.

Imagining poverty in Dallas. . .

Working on a committee with Untied Way of Metropolitan Dallas, I picked up these facts of life in wealthy Dallas County:

11% of our households live on less than $10,000 annually

7% of our households live on between $10,001 and $14,999

16% live on annual income of 15,000 to $24,999

14% live on annual household income of $25,000 to $34,999

17% live on annual income of $35,000 to $49,999

15% live on between $50,000 to $74,999

7% live on between %75,000 to $99,999

6 % live on annual household income of between $100,000 and $149,999

3% live on annual income of $150,000 to $199,999

4% live on annual income of more than $200,000

Total residents of Dallas County, Texas as of July 2008: 2,412,827

Number of housing units in 2007: 938,053

Number of households 2000: 807,621

Consider the following definitions of livable wage earnings for Dallas, Plano and Irving, Texas without employer sponsored health insurance:

One adult/no children: $24,057

Two adults/ no children: $34,110

Single parent, one child: $38,644

Single parent, two children: $45,032

Single parent, three children: $59,671

Two parents, one child: $50,138

Two parents, two children: $54,259

Two parents, three children: $70,628

What are the most surprising findings that you notice in these numbers?
.

87 % of Texas Communities Exceed U. S. Poverty Rate

John Hennenberger's (Texas Low Income Housing Information Service) research provides the hard data on poverty in Texas. What follows is worth a careful read. Poverty in a city like Dallas can be avoided by carefully chosen travel decisions. Even though we still encounter people who are surprised by Dallas' poverty, the preality remains and grows, both here and across the state. Here's John's report:

My New Year’s resolution is to put doing something about the high levels of Texas poverty on our state’s agenda for 2009. Here is an assessment of where Texas communities stand in terms of poverty based on the recently released American Communities Survey.

There are 61 Texas communities represented in the Census survey of more than 900 communities across the US.

Six Texas communities have poverty levels below the average US poverty level of 13.3 percent. However, three of the six are large metro areas (Austin-Round Rock, Dallas-Plano-Irving Metro Division and Fort Worth-Arlington Metro Division) that include affluent suburban communities that dilute much higher percentages of central city urban poverty. The “urbanized areas” of major Texas cities themselves have the following poverty rates: Austin - 14.1 percent; Dallas/Fort Worth - 14.1 percent and; San Antonio - 17.2 percent; and Houston - 16.1 percent. All are above the US community average.

Three smaller Texas communities have poverty rates below the US average: Dumas, Gainesville and Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg’s poverty rate is actually less than half of the US average.

Two Texas communities have poverty levels equal to the US average. A whopping forty-four Texas communities have poverty levels above the US average but less than twice the US level.

Nine Texas communities have poverty rates more than double that of the average US community. All of these communities, except College Station-Bryan, are along the Texas-Mexico border. Raymondville, Texas ranked as the community with the highest percent of persons in poverty of all US communities with an astonishing 50.1 percent of its residents below the poverty level. Rio Grande City-Roma ranked second in the US in poverty.

Eighty-seven percent of Texas communities in the American Communities survey have higher rates of persons in poverty than the US.

Read the entire report and review a most helpful data table here.

.

Plans for new "poor people's " demonstration

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference plans a June action designed to bring the nation face-to-face with its poorest people. The focus of this "poor people's" demonstration will be the towns and rural areas of the Mississippi Delta.

Worth your reading:

SCLC plans Poor People's Campaign
ERRIN HAINES
The Associated Press
ATLANTA - The Southern Christian Leadership Conference hopes to mobilize 50,000 people in the Mississippi Delta this summer in a campaign to draw attention to the poverty of a region where some Americans still live in homes with dirt floors and brown water flows from their faucets.

The effort is much like the one envisioned by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was planning a Poor People's Campaign and march on Washington before he was assasinated in 1968.
SCLC Interim President Byron Clay announced the initiative in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday. He said the efforts would be centered not on the nation's capital, but in towns along the soil-rich, resource-poor Delta region.

"We will bring this nation face to face with poverty," Clay said. "We are organizing poor people of all colors, to form the kind of beloved community that Martin Luther King Jr. talked about."

A report published earlier this year by Oxfam America found that residents in the Mississippi Delta are living in conditions similar to the world's poorest countries.

[Read more of this interesting report from the AP ]

Worth watching.

Reactions?


.

This is a test. . .

Multiple Choice:

1. Based on the 2006 census data, how many individuals live below the federal poverty line in Dallas County?

a. 382,161
b. 259,511
c. 90,965

2. Of those living below the poverty line in Dallas County, how many are children?

a. 45,943
b. 162,379
c. 105,677

Answers should go in the comment box!

.

New York points the way

Cara Buckley's report, "City Refines Formula to Measure Poverty Rate" (The New York Times, July 14, 2008, spotlights the inadequacy of the current, so-called "federal poverty line."

Most people don't realize how the standard was developed or what it was based upon. The poverty measure grew out of a 1955 study that showed that poor Americans spent roughly 1/3 of their after-tax income on food. Since the 1960s, the federal government has estimated its poverty line by tripling the annual cost of groceries for individuals and families of various sizes.

Obviously, the standard is inadequate and grossly incomplete.

Thanks to the leadership of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city recently unveiled a new standard for determining and measuring poverty levels. The New York test factors in costs such as housing, child care, clothing and other expenses not included in the formula used by the federal government. The plan also points up the fact that the cost of living varies from location to location across the nation.

So what?

Bottom line: there are many more Americans living in poverty today than the federal government recognizes in its calculations. Frankly, no surprise to those of us who work in poor areas of urban America.

Take the time to read the entire report by clicking on the title line above.

Let me know what you think after you've read the story. We have lots of work to do.

.