Posted on 10/24/2011 4:40:46 AM PDT by Graybeard58
Fourteen months ago, Aurora resident Prentiss Bailey was going about happily living his life as usual.
He was employed at a printing company where he’d worked for 10 years—a job that paid $17 an hour and that with the consistent overtime and $4,000 and $5,000 annual Christmas bonuses he got, enabled him to take care of his family and enjoy what he considered a middle income life.
Today, he and his 10-year–old daughter live in a homeless shelter.
So does 33-year-old Robert Estes, also of Aurora.
They’re among the nearly 193,000 people who’ve been added to the ranks of the poor in Illinois since the Great Recession began and among the nearly 440,000 that have been added since 1999, bringing the state total to 1.73 million, according to the latest 2010 Census data.
The numbers reflect many newly poor people like Bailey, who previously held good paying full-time jobs that were cut; and folks like Estes, who was low-income, but had heretofore been able to make ends met. Both are now left unable to support themselves and their families without help from social service agencies and non-profits—among many people in that same boat.
The latest Census numbers also paint a picture of poverty that continues to spread beyond urban areas to suburban communities in Chicago and across the country that are ill equipped to handle the growing population of poor.
“I had a job; we had what we needed,” said Bailey, as he sat inside the Hesed House shelter in Aurora where he now resides.“I was able to pay my rent. We were middle class.”
That was before he was laid off 13 months ago.
“Now there’s a lack of opportunity, a lack of jobs,” he said. “I didn’t think it would be this hard finding another job.”
Bailey, who for the first time in his life is receiving public aid, has lived at the shelter for about five months. Initially, he and his daughter slept on mattresses in a gymnasium-like room with others. Now the two share a small room in the transitional housing section of the shelter furnished with bunk beds.
“It was hard at first, but I’m glad I took that step,” he said, noting he’s receiving guidance on getting back on his feet from a case worker at Hesed House. He plans to enroll in truck driver training program to improve his prospects of landing work.
Estes, who’s been at the shelter for about six weeks, says after losing his $12.50-an-hour job at a local grocery store where he’d worked for two years, he hasn’t yet been able to find another one.
The economy is “pretty horrible,” he said. “You have people here of all ages that are struggling. Some people tell me how they used to make $20 bucks an hour, $25 bucks an hour. Now they’re here. Nobody wants to hire them.
“I always had my own place, my own car, bought my own food,” he said. “I was making it paycheck to paycheck. Then this happened, and it’s like a slap in the face. I’ve been working and paying taxes my whole life, and now all of a sudden I can barely get into the door for an interview. I’m a strong guy. I can work. I know I don’t belong here.”
The shelter sits next door to the Aurora Area Interfaith Food Pantry, where on a recent Monday morning the parking lot was packed as people arrived seeking food.
“When I first started here in ’08, if we had 80 families, 90 families come in one distribution day, that was a big day,” said Marilyn Weisner, executive director of the pantry. “Now we have routinely 260, 280 families come,” said Marilyn Weisner, executive director of the pantry.
“One of the things that we’ve noticed is the family sizes have increased. We’re wondering if people aren’t moving in together because they’re struggling to survive.”
Census data suggests that is occurring. The bureau recently noted the poverty rate among young adults ages 25 to 34 living with their parents nationally was 8.4 percent, but that rate would be 45.3 percent if the poverty level was determined by their own income.
“We often hear, ‘I lost my job or my husband lost his job, my daughter lost her job and now she’s moved in with me and now I need some extra help,’” Weisner said.
Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago Chief Executive Officer Monsignor Michael Boland said among trends he has observed among the clients the group assists are “a lot more people coming today who have never come before to Catholic Charities or to a social service agency, people that are unemployed, underemployed. I think the recession has really hit a lot of people who were probably doing okay, but now are put below the poverty line. People are coming to us for emergency assistance, food, shelter, clothes. The numbers are extraordinary.”
At the Christian Outreach of Lutherans Food Pantry in Waukegan and Ingleside in Lake County, pantry operations manager Gayle Olson said she’s seeing more “people that don’t know where to go, how to get help, people that had been employed all their lives and now they can’t find a job and they don’t know how to get the resources they need like food stamps and medical coverage for their children, or help with the mortgage, rent or utilities.”
Many of the clients receiving help through Chicago-based Heartland Human Care Services’ Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing program in Chicago “in the past, they had their own social safety networks of family and friends they could turn to for help if they fell on hard times,” said Lisa Mayse-Lillig, Heartland’s director of housing services. “Those things just have been exhausted for a lot of households because everyone is on hard times.”
Social service providers say they have seen dramatic increases in requests for help from the growing number of poor in Chicago’s suburbs.
New census data shows the rate of poverty in Chicago rose 2.9 percent from 1999 to 2010. In Chicago’s suburbs, it rose a bigger 3.7 percent.
The poverty rate, stood at 21.2 percent in Chicago 2006, the year before the recession began, but climbed to 22.5 percent last year. By comparison, in the suburbs, the rate rose from 7.3 percent to 9.3 percent.
Boland noted Catholic Charities has seen requests for food in some Chicago suburbs rise anywhere from 110 to 150 percent, compared to about 25 percent in Chicago.
A Brookings Institute poverty study released last year by University of Chicago researchers looking at 30 Chicago suburbs found most of those suburbs experienced more than 50 percent increases in the number of poor from 2000 to 2008.
The study also found that few suburban communities have the social services infrastructure in place to address the challenges of poverty.
The rise in poverty in Illinois and nationally can’t simply be attributed to the recent recession, said Amy Terpstra, associate director of the Social Impact Research Center at Heartland Alliance said. She noted poverty rates have risen significantly since 1999 as median household incomes have dropped and added the poverty numbers include people who work full-time, year-round, but are still poor. The drop in income is affecting the poor, and middle-income families.
The U.S. Census Bureau sets the poverty level as:
†One individual: $11,344
†Two adults: $14,602
†Two adults and one child: $17,552
†Two adults and two children: $22,113
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
An analysis of Census data done by the center shows that in Cook County, the median household income last year was $51,466, down $8,625 from 1999 and down $3,351 from 2006. In DuPage County, the median was $72,471, down $16,362 from 1999 and down $7,203 from 2006. In Lake County, it was $74,705, down $12,932 from 1999 and down $6,583 from 2006.
“That really points to a job quality issue,” Terpstra said. “We’re seeing the impact of job loss in the numbers, changes in our economy that have led to less stable and fewer good paying jobs.”
Many more people are in poverty “or just above poverty, not officially poor but still struggling with low income due to job loss, but not just a straight out job loss,” she added. “We’re seeing the effects of hours decline, people having to take part-time jobs instead of a full-time job because full-time jobs aren’t available. You see all of that stuff play out with this new data.”
These type articles should inquire who the dummies voted for.
I saw people buying lobster tail and shrimp on EBT, see it is all just seafood.
I've done this on occasion too. The best I saw was one driving a new Mercedes SLK
I have a checklist:
All four is a grand slam....
Yet there are jobs. I just looked at AT&T's web site and I saw seven openings in retail in Aurora. Just looking at one company and one category retail - a category that dos NOT need much training. You have to wonder how hard these people are looking and how willing they are to do what it takes.
Call it The Silent Depression. Because our lifestyles and technology mean that most of the affected don’t have to stand in soup lines or hop trains and become fodder for press cameras doesn’t mean that the destructive, pervasive effects of statism aren’t happening. It’s also Silent because a small cadre of broadcasters with an ongoing vested interest in supporting statism can and will ignore the true state of affairs - whatever it takes to assist their favored party and politicians.
Urban dwellers have always been exposed to, and therefore comfortable with, a bifurcated society. Walking past a blighted building on their way to the office or encountering a man in rags begging for change is part of their everyday landscape. As long as they arrive at their destination and voice their hypocritical concern about such things all is well. But the suburbs are a different story. The suburbs, despite being mocked by urban dwellers, are the most American and egalitarian of environments with ‘just enough’ retail, housing, green space and other institutions. Market forces are strongest in the suburbs which is why failed enterprises are a) allowed to fail and b) are replaced by newer, better ideas and enterprises. This natural progression ensures that the tax base over which statists obsess will replenish itself.
But statism as practiced and enforced by urban dwellers, as always, upsets this balance. Laws, regulations and wrongheaded attempts to impose policies that *might* make some sense in a city but make no sense in a suburb invariably introduce man-made imbalances that the market cannot correct, especially where individuals and institutions face prosecution for attempting to do so! From section 8 housing to silly ‘green transportation’ boondoggles to hyper-specific land use laws, statism applies solutions where there are no extant problems.
Advancements in medicine, psychology and communications still are no match for a mass psychosis that finds urban dwellers - who have already brought Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ to life - attempting to impose their flawed, fatalistic system on the rest of us.
If you can’t make it more than three months without a job, then you’re not “middle class,” you’re “working class,” regardless of how much money you make or how nice your house and car are.
You can always tell that those who separate out the dog food, beer, and wine from the rest of the groceries are going to pay by EBT. And its usually the largest bag of dog food that the store carries.
Perhaps people without the means to support foster children should abstain form their charity. What is noble about that?
Gray, it’s not a good idea to follow people in the store. Some folks are more aware of their surroundings than you think and you may have the facts right but still come to a wrong conclusion. My uncle has dementia. I or someone takes him to the grocery store and pays for his food with his food stamps. An observer might see me and my SUV and think “shame, shame” but they’d be wrong about what’s going on.
I am not following anyone. The EBT/WIC thieves were right in front of me checking out. All I did was look around the parking lot, which is public.
With 0 stickers to boot.
Sorry his family(you) should be taking care of him not the taxpayer.
I have noticed an uptick in the amount of panhandlers at busy intersections.
Also, the amount of vacant storefronts on Newbury St. in Boston is staggering. Me and the g/f went yesterday and were surprised.
OTOH, this past weekend the “Head of the Charles” Regatta was held and I never saw so many people in attendance (no I didn’t go, just drove by on the way to Boston) and there were many out of state license plates on the vehicles.
So, as with most things, YMMV.
Yeah...he will make $80,000 a year hauling FRACKING TOXIC CHEMICALS (salt water, vinegar and sand for those in Rio Vista) in the Balkkan oil fields of North Dakota.
Only if tax laws are changed and spending is drastically cut. The current system works the cost of social services into everything we buy. But fundamentally I agree with you.
The CPI has risen dramatically along with energy costs and is squeezing those who depend on government assistance. That cost is passed onto you and me in the form of budget deficits.
We need businesses to spend more on growth and they won’t do that until we have a new administration, one that is friendly to business both large and small.
You might have it backwards. Free money is chasing food and fuel. Free money has no value so the "poor" buy things like lobster and shrimp and are obese to boot. This is what is causing inflation. Too many dollars chasing to few goods. Since the WIC/EBT thieves don't earn the money the food has decreasing value but increasing price.
Actually, they have plenty of means and didn't have any idea that they would be elegible for all the perks when they started the adoption process. No one said they were trying to be noble. They are unable to have children of their own, so they went the adoption route. They would have gladly given up the perks to be able to adopt the boys.
They were in what's called a fost-adopt program that was meant to give permanent homes to kids. Unfortunately, the social worker's attitude was reunite with the birth parents no matter what the situation is. The newborn twins tested positive for meth, and were taken away at birth, along with their 18 month old brother, who had been living with the birth mother. Now they are back with her and have no chance at life. They lived with my son and his wife for a year, before they were snatched back to live with the birth mom.
“...worked for 10 years—a job that paid $17 an hour and that with the consistent overtime and $4,000 and $5,000 annual Christmas bonuses...”
And, never put away a dime in savings over 10 years, so he and his kid end up in a shelter after 14 months on unemployment benefits. It’s fools like him that want the rest of us who work and save to pay for his comforts and ease. I’m not amused.
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