Nearly 1.4 million American households live on that much per
person. Gabriel Thompson reports from one of the nation's
poorest areas.

By Gabriel Thompson

December 19, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
- Two years ago, Harvard professor Kathryn Edin was in
Baltimore interviewing public housing residents about how
they got by. As a sociologist who had spent a quarter
century studying poverty, she was no stranger to the
trappings of life on the edge: families doubling or tripling
up in apartments, relying on handouts from friends and
relatives, selling blood plasma for cash. But as her
fieldwork progressed, Edin began to notice a disturbing
pattern. “Nobody was working and nobody was getting
welfare,” she says. Her research subjects were always pretty
strapped, but “this was different. These people had nothing
coming in.”

Edin shared her observations with H. Luke Shaefer, a
colleague from the University of Michigan. While the income
numbers weren’t literally nothing, they were pretty darn
close. Families were subsisting on just a few thousand bucks
a year. “We pretty much assumed that incomes this low are
really, really rare,” Shaefer told me. “It hadn’t occurred
to us to even look.”

Curious, they began pulling together detailed household
Census data for the past 15 years. There was reason for
pessimism. Welfare reform had placed strict time limits on
general assistance and America’s ongoing economic woes were
demonstrating just how far the jobless could fall in the
absence of a strong safety net. The researchers were already
aware of a rise in “deep poverty,” a term used to describe
households living at less than half of the federal poverty
threshold, or $11,000 a year for a family of four. Since
2000, the number of people in that category has grown to
more than 20 million—a whopping 60 percent increase. And the
rate has grown from 4.5 percent of the population to 6.6
percent in 2011, the highest in recent memory save 2010,
which was just a tad worse (6.7 percent).

But
Edin and Shaefer wanted to see just how deep that poverty
went. In doing so, they relied on a World Bank marker used
to study the poor in developing nations: This designation,
which they dubbed “extreme” poverty, makes deep poverty look
like a cakewalk. It means scraping by on less than $2 per
person per day, or $2,920 per year for a family of four.

In a
report published earlier this year by the University of
Michigan’s National Poverty Center, Edin and Shaefer
estimated that nearly 1 in 5 low-income American households
has been living in extreme povery; since 1996, the number of
households in that category had increased by about 130
percent. Among the truly destitute were 2.8 million
children. Even if you counted food stamps as cash, half of
those kids were still being raised in homes whose weekly
take wasn’t enough to cover a trip to Applebee’s. (The chart
below reflects their data.)

From data provided
by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer; dates are
approximate, as data were collected over several months.

In the
researchers’ eyes, it was a bombshell. But the media barely
noticed. “Nobody’s talking about it,” Edin gripes. Even
during a presidential campaign focusing on the economy, only
a few local and regional news outlets took note of their
report on the plight of America’s poorest families. Mitt
Romney told CNN that
he wasn’t concerned about the “very poor,” who, after
all, could rely on the nation’s “very ample safety net.”
Even President Obama was reticent to champion any
constituent worse off than the middle class. As journalist
Paul Tough
noted in the New York Times Magazine this past
August, the politician who cut his teeth as an organizer in
inner-city Chicago hasn’t made a single speech devoted to
poverty as president of the United States. (Although Paul
Ryan
has.)

IF YOU WANT to
explore the dire new landscape of American poverty, there’s
perhaps no better place to visit than Fresno, a sprawling,
smoggy city in California’s fertile Central Valley. Heading
south on Highway 99, I pass acres of grapevines and newly
constructed subdivisions before reaching the city limit,
where a sign welcomes me to California’s Frontier City.
Ahead, no doubt, is a city, but all I see is brown haze.
It’s as if a giant dirt clod had been dropped from space.
The frontier looks bleak.

In
2005, after Hurricane Katrina briefly focused the nation’s
attention on the plight of the poor, the Brookings
Institution published a study looking at concentrated
poverty. Only one city fared worse than New Orleans: You
guessed it, Fresno. Earlier this year, the US Census
identified Fresno County as the nation’s second-poorest
large metropolitan area. Its population has nearly doubled
over the past three decades, which means more competition
for minimum-wage farm and service-sector jobs, and a quarter
of the county’s residents fall below the federal poverty
threshold. With fewer than 20 percent of adults 25 and up
holding bachelors degrees, there’s little prospect of
better-paying industries flocking here.

For
those living on the margins here, daily life can be a long
string of emergencies. “There’s this whole roiling of
folks,” says Edie Jessup, a longtime local anti-poverty
activist. “They are homeless, move in someplace else, lose
their jobs and are evicted, maybe end up in motels.”

If I
want to see how bad things are, Jessup advises, I should
check out the area southwest of downtown. She gives me
directions, and after crossing some train tracks near a
pristine minor-league baseball stadium, I find myself in a
virtual shantytown. Amid boarded up warehouses and vacant
lots, the streets begin to narrow. They are filled with
structures made of pallets, plywood, and upended shopping
carts. A truck pulls up filled with bottles of water, and a
long line of thirsty people forms.

Amid
the makeshift shelters, one section of pavement has been
cleaned up, fenced off, and filled with more than 60 Tuff
Sheds—prefab tool sheds brought in to provide emergency
housing for Fresno’s growing street population. “It’s not
ideal,” concedes Kathryn Weakland of the Poverello House,
the nonprofit that oversees the encampment and doles out
1,200 hot meals a day. “But like one of the homeless told
me, it beats sleeping in a cardboard box.”

The
collection of sheds even has a name: “Village of Hope.”

IN THE WEE HOURS
of the following morning, I pay a visit to Josefa, a
37-year-old single mother from Mexico who lives in a
low-slung apartment complex just north of downtown. She’s
awake and ready by 3 a.m. when the first family knocks on
her door. A Latino couple hands off two children and a
sleeping baby and then disappears into the dark, heading for
fields outside of town. Over the next half hour, two more
farmworker families do the same. The small living room is
soon filled with kids in various states of somnolence. Some
nestle together on couches; others spread out on blankets on
the floor. Josefa heads down the hallway to her bedroom,
cradling the baby girl and walking quietly to avoid waking
her 10-year-old daughter in the next room.

Four
hours later, she has accomplished the morning’s major
chores: Five of the six kids are awake, fed, and dressed.
The only holdout is a feisty toddler who is waging a mighty
fuss over the prospect of wearing a t-shirt. Josefa gives
the edges of the boy’s shirt a sharp downward tug and
smiles, winning a small but important battle. After pulling
her curly black hair into a ponytail she looks at her watch.
“Let’s go!” she calls, waving her hands toward the door.
“We’re going to be late.”

The
group heads down a dirt alleyway, led by a tiny girl wearing
a pink Dora the Explorer backpack that looks big enough to
double as a pup tent. The school is three blocks away. Along
the way, we pass modest but tidy single-family homes, a few
shoddy apartment complexes, and two boarded-up buildings. On
the surface, there’s little to distinguish this
neighborhood—known as Lowell—from other hardscrabble
sections of Fresno. But Lowell is, in fact, the poorest
tract in the city and among the poorest stretches of real
estate in America. More than half of its residents,
including nearly two-thirds of its children, live in
poverty. One in four families earns less than $10,000 a
year.

In a
county where unemployment now hovers around 14 percent,
Josefa is lucky to have work. Even better, she loves her
job, and 10 minutes in her company is enough to realize
she’s got a gift with children. “They run up on the street
and hug me,” she says, beaming. “What could be better?”

What
she lacks is money. Her farmworker clients are barely
scraping by, so she only charges them $10 a day per child.
At the moment it’s late September, the heart of the grape
season, so she’s got a full house. But at times when there’s
less demand for farm work, or the weather is wet, she gets
by largely on her monthly $200 allotment of food stamps. “I
don’t even have enough to pay for a childcare license,”
Josefa says. (Because of this, I’ve agreed to change her
name for this story.)

Josefa
estimates that her childcare business brings in $7,000 a
year. She visits local churches for donated food and
clothes, and has taken in relatives to help cover her $600
rent. Until earlier this year, Josefa and her daughter
shared their small apartment with her niece’s family. It was
hardly ideal—some days, there were 12 people sardined in
there. “Of course I need more money,” Josefa tells me,
pushing a stroller and holding the toddler’s hand as we
arrive back at her place. “But how can I charge more when no
one has any more to give?”

Her
niece, Guillermina Ramirez, is sitting in the apartment
complex’s small courtyard and overhears Josefa’s last
comment. “The key is to learn English,” she announces.
Guillermina, like Josefa, is undocumented, but she’s married
to a US citizen and says she will be a legal resident soon.
She recently enrolled in English classes and anticipates
securing “a really good job” once she’s done. “That’s what
you need to get ahead.”

Gary
Villa and Jim Harper speak English and both are American
citizens—as a member of the Northern Cheyenne Nation,
Harper’s lineage goes way back—but neither would say he’s
getting ahead. I run into the two men outside a temp agency
three miles from Josefa’s apartment. They’ve been waiting
around since well before sunrise in hopes of finding
something.

Villa,
a stocky 23-year-old with a shaved head and goatee, tells me
that he was pulling in a decent paycheck installing phone
boxes for an AT&T subcontractor before he got laid off in
2008. He was evicted from his apartment and now lives with
his mother—”It’s kind of embarrassing,” he mutters—while his
girlfriend and two kids moved in with a relative. “You can’t
pay $800 in rent making $8 an hour.”

Villa
peers inside the job office, trying to discern any movement.

“At
least we have family to fall back on,” says Harper, 33, who
keeps his long brown hair tucked beneath a red-and-blue
Fresno State cap. After being let go from his job delivering
radiators, he tried starting a handyman business called
Jim’s Everything Service. It didn’t work out, so now he now
begins each day by calling seven temp agencies. But Fresno
was slammed hard by the housing bust, and it remains a tough
place for unemployed blue-collar workers. Harper, who is
staying with his stepfather, says he’s lucky to pull in more
than $200 a month. His monthly food stamp allotment tacks on
another $200, for an annual income of $4,800.

By now
the sun is well above the horizon and it’s shaping up to be
yet another day without a paycheck. “The working class isn’t
the working class if there’s no work, right?” says Harper,
who is wearing paint-stained Dickies and a faded t-shirt.
“We’re getting pretty desperate out here.”

“I
like to joke that I’ll take any job short of being a male
whore,” he adds.

True
enough, when the temp office clerk announces that there’s a
job available, Harper leaps at it even though the gig starts
at 2 a.m. and he knows he’ll have to arrive at the work site
in the early evening, thanks to Fresno’s limited bus
service. He shrugs off the six hours he’ll waste “twiddling
his thumbs.” What matters, Harper says, is to keep knocking
on doors and making the calls, because “you never know when
you might get your foot in the door.”

Fleeing Fresno’s hostile job market might seem like the
logical solution, but it’s never that simple. As frequently
happens with the very poor—especially in light of the
restrictions put in place with welfare reform—the informal
safety nets that help keep people afloat also tend to keep
them rooted in place. Losing his delivery job left Harper
homeless. For a few months he lived out of his car or in a
room in Fresno’s “motel row,” notorious for drugs and
prostitution. But since moving into his stepfather’s house,
he’s been able to use food stamps in lieu of rent. Leaving
town would mean running the risk of being homeless again.
And given Harper’s income, there’s no room for error.

Neither is there a clear path out of deep poverty for Josefa.
She puts in twelve-hour days six days a week, so there’s not
much room to increase her workload. By allowing six other
families to work, she plays a small but key role in making
Fresno an agriculture powerhouse, but her cut is miniscule.
“That’s why it’s so important for my daughter to study,” she
says.

The
last time I speak to Harper, he tells me he’s landed a stint
working overnight at a series of grocery stores that are
overhauling their freezer compartments. “It looks like it
will be a 10-day job,” he says, excited. In Fresno, that
counts as a big success. I ask where he hopes to find
himself in five years. He pauses and takes a deep breath.
“Best case scenario, as sad as it sounds, is to be no worse
off than I am right now,” he says. “That’s about all I can
hope for.”

Gabriel Thompson is an Economic Hardship Reporting Project
writer and the author of three books: Working in the
Shadows, There’s No José Here, and Calling All Radicals. He
has written for The Nation, New York magazine, The New York
Times, and other publications. Thompson is the recipient of
the Richard J. Margolis Award, the Studs Terkel Media Award,
and a collective Sidney Hillman Award.

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