The Highway: What works
Nashville's fight for the poor could get help from new definition of poverty
By Janell Ross • THE TENNESSEAN • March 24, 2010Roslyn Burdett gets five children off to school before she starts her Baptist Hospital phone operator job at 7 a.m.
It's a tough scramble, but it beats being unemployed and living in a housing project. And she'd have never been able to make the change without Bethlehem Centers of Nashville, a nonprofit agency whose before- and after-school programs are the linchpin of her schedule.
"I have to have a safe place to leave my children so that I can be at work at the time I have to be there," said Burdett, a single parent.
Bethlehem's programs are open only to impoverished families, the kind who would otherwise struggle to pay for child care.
For decades, American poverty has been defined by an eight-line chart comparing family size with annual income. A family of four that earned $22,050 last year qualified for all sorts of programs. With a dollar more, they didn't.
But the Obama administration's stance is that poverty isn't so simple, and it announced this month that it will redefine the term by including expenses such as housing and health care — which vary from place to place — plus the value of tax credits and other government help.
The process won't immediately expand who is eligible for federal programs, but the new definition, due out next year, could give Americans a more accurate picture of who is struggling and what policies have the greatest potential to lift families out of poverty.
The Census Bureau will gather data and come up with the supplemental measure, which will be released each fall along with the traditional guidelines. The Obama administration's announcement came just days after Nashville released plans to reduce poverty by 50 percent in 10 years.
About 16 percent of Davidson County residents live in households below the federal poverty line. Area nonprofit organizations and government agencies are calling for programs to make child care and housing more affordable, expand economic opportunities, provide more access to health care and healthy food, and improve work readiness. The group appointed Metro Social Services to implement specific measures.
Poverty hard to define
For now, those who work with poor families say, it's tough to address a problem no one defines in a realistic way.
"I hope it would tell us just how many people who are perhaps considered middle class by our government ... really aren't and just how many people are struggling so hard," said Mary McKinney, interim director of the Bethlehem Centers of Nashville. The nonprofit, which receives church and government funding, provides child care and other services to poor families.
McKinney said silence and desperation about poverty have grown in the 30 years she has worked in nonprofits. She recently discovered that one of her own friends whose business went under is four months behind on her mortgage.
"The truth is, people would rather talk about their intimate sex lives than their financial situation in this country," she said. "I would hope that a better poverty measure, something with more detail than how much money ... you make would make it clear what's really going on and maybe bring about some change."
Scholars, social workers and policy makers have criticized the current poverty guidelines, created in the 1960s, because they are based largely on a family's income. It also assumes families are spending large sums on food that today are more likely to be directed toward housing, medical, child- care and transportation costs.
Formula went nowhere The most recent attempt to redefine the measure was by congressional order.
The new formula went nowhere after the issue became politicized, said Michael Laracy, director of policy reform and advocacy for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a nonprofit research organization that advocates for disadvantaged children.
"Liberals thought changing the measure would increase spending on programs such as food stamps and show that need is more widespread and intense, and conservatives thought changing the measure would … show there is no poverty or at least very little in the United States because everyone has a television and a radio and nobody starves," Laracy said.
"So we had a political impasse."
Where is poverty line?
Most people don't know exactly where the poverty line is, said William Sinclair, executive director of Catholic Charities of Tennessee.
What even fewer people seem to realize is that two adults working full time for minimum wage with no benefits take home about $27,840 before taxes.
If they have two children, that's a family that officially falls above the federal poverty line but almost certainly struggles.
"So many people think that the poor are people who don't work," Sinclair said. "That's so far from the truth. … But without some of the subsidies and the government supplement programs, they would be living in abject poverty. And many of them have no way to get themselves out."
Catholic Charities plans to bring about 200 people to Nashville this week to discuss poverty. The conference will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday at the Curb Event Center at Belmont University.
Nashville poverty reduction plan
A city-wide plan to cut Nashville's poverty rate in half was introduced by the Poverty Reduction Planning Committee in February 2010. An executive summary outlines key points of the plan for child care, economic opportunity, food, health care, housing, neighborhood development and workforce development.
Poverty rate hits 17.5 percent in Nashville
Brookings Institution study finds suburbs have only slight rise
By Naomi Snyder • THE TENNESSEAN • January 25, 2010
Marilyn Musser cleaned house for a psychiatrist until a few weeks ago, when the psychiatrist lost her own job and couldn't afford Musser anymore.
So, Musser showed up Friday at St. Luke's Community House in Nashville, where emergency free food boxes are delivered to local residents.
"There are no jobs," she said. "People get laid off and they can't find work, and the pay rates went down."
A study released last week by the nonprofit Brookings Institution says that while times are tough all over, Nashville has fared worse than the suburbs that surround it. The city of Nashville added about 32,110 people living below the poverty line between 2000 and 2008, a gain of 4.2 percentage points, reaching 17.5 percent of the city's population.
The suburbs as a group, which comprises 12 surrounding counties, saw an increase of 22,129 people living in poverty, a rise of less than one percentage point. Fewer than 1 in 10 people in the suburbs live below the poverty line, Brookings said.
Those numbers contradict the general trend in the 94 largest metro areas in the country, which saw suburban poverty grow faster than urban poverty in the same time period, the study group said.
With the latest economic blows from the recession since the 2008 figures were tabulated, the Brookings Institution, a research organization that does work on poverty and urban-suburban demographics, now estimates that nearly 20 percent of Nashville lives below the federal poverty line.
That means income of less than $21,834 a year for a family of four.
Those who work on poverty issues cite a variety of reasons for the rising poverty in Nashville: A flight of the middle class to the suburbs for what they perceive as better schools, lackluster job growth and low educational levels all have plunged more of the city's residents into poverty during the last decade or so.
"The kinds of jobs that were sustaining the neighborhood in the past aren't there," said Christopher Sanders, the development director for St. Luke's Community House in West Nashville. "People are running out of options."
He said many of the manufacturing and construction jobs on which residents once depended have disappeared.
Job growth has been strong in the past decade in some of Nashville's suburbs, but there are obstacles to getting to them, nonprofit leaders say.
Williamson County saw an influx of corporate headquarters and retail stores in the last decade, with job growth of more than 30 percent between 2001 and 2009. Rutherford County has seen 20 percent growth in employment in the time period.
Davidson County, in contrast, has seen employment levels fall during the same time period by more than 4 percent.
Transportation lacking
The Rev. William Barnes, a retired pastor who worked 30 years for Edgehill United Methodist Church here, said 30 percent of the people in Edgehill don't have cars. "The public transportation system doesn't really connect well to the suburbs," he said. (There is an Anchor Trailways Runner shuttle funded with federal transportation dollars that takes people from Nashville to Franklin twice a day. It costs $9.24 per round trip, with a 15 percent discount for frequent riders).
Also, places such as Williamson County have jobs but not much affordable or subsidized housing for low-income people, Barnes said.
Eddie Latimer, the chief executive officer of Affordable Housing Resources in Nashville, said developers who get tax credits to build affordable housing get higher scores on their funding applications if they locate in neighborhoods that are already poor, not ones that are wealthy.
Kristi Daugherty, who was picking up free boxes of food Friday at St. Luke's, said she wasn't much interested in working or living in the suburbs, because her family lives in Nashville.
"I need their help with child care," she said.
The mayor's office issued a statement from Mayor Karl Dean, who was in Washington on Friday, saying, "Poverty has always been an issue in urban areas, and it's something we have to stay focused on in terms of housing, transportation, health and other issues.
"But the best way to end the cycle of poverty is through education, which is one of the reasons I have made improving schools my top priority."
Copyright 2010 The Tennessean. Used with permission.
