The Real Economy is People

Note: This entry first appeared as a column in the Somerville Journal.

They say the economy is improving. But you can’t tell it by Anne.

Anne is a graphic designer in her mid-50s. She has made her own living all her life, either in her chosen field or in general office work. She hasn’t been able to find a steady job for the past year. Anne came to the Community Action Agency of Somerville (CAAS), the anti-poverty agency where I work, to apply for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or what most of us still call “food stamps.” She was denied. Having a little bit of savings for her retirement meant Anne was poor, but not poor enough for benefits.

They say the economy is improving. But you can’t tell it by Matt.

Matt is one year out of college with a degree in mathematics. He is working in a corporate mailroom, as a temp. Matt has the skills to do a lot more. His first temp job had him troubleshooting a web site designed to let middle school students study math at their own pace. He had hoped a few months’ temp work would put him in line to use his skills in a permanent entry-level job. No one was hiring. For now, he is sorting the mail.

They say the economy is improving. But you can’t tell it by the Blanco family.
Antonio and Maria Blanco have lived in Somerville since 1988. They have gone to church here and raised their three children here. They both commute into Boston where he works as a janitor and she as a nurse’s aide. Two full-time jobs are not enough to support a family in Somerville. So, four nights a week, Antonio comes home for dinner and a quick hello to his children. Then he heads out again to his second job as a night watchman in an office building. With two-and-a-half full-time jobs, the Blancos are still living at the poverty level.

For whom is the economy improving? Not for tenants living in buildings where the owner can’t pay his mortgage and the bank is taking over and evicting the tenants. Not for disabled people, who have a harder time finding work than average even when the economy is sound. Not for most of the people we call our neighbors. A few are fortunate to work in high-income jobs. Most are struggling to get by.

At CAAS, we are on the side of the struggling. We can help people narrow the gap between what they have and what they need, with services like job readiness training, housing and benefits advocacy, and early childhood education and daycare through our Head Start program. But human service agencies cannot do it alone. If life is really going to improve, all of us, in Somerville and across the country, have to change the way we think about “the economy.”

The real economy is not corporations, nor the stock market, nor the price of real estate. The real economy is people. How many people have jobs that pay a living wage? How many families can pay for the necessities of food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, transportation and childcare without working all day and all night? Who has a sense that they really belong, as a respected member of this community? Who can look forward to a better future?

These are the questions we must ask ourselves. These are the goals we should set for our city and our country. We will know we live in a better economy when the answer to each question is, “We are all doing better, together.”

Up from Poverty?

When Lyndon Johnson called for a War on Poverty, what he really meant was an all-out effort to eliminate it. But poverty is not an enemy. It's more like a neighborhood. You can't demolish it through head-on assault. You end up destroying the people who live there in the process.

For the next three days, we will discuss three strategies for rebuilding America so poverty isn't a part of the architecture any more.

Strategy 1: Family Economic Self-Sufficiency.

The amount of money that it takes to "escape poverty" according to the federal definition of poverty is so small, you wonder why so many are poor. The feds say that a family of three (typically a mother and her two children) are out of poverty if she earns more than $17,600 (roughly $8.75/hour for a full-time worker). Surely that's possible?

Possible, but unlikely. Consider. The federal minimum wage is $6.55/hour. The Massachusetts minimum wage, which is essentially tied for the highest in the country, is $8/hour. Neither one of these is as high as the poverty threshold. A minimum-wage worker can work full-time all year round and still not make nearly enough to get her family out of poverty. (And of course, many people work seasonally, or part-time. They have to try to survive on even less.)

Before we get people out of poverty, we need to get them up to poverty!

But is the poverty threshold really enough to live on? Actually, no. Family economic self-sufficiency (FESS) means earning a lot more than the federal poverty level, depending on the ages and needs of your family members and the cost of living where you are. The Crittenton Women's Union in Boston has provided us with an online "self-sufficiency calculator" so we can figure out the FESS level for any city in Massachusetts. For my home city of Somerville, for instance, what would it cost that three-person family to live?

Just for housing, child care, food, transportation, and health care expenses, plus a small amount of miscellaneous necessities, a Somerville resident with two children has to earn somewhere between $36,761 (if both her children are teens) to $95,284 (if both children are infants). That's at least $17.41/hour, and as much as $45.12/hour.

Go and look through the want ads. Ask around at Human Resource offices. How many job openings are there for jobs that pay that much? There aren't enough to raise the one out of eight families that live in poverty up to the self-sufficiency level. And that level is bare bones. It doesn't allow savings for college, or even for a rainy day.

That's why:

1. We need to help people get the education and training to qualify for the high-paying jobs that exist.
2. We need to make sure people get all the public benefits they're entitled to, from food stamps to subsidized housing, so their need for income drops.
3. Even if we do all that, it will not be enough. Family economic self-sufficiency is a strategy for building up one family at a time. We need a strategy for developing a society without poverty.

More on that tomorrow!