by Crystal D. Swann and Yuriy Dyuduk, USCM Intern
April 10, 2006

The U.S. Conference of Mayors Taskforce on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity held its second meeting March 30 in Los Angeles to continuing to build a national strategy for addressing poverty in this country.

Task Force Chair Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa began his opening remarks with a note of gratitude for Past Conference President Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley for starting the Task Force, and with a comment that would set the tone for the rest of the meeting. “Poverty is not a partisan issue, it’s an American Tragedy,” he said, adding that in today’s world the poor are not simply the unemployed and the homeless, “poverty today means having two jobs and no insurance.”

Mayors from across the country heard a panel of speakers including: Deborah Reed Program Director, Public Policy Institute of California; Jean Ross, Executive Director, California Budget Project; Cynthia Hudley, Professor, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Mark Greenberg, Executive Director, Task Force on Poverty of the Washington-based Center for American Progress. The speakers all focused on different aspects of describing poverty in America such as, the unequal distribution of GDP growth over the last four decades, education and unemployment.

Before the speakers began Conference Executive Director Tom Cochran mentioned that before one begins to tackle an issue, one must know what the issue is and asked, “How exactly do we define poverty?”

Poverty or more importantly the “poverty line” is a pre-tax, federal law, which identifies a family of 2 adults and 2 children to be “poor” when the annual income of the family is $19,157 or lower. This measure was devised in the seventies and is based on caloric needs, i.e. cost of food necessary to survive, multiplied by three, due to the theory that food expense is around a third of a household’s expenditure.

All four speakers addressed the insufficiency of this way of measuring poverty, especially by pointing out that annual rent is sometimes more than, or close to, the “poverty line” income. In San Francisco, for example, average annual rent is $21,300 or 111 percent of poverty income. Annual rent in Boston is $17,020 and is $14,616, $12,876 and $12,252 in Washington (DC), New York City and Los Angeles, respectively. Thus, the speakers said, “poverty” should be calculated on a regional basis, should also take family structure into account and should also account for the cost of basic needs such as electricity and utilities.

To make the issue of today’s poverty a little clearer one must realize that 23 percent of all those families below the federal poverty line, a rather un-accurate measure as one can see, have at least one fulltime worker. If one adjusts poverty as describing a two child, two adult family with an annual income of $38,000, then one finds that 92.2 percent of all those families have a fully employed member.

The problem arises partially from the fact that newly gained jobs pay an average of $35,000 a year and the lost jobs paid an average of $44,400. In addition, only 54.8 percent of new jobs are likely to provide insurance.

In addition, all of the speakers, and mayors present reiterated Villaraigosa’s statement by showing that poverty in America is not a racial or a regional issue. Thirty'seven percent of all those identified as poor by federal statistics are white, 27 percent are African American, 21 percent are foreign-born Latinos and 8 percent are US-born Latinos. More important is to debunk the popular misconception that somehow only urban centers are subject to “poverty.” The rural areas are actually the most poor in the nation, as Fresno (CA) Mayor Alan Autry said, by pointing out that the San Joaquin Valley in California has the highest concentration of poverty in the nation.

The situation is not hopeless, however. As Hudley pointed out, the benefits from education are still immense, especially the difference between a High School diploma and a four-year degree. Eighty percent of all prisoners are High School dropouts, said Autry, as all other mayors recounted time and time again how keeping libraries open longer, and opening more community colleges has helped their communities.

Other solutions included preparing workers for existing and new jobs, Mayor Autry’s advice on stopping sprawl by requiring developers to rebuild the inner city, or at least a “one-for-one” policy, meaning one affordable house for every one luxury condo, or housing unit built on city land.

At the end of the meeting the mayors conceded that perhaps new methods and ways of addressing poverty are needed and that one such approach maybe to assign someone on their city staff to be solely responsible for addressing this issue in their communities. The mayors remained optimistic and challenged by the daunting tasks ahead as this task force lays the foundation for a new dialogue on an old problem.