Despite boom, poverty on the rise in United States

In 1991, youngsters accounted for 1,122 overnight stays in the shelter. Last year that number jumped to 11,352. The number of overnight stays by women in that same time period leapt from 12,432 to 23,461 – and this despite the boom in the American economy.

“At the moment, we’re looking after the poorest of the poor and the hard cases,” says John Suggs, the shelter’s director. There are a great manyalcoholics, drug addicts and mentally handicapped people who just can’t make it out there. And more women with children.

Suggs daren’t imagine what could happen if the American economy suffers a downturn. The cause of rising poverty, say Suggs and other experts, is not the fact that welfare benefits are being cut. Wages in the lowest paid jobs are often so low that even a full time job does not provide enough to feed a family.

The homeless shelter tries again and again to help its clients to break out of the cycle of poverty and hopelessness. On this particular day a family of seven is packing up its few belongings. The shy father and his five sons have shaved their heads. They can’t afford to go to a barber shop for a real haircut. The whole Johnson family – not their real name – wears simple t-shirts and sneakers.

The father just found a job that pays eight dollars an hour, Suggs explains. “We were able to find them a motel room with a kitchenette for 130 dollars a week. If their dad keeps his job,they might make it.”

According to a recent study, the number of American kids under the age of seven living in poverty has increased by 12 per cent in the past 20 years. The national study, conducted by Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty in New York, compared data for 1979 to 1983 and 1992 to 1996, and revealed tremendous differences among the 50 states in the union.

Nearly half the poor children in the United States live in the states of Texas, California and New York. In Texas, for example, the number of children living in poverty increased during the past 20 years from 24 to 30 per cent. In neighbouring Louisiana, forty per cent of children are poor. In 1996, the poverty line was set at an annual income of 16,036 dollars for a family of four.