Rising poverty rate hits home

For 10 days, home was the cramped confines of a 1984 Volvo station wagon, parked after hours in the lot of Lincoln Heights Shopping Center.

When they moved from Portland to Spokane in June, Erin Winternheimer and her two kids spent her last paycheck on a motel room in Airway Heights. When the money ran out after a week, they ended up living in their car, eating food that didn’t need to be cooked, taking turns sleeping in the back seat.

“How did I get here?” Winternheimer asked herself, afraid to look her children in the eye. “How could this happen to us?”

Since then, the 31-year-old has found a job and a temporary home for her family at Anna Ogden Hall, a shelter for women and children. Her story, however, is one example of the poverty affecting thousands of families throughout Spokane County and Idaho, and millions more across the nation.

According to statistics released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate in this country has grown for the third year in a row.

In 2003, 35.9 million Americans lived in poverty – 1.3 million more than the previous year. The poverty rate among children rose by nearly 1 percentage point in a year, leaving nearly 13 million kids below the poverty line.

Census figures also show that 45 million people didn’t have health insurance coverage, an increase of nearly half a percentage point since 2002.

In Spokane County, the percentage of people living below the poverty level has increased steadily since 2000 – from 13.3 percent three years ago to 15.9 percent last year. The census data show that nearly 17 percent of children in Spokane County were considered poor. Statewide, the percentage was slightly higher for children under the age of 5. And in Idaho, poverty affected 17.6 percent of all kids in 2003.

“The numbers are just astonishing,” said Linda Stone, the Eastern Washington director for Children’s Alliance. As an advocate for kids, Stone said she worries about the availability of health care, child care subsidies and other assistance for families in dire need.

“There has always been a lot of conversation in Spokane about poverty, but it doesn’t seem to change the reality here,” she said. Like other communities across the country, Spokane has continually struggled to find ways “to support families and to make sure kids are safe, educated and well-nourished.”

The rising poverty level in Spokane County is reflected in the growing need for services at area nonprofits. Employees at the Union Gospel Mission, for instance, are seeing more families than ever before.

Traditionally, most of the people seeking help from the mission are men, although it also provides meals for women and children. In recent months, however, Union Gospel Mission is drawing a larger number of families and people who are homeless and unemployed for the first time in their lives, according to Kari Reese, the mission’s public relations coordinator.

In Idaho, the sharp increase in child poverty has been evident in growing caseloads for food stamps, Medicaid and emergency assistance. “Our data shows that we are serving more children,” said Idaho Health and Welfare spokesman Tom Shanahan. “Families in general are not doing quite as well as they were. They may have lost a little bit of ground.”

In 2001, Idaho’s Medicaid program, which provides health coverage for the poor and disabled, was covering 93,000 children. Last month, the number hit 114,000.

The number of kids on food stamps also ballooned. In June of 2001, there were 31,000 Idaho children on food stamps; in June 2004 that had swelled to 49,000.

“Basically we are seeing a lot more demand for services for children,” Shanahan said. “The economy has had just as big an impact on them. When it impacts a family, it impacts the children.”

Additional census data released Thursday point to other factors that inevitably affect the growing poverty levels in the area.

Although the 2003 median household income in Washington state was $46,868, the median for Spokane County was $36,446.

Among communities with populations of 250,000 or more, Spokane County ranked 211th out of 220 counties, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, the median income for all of Idaho was $39,492. Figures were not available for Kootenai County, but the poverty rate for the entire state in 2003 was 13.8 percent. That figure was unchanged from 2002 but up significantly from 2001.

While Washington was one of the states with higher percentages of people over 25 with bachelor’s degrees at 30.2 percent, less than 26 percent of Spokane County residents of the same age graduated from a four-year college or university. In Idaho, only 24 percent of adults have bachelor’s degrees.

Policy-makers need to understand that Spokane County and Eastern Washington have a completely different set of circumstances compared with the West Side, Stone said.

Washington state’s median household income is boosted by the fact that the median income in King County is $56,881. Residents of that county are also better educated. More than 42 percent of King County’s population over 25 have bachelor’s degrees, and Seattle is the nation’s best-educated city with more than half of the adults holding college degrees. The reality on this side of the state is far different, said Stone.

While many agencies and people are working hard to help those in need, the community sometimes feels overwhelmed in its efforts to fight poverty, she said.

As a culture, there is still a tendency to blame those who are suffering, Stone said. “There’s something about our culture that says if you’re not making it, it’s your fault. That makes it hard to come up with solutions that help the whole family.”

Timi Brower, administrative assistant at Anna Ogden Hall, pointed out that most of the women who end up living there never chose to be poor. Although people sometimes make mistakes, she said, their situations were often the result of bad luck and, sometimes, bad relationships.

Like most mothers, Winternheimer never wanted to subject her children to life in a car. But she ultimately had no choice, she said. The house they were renting in Portland was being torn down and they had no place to go. She had bad credit. So they drove to Spokane, where they had lived before, hoping to find work.

While living out of their car, they ate mostly cereal and sandwiches, food that they were able to keep in a small cooler. They stayed at Underhill Park and other public parks until they closed at 11 p.m. Then, she’d park the car in the empty lot at Lincoln Heights.

The kids – 10-year-old Crystal and 8-year-old Brian, – would take turns napping in the back of the car. Winternheimer stayed in the driver’s seat and hardly slept during those 10 days. She called a number of shelters in town and waited patiently for an opening.

One night, a security guard who told her to move her car accused her of abusing her children, she said. “Being homeless isn’t child abuse,” she told him before driving off. “We’ve hit hard times. We’re not bad people. We’re just trying to get our lives back together.”

Since she moved to Anna Ogden Hall in late June, Winternheimer has found a job as a night auditor at a hotel. Her kids are registered to attend classes at Franklin Elementary. In the fall, she’ll pursue an associate’s degree at Spokane Falls Community College.

“We’re responding to people in time of crisis not by just helping them out with a hot meal and a place to stay,” said Reese. “We help them find what they’re good at so they can get a job and so they can find their dream.”