Betty Jean Jones transfers a spoonful of French fries to a cast-iron pan filled with oil after her electric fryer stopped working in her apartment at Hikone. Jones volunteers to help cook meals for children in the after-school program at the Hikone Community Center.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
For a few hours one day before school started in August, Mitchell Elementary School staff members canvassed an Ann Arbor mobile home park to make sure everyone was signed up and ready for school.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but there was one glitch.
Despite signs that people were home like televisions and lights on, no one answered the door. Not one person. And no children were even playing outside.
The lack of response puzzled staff members until they remembered the demographics of the Ann Arbor elementary school, which has the highest percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch in the district.
Most families wouldn't be able to afford to have a babysitter, nor could they afford to stay home themselves to keep an eye on the young children.
"Kids are told to stay in the house, keep the door locked," Principal Kathy Scarnecchia said. "Parents know they are home, locked in and pretty safe. They’ve got to do whatever it takes so the parents can keep the job. They were just hidden away."
The children are indicative of the larger hidden problem in Ann Arbor, a city generally considered affluent - despite nearly 25 percent of its residents classified as living in poverty.
They live in cooperatives and neighborhoods tucked along the city’s southern border, where traffic is light.
They live in public housing projects scattered across the city, well off the beaten path. Or they live in friends’ houses, sleeping in spare bedrooms or on futons in the basement.
The poor make up a hidden underclass in a city where nearly 40 percent of mortgage payments top $2,000 a month, 52.5 percent of renters report committing more than 35 percent of their income to rent and the average household income is above $70,000 a year.
But Ann Arbor's low-income underclass is starting to come out of hiding, due to an economy that has shed jobs and almost tripled the local unemployment rate since 2000.
“It’s creating more disparity," said Mary Jo Callan, Washtenaw County’s director of community development. "We are a community of haves … but we have a growing community of have-nots. The fabric of society is more strained.”
The rising tide
From his office window at Peace Neighborhood Center on North Maple Road, Bonnie Billups Jr., the center's director, could see a dumpster next to transitional housing the center was building earlier this year. Time and time again, he’d look out to see pickup trucks arriving to scavenge for metal or other scraps.
On his desk, Billups also could see the growing pile of requests for help.
“They are calling us more and more for help or calling other agencies and saying, ‘Can you help me pay my rent? Can you help me get some food? Help me get a tank of gas so I can get to work?'” he said.
Billups and his counterparts at agencies across the city are seeing a growing volume of requests for help from a growing population of city residents who are struggling.
The latest U.S. Census figures for 2008 show Ann Arbor experienced a significant jump in the number of people living in poverty. That figure climbed to more than 24 percent from around 16 percent the year before, said Reynolds Farley, the Dudley Duncan professor and research scientist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.
That means one in every four Ann Arbor residents qualifies as poor, according to the federal government.
Part of the reason, experts say, is that college students are counted in those figures, meaning many of U-M's nearly 42,000 students are classified as living in poverty.
"Ann Arbor has a very high poverty rate, but something like 70 percent of the poor people in Ann Arbor are college students, or are living in a home of someone enrolled in college," he said.
See University of Michigan Institute for Social Research scientist Reynolds Farley discuss the economics of poverty in Ann Arbor.
That includes traditional students supported by their parents who make little money on their own. But the statistics also include the single mother taking a class or two at Washtenaw Community College while trying to make a living and raise her kids.
A college town with a high poverty rate isn't surprising, Farley said.
"If you look at the cities that have the highest poverty rates in the United States, you get the places in the Rio Grande Valley where the Latino population is very poor, although the cost of living is low, but you also get State College, Penn.; Bloomington, Ind.; and Champaign, Ill."
But there's no doubt people here are living in poverty, he said. According to Census data, 5,000 to 8,000 Ann Arbor residents lived under the federal poverty line in 2007 and weren't attending college. Figures aren't yet available for 2008.
And it's clear the number of Ann Arbor residents living in poverty is skyrocketing, Farley said.
For example, Census data shows the number of people getting food stamps grew from 1,269 in 2005 to 2,078 in 2008, a number likely to keep growing, experts say. The poverty rate for children almost doubled from 2007 to 2008, according to Census data.
Derrick Miller, director of the Bryant Community Center in the southwest corner of Ann Arbor, said more people are struggling with poverty in Ann Arbor than even those numbers reflect.
“Not as many meet federal guidelines for being poor as in other places, but because the cost of living in Ann Arbor is so high, they are poor," Miller said. "Lots of people look good on the outside, but inside are really struggling.”
Rising poverty over the last 18 months has created two classes of poor in Ann Arbor - the traditional poor and the “new” poor, experts say.
The traditional poor
In the neighborhood where Aaron Pressel grew up, success was expected. Those who didn’t make it were an anomaly, said Pressel, director of the community center in Ann Arbor’s Hikone public housing.
For many trapped in poverty, the cycle spins the other way.
“You’re talking about generations of people who weren’t successful and come from a neighborhood where no one was successful," he said. "It would be unusual to be successful.”
Billups knows something about that. He grew up in poverty in Ann Arbor and was helped by programs at the Peace Neighborhood Center, which expanded his world and showed him a way out of poverty, he said.
If that doesn’t happen when children are young, it can be hard to break the generational cycle, he said.
With that in mind, many local community centers run after-school tutoring programs and take kids on field trips. They also help in other ways, like counseling kids on life issues.
“One thing we really try to avoid is teenage pregnancy,” Pressel said. “If you are a teen living in here already with your family, and you get pregnant, you’re screwed.”
LaTisha English spent several years of her childhood living in various Ann Arbor public housing apartments. Now 25, she uses food stamps and a couple other assistance programs to help make ends meet for her and her two sons, ages 5 and 3.
English said she started working various service industry jobs while in high school to help with rent and has been working those same jobs since.
"I'd like to go back to school and get a nursing degree," English said. "I just don't have the time. I'm too busy trying to make money. I just can't break even, let alone get ahead."
The new poor
Ann Arbor was long thought to be the oasis in a struggling state. Protected in large part by the economy built up around the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor’s unemployment rate seemed impervious to the conditions pummeling the rest of the state.
About two years ago, that changed.
The unemployment rate, which had hovered between 4 percent and 5.5 percent, began steadily climbing: to 6.4 percent, then 6.8 percent and 7.5 percent. In September, the unemployment rate in Ann Arbor was 9.9 percent, up from 6.9 percent the same month a year before. The state's unemployment rate in September was 15.3 percent.
The overall size of Ann Arbor’s workforce, which averaged more than 65,000 people in the prior three years, dropped to about 63,785 in 2008. So far this year, the workforce has stayed between 60,000 and 62,000 people.
One of the leading indicators of financial struggles is tax delinquencies, said County Treasurer Catherine McClary. Delinquencies totaled $35 million in Washtenaw County last year, up from $32 million the year before.
When the sub-prime housing crisis first hit, it mainly affected the county’s eastern side, which has greater numbers of residents who are low-income and work blue collar jobs. The county expanded its services and public outreach efforts to people threatened with both tax and mortgage foreclosures, McClary said.
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Delinquent Taxes • Average number of delinquent taxes in Washtenaw County since 1999 - 8,000 |
"But now that wave is over. Now we're seeing prime-rate mortgages, middle class people who at one time had good credit,” she said.
The tide has turned to residents in Salem and Webster townships, Saline and Ann Arbor. A typical scenario: Someone loses a job, can’t find another, misses a mortgage payment or two and can’t sell their home to relocate to a new job opportunity, McClary said.
Tom Moore, 47, is among the wave of new poor. Moore was employed in human resources his whole adult life for a variety of companies, and he, his wife and 15-year-old daughter lived a comfortable life in their Ann Arbor house. But last year, Moore was laid off.
"My wife wasn't working, but we were still making it," he said. "Then I got laid off, and we couldn't make it anymore. We're chewing through our savings just trying to make sure we don't lose the house, but if we don't get some income by the end of the year, we're going to be in trouble. I've stood in line for food stamps for the first time (in October). It's a hard thing to adjust to. I just can't imagine what it will be like if my wife or I can't find a job soon."
Ann Arbor's "new" poor is a growing problem mirrored across the state and nation, experts said.
"What is likely one of the reasons for this is more people who are just on the edge of poverty are sliding," said Sheldon Danziger, director of the University of Michigan's National Poverty Center. "You see increasing inequality in everything. From the high-tech computers people buy their 2-year-olds, when there are people who don't even have books in their houses."
Hidden away
Finding the poor neighborhoods in Ann Arbor can be a challenge.
One of the poorest is off Stone School Road, tucked between Eisenhower and Ellsworth, south of I-94. Only about 4,000 cars a day travel past it.
“This side of I-94 is our other side of the tracks,” said Miller, whose community center is located in the middle of the neighborhood.
In Ann Arbor, there's a stigma tied to being poor, Billups and others said.
“There’s such a gap between the haves and have-nots,” Billups said. “That’s why you don’t see the poor in Ann Arbor. That’s why they’re hidden."
The stigma starts growing as soon as the fourth grade and really builds in middle school, said Fran Deering, director of Green Baxter's community center off Green Road on the city's north side.
“When you’re living in Ann Arbor, you want the help, but you don’t want to say, ‘Hey, I live in public housing,’” Deering said.
"(Poverty) is a very invisible problem," said Peri Stone-Palmquist, director of the Washtenaw Intermediate School District's Educational Project for Homeless Youth. "People live in the world they inhabit. When you walk around, you don't see it."
Public housing sites are scattered throughout the city. The Ann Arbor Housing Commission runs 355 low-income rental units in 67 buildings on 17 sites.
Those living in poverty are mostly concentrated in one area of town, as evidenced by the Ann Arbor school district’s reduced-price and free lunch program.
Four of the five elementary schools that had the highest percentage of students receiving free and reduced-price lunch last year are clustered in the southeast portion of town.
The highest rate belongs to Mitchell Elementary School. Scarnecchia anticipates the percentage of students who need help buying lunch will rise above 60 percent of her student body this year.
“We don’t get a lot of complaints about the food that’s being served," she said. "Our waste rates are really low.”
Public housing residents
Low-income residents in a place like Ann Arbor quickly learn the tricks to stretch a small budget and take advantage of local resources. They also sometimes hide income in order to get help from local agencies and the government.
Those in public housing say they scour the sales at local grocery stores or carpool to places as far as Detroit to find cheaper shopping.
Some residents have side jobs for money, like Betty Jean Jones. She lives in the Hikone public housing complex and repairs and sells computers. Each month, Jones gets along with the money she makes for her computer work, along with about $300 she gets in food stamps and a few hundred dollars she receives in child support payments.
“If I got a bill I’ve really got to pay, I’ll put up a couple computers for $100 a piece to make the bill,” she said.
Jones said it wouldn’t make sense to forgo the money she earns from selling computers in favor of a full- or part-time job because she’d likely lose her Medicaid insurance. With that insurance, she can visit the local Packard Health clinic for checkups after she had a stroke last year. Besides, she said, “I like the way I am doing things.”
During the summer months, she grows vegetables like beans, peppers, collard greens and okra in gardens tucked behind the housing project.
She lives in one of the nine family public housing sites the Ann Arbor Housing Commission operates in the city.
Those who live there generally fall into one of three categories, Pressel said: Either they're immigrants, they have large families or they're single mothers.
Judy Gardner, a CAN board member and resident of the Bryant community, sees two categories of people who live in public housing.
“You’ve got the poor living there temporarily to get a way up and the poor who want to stay poor,” she said.
Getting out of public housing can be a challenge.
“There’s an opportunity to go from Hikone (public housing) to (the) Bryant (neighborhood where people own houses or rent houses), but to go from Hikone to Burns Park is impossible,” Gardner said.
Some people will never leave public housing, said Joan Doughty, executive director of the Community Action Network, noting that some are trapped by a cognitive or other impairment.
"It's really a complex situation," Stone-Palmquist said. "All the families have different needs. There's not a one-size-fits-all answer."
Swamped
The growing poverty problem is threatening to overwhelm many local non-profit agencies.
Eileen Spring, the executive director of Food Gatherers, said her agency has seen a 35 percent increase in requests on average from agencies since last September.
“It’s not sustainable," she said.
Food Gatherers isn't the only local non-profit struggling. Callan said her office funds about 45 local non-profits. "They are all up 20 percent to 60 percent in demand," she said.
Those non-profits are seeing cuts from local governments, and private giving is struggling. That's a double-edged sword, those leaders said.
It's not just the non-profits being swamped. The increased demand makes getting help from government agencies tough. It can mean long lines and lots of frustration.
For instance, applying for a passport requires a two-page form. But applying for food assistance takes a 20-page booklet with more complex questioning, residents said.
Many who are eligible are denied help because of small errors on their paperwork, but never learn why they were turned down and therefore don't get any help, some residents and non-profit organization coordinators said.
At the local human services department, which resembles the waiting room of a doctor's or Secretary of State office, lines get long and tempers get short while people try to sort through the requirements.
Bins with all of the forms sit below poster-filled bulletin boards with messages about finding child care, prescription discounts, jobs and the process of getting food stamps, Medicaid and unemployment benefits.
Filling out paperwork for assistance can feel like a full-time job, many said.
"There is a need in this economy that's forcing families to struggle in ways they've never figured out before," Billups said.
And that struggling is starting to make its mark on the community, Callan said.
"People are desperate. They don't know where to turn to," Callan said. "And those places they are looking to for help are overwhelmed and underfunded. It's the perfect storm."
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