Over at the online Capital Times, there’s a story entitled, Despite Madison’s Relative Affluence, Poverty Rate Growing Rapidly.
Here’s an excerpt:
Being poor, hungry or unemployed is a world far removed for many in Wisconsin’s capital city, where arguments over passenger rail, Badger sports or high-rise hotels can dominate the news.
But the reality is Madison’s poverty rate is climbing – rising nine times faster than the rate of other U.S. cities, according to a new report from the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution.
Since 2000, the poverty rate (defined as a family of four with an income under $21,800) in Madison has jumped from 15 percent to 17.7 percent. That?s one in every six residents.
Perhaps more significantly, the city has seen an explosion in the number of low-income children as measured by participation in subsidized or free-lunch programs. One of every two students in the Madison Metropolitan School District is now considered ?low income? using the lunch standard. In 1990, just one in five Madison school kids qualified.
“It’s very much a part of the changing demographics in the district,” says Madison school Superintendent Daniel Nerad.
And the overall picture is not improving. In its report, Brookings predicts Madison will likely see its poverty rate jump another 1.1 percent this year, surpassing the average poverty rate for the 95 largest U.S. cities.
It’s a complicated issue. Certainly, the slumping economy has strained many family budgets. Others point to overwhelmed social services and a lack of job-training programs. Some blame an influx of low-income residents from the big cities of Chicago or Milwaukee.
But one thing is clear to Elizabeth Kneebone, senior researcher at Brookings, one of the nation’s oldest think tanks: “Madison has historically done better than a lot of places but we are seeing a significant increase in poverty,” she says.
Measuring poverty in college towns can be somewhat misleading, researchers caution, since many students live below the poverty line and are counted by the U.S. Census Bureau as officially “poor” even if they come from wealthy families.
But Kneebone says students don’t account for the growing number of poor residents in Madison. According to the American Community Survey, an annual estimate from the Census Bureau, Madison added nearly 8,400 residents living below the poverty line between 2000 and 2008, a 29 percent increase….
There’s little argument the recession has pushed more Wisconsin families into poverty. The state’s overall poverty rate has climbed from 8.7 to 10.7 percent since 2000. The national rate also increased, from 12.4 to 13.1 percent over that same period.
The focus on child poverty is sound, as children are particularly vulnerable, and that focus on family and children in Whitewater is one that I’ve written about consistently. See, the focus on family poverty from a series I previously even posted.
We have a campus, but college students are not the reason we have an above-average poverty rate for Whitewater. We have a high-rate of family and child poverty.
Although we’re a small town, and poverty statistics are not compiled so frequently for us as they are for larger towns, our high rate must be higher still since the recession.
Sadly, Madison faces a problem we also face: talk about big projects while large numbers of children are impoverished, and as poverty rates increase. The coexistence of big-ticket construction projects while many are indigent is a sign of a disordered and diseased economy.
It’s more common in the third world than elsewhere, a sign of unproductive economic relationships and the vanity of project-hungry bureaucrats. It might seem odd, that Whitewater’s bureaucrats talk with sanctimoniously about their work, its supposed uniqueness and extraordinary nature, while so many in this rural town struggle, if only one would consider the contrast between words and conditions.
These projects don’t improve life for ordinary people the way free, mutually beneficial exchange in the marketplace does; they are ornaments mostly to the pride of managers and planners.
We have no reason to scoff at Madison, or the third world — our own small community makes similar mistakes.