In January 2010, he was making $50,000 a year as a surveyor, meeting the mortgage payments on his three-bedroom home in the nation's wealthiest county and paying for his children to play hockey and soccer. Then came February. Schlegel, 45, was laid off. During the next 18 months, the divorced father of three almost lost his house, had to stop paying child support and turned to the local food bank for basic necessities. "You've got to swallow your pride," Schlegel says. "Especially around here, people lose their status and they feel they don't fit in."
This is the face of poverty after the Great Recession. Millions of Americans such as Schlegel now find themselves among the suddenly poor. The recession that led to an explosion in poverty began in December 2007 and ended — officially, anyway — in June 2009. It not only made the poor poorer, it snagged those who thought they had worked themselves out of poverty and blindsided those who never thought they would be caught in its net. Today, 15% of the USA— one in six Americans — are considered poor, the highest rate of poverty since 1993. Now among the poor are the college-educated, the former middle-class worker, the suburbanite and the homeowner.
They've been hit by layoffs, cuts in work hours, health problems and other crises. They've gone through savings and 401(k)s. They live off food stamps or other government benefits and rely on help from family members and friends. Numbers released this month by the Census Bureau show staggering trends:
•A record number of Americans are living in poverty — 46 million. That's more than at any time since the Census Bureau began tracking poverty data in 1959.
•The number of families below the poverty line rose 18%, from 7.3 million in 2006 to 8.6 million in 2010. The poverty line last year was a household income of $22,314 or less for a family of four.
•More people living in the nation's suburbs are poor. The number of poor people living in the suburbs of metropolitan areas rose 24%, from 14.4 million in 2006 to 17.8 million last year. By comparison, the number of poor living in central cities rose by 20%.
•Those who have not worked during the previous 12 months make up an increasing share of the poor. The number of poor people 16 and older who had not worked during the previous year increased by 28% from 2006 to 2010.
"It's all about joblessness," says Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "There's just not enough work." The solution to poverty is simple, Smeeding says: It's a job.
'It was the only thing I had left'
