We don't see them, the residents of our community who live on the edge of despair. The Champaign News-Gazette started a series that may open our eyes, Who ate they? Well they serve your meals; they flip your burgers; they clean the rooms at your hotel. They ring up your order and hand you the bags. They are all but invisible in our community of professional with well paying jobs.
Here are the facts as described in the News-Gazette article:
An analysis of state and federal data highlights the extent of economic hardship in Champaign County. Among the findings:
– Nearly 10,000 children – almost half of Champaign County's public school students – qualified for free or reduced lunches last school year, according to an analysis of Illinois State Board of Education data. The students' families lived at or near the federal poverty line, which is $22,050 annually for a family of four.
– More than 10 percent of Champaign County residents lived in extreme poverty between 2005 and 2007. That means their income was less than half the federal poverty line. Statewide, 5 percent lived in extreme poverty, according to Census estimates.
– Nearly 20 percent of Champaign County residents under the age of 65 were uninsured in 2005, according to census estimates. Statewide, 15 percent of residents under the age of 65 were uninsured.
Today, The News-Gazette and the University of Illinois Department of Journalism begin an interactive reporting and outreach project to document the economic disparity in Champaign County and chronicle the lives of people on the edge.
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Households earning less than $20,000 annually in Champaign County make up 41 percent of the rental population in the county, according to 2007 Census estimates. (This excludes college students who live on campus or people who live in group homes or institutions.)
Rents in Champaign County rank high among neighboring counties, according to a 2009 analysis by the Heartland Alliance Mid-America Institute on Poverty, a Chicago-based advocacy and research organization. That's because Champaign County has a higher incidence of unrelated adults living together, including college students, said Esther Patt, volunteer director of the Champaign-Urbana Tenant Union. This drives up rents because landlords assume that unrelated adults living together will have a higher combined income, she said.
Apartment rents for June in Champaign and Urbana ranged from $400 for a one-bedroom apartment to $975 for a four-bedroom apartment, according to data compiled by the Tenant Union.
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One in seven individuals and families filing tax returns in Champaign County in 2006 were low-wage workers who qualified for the earned income tax credit, according to The Brookings Institution, a public-policy think tank. The credit was available to individuals and families who earned between $12,120 and $38,348, depending upon family size. Mendenhall found that nearly 40 percent of low-wage earners in the study initially saved some portion of their tax refunds, which averaged around $4,200. But the majority spent their refunds trying to catch up on overdue bills.
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A resident in Champaign County needed to earn $13.15 an hour or a family of four needed to make $32,000 a year to achieve a living wage, according to data analyzed by the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission in 2007. The organization defined a living wage as the amount needed to live without government assistance and spending no more than two-thirds of annual income on housing and utility bills.
But the average estimated mean wage for renters in Champaign County is $9.43 an hour, according to the 2009 report on poverty by Heartland Alliance.
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2009/07/12/champaign_county_no_stranger_to_economic_disparity_and_despair
