The Economic Consequences of Homelessness in The US

But finding employment can also risk the crucial aid that helps you get by.
Helen Bechtol, 23, is a mother of two and a community college student with dreams of
graduating from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. To help pay for child care,
she took a second job, which made her ineligible for day care assistance.
Ashley Schmidtbauer said her family is “not destitute, but we barely make it month to
month.” She stays at home to raise her kids and has found there aren’t any easy
alternatives. Her husband’s income alone makes the family ineligible for day care
assistance. “To be honest, we make roughly $35,000 a year. Somehow, we make over
$10,000 more than their limits allow,” she said. “We are the in-betweeners. Not
making enough to live ‘comfortably’ — but not ‘poor’ enough to get any
assistance either. We don’t expect handouts. We just want what is best for our
family.”
Being working poor means knowing it can be expensive just to keep your job.
Joanne Van Vranken, 50, was laid off in 2011. After nearly two years of unemployment,
she landed a temporary administrative assistant position, which requires a 60-mile
round-trip commute every day. Van Vranken’s car is in desperate need of repair, but
she hasn’t had the money to fix it in years. She’s worried her car will die, which could
put her back in dire financial straits. “And I don’t have the money to buy a new one,” she
said. “But I have to do it, because we need to pay the bills.”
Janet Weatherly, 43, has almost completed her doctoral degree but can’t find
employment in her field. Instead, she’s making $11 an hour as a sales associate for a
major retailer. Her job is a 45-minute drive from her house, and a significant chunk of
her paycheck goes toward gas money. Weatherly’s parents put her car repairs on their
credit cards. She’d like to finish her dissertation, but currently can’t afford to get her
documents out of a storage unit halfway across the country, much less invest more time
in her education.
________
A Profile of the Working Poor, 2015
Bureau of Labor Statistics – April 2017
In 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 43.1 million people, or 13.5
percent of the nation’s population, lived below the official poverty level. (See the
technical notes section for examples of poverty levels.) Although the poor were primarily
children and adults who had not participated in the labor force during the year, 8.6
million individuals were among the “working poor” in 2015, according to data from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics; the 8.6 million figure was down from 9.5 million in 2014. The
working poor are people who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force (that is, working
or looking for work) but whose incomes still fell below the official poverty level. In 2015,
the working-poor rate—the ratio of the working poor to all individuals in the labor force
Page 69 of 289