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43 °F Forecast | Road Cams Thursday, January 27, 2005 Today's News | Classifieds | Autos | Homes | Jobs | Tempo | Health | Community | Home Delivery SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion - Politics Tempo AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map SPECIAL SECTIONS Since We Asked Outdoor Journal Menu Guide How To Guide Wellness Connection Readers' Choice Real Estate Showcase Real Estate Guide Joy Magazine Homelife Magazine Wedding Guide Passport to the Rogue Valley EXTRA Newspaper in Education Personals Movie Times TV Times E The People Volunteer Opportunities Moving to Southern Oregon? MARKETPLACE Find a Car Find a Home Find a Job Classifieds Place an ad eSouthernOregon Automotive Communities Entertainment Publications Recreation Calendar CUSTOMER SERVICE Frequent Questions Advertising Information Home Delivery Employment Contact Us Media Kit Network Affiliate Oregon Road Conditions & Cams Email Story to a Friend December 26, 2004 Hunger’s face is young, with kids Oregon’s hungry often are employed, like Amanda Nelson of Ashland, who works nearly full time By JEFF BARNARD The Associated Press ASHLAND — The face of hunger in Oregon is not the haggard homeless man looking out from ads seeking donations to soup kitchens during the holidays. Experts say the hungry are more likely to be a family like Amanda Nelson’s. She is a 23-year-old single mom with two kids and a nearly full-time job earning minimum wage at a fast-food restaurant, leaving her below the federal poverty line and forcing her to spending most of her take-home pay on rent. And research indicates that hunger among pregnant mothers and children leads to serious health problems later on. "The old images don’t serve us well anymore," said J. Larry Brown, director of the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University. "Largely, what has happened is the national economy and state economies have seen such a transformation in the last 25 to 30 years in terms of downscaling of wages that the typical people in soup kitchen lines and food bank lines today are working families with a kid. "They are playing by the rules, but they are making somewhere between $5.15 and $8.50 an hour. When they get their paycheck they’ve got to pay the rent. They will not let themselves become homeless, typically. Then they have to pay utilities. Then they have to pay medical care. The one elastic item in their budget is food. They can always skimp on food. And that is what they are doing." Advertisement Oregon ranked first in the nation from 1995 to 2001 on U.S. Department of Agriculture surveys on hunger. In this year’s rankings, Oregon dropped to eighth, with 12.9 percent of households, about 531,000 people, still reporting difficulty putting food on the table at some time during the year. And 4.3 percent of households, representing about 179,000 people, report someone having to go without food at some time during the year. The core causes for Oregon’s high ranking, experts say, are high housing costs and low wages amid chronically high unemployment that can’t be fully overcome by government programs like food stamps. Michael Leachman, policy analyst with the Oregon Center for Public Policy, said housing costs skyrocketed in the high-tech boom of the 1990s and remain high, despite a recession. Meanwhile, family wage timber jobs gave way to minimum wage service jobs. For all but four of the past 30 years, Oregon had a higher unemployment rate than the rest of the nation. "The sons and daughters of timber workers are now at Wal-Mart," he said. "Compared to other states we have a lot of seasonal jobs. So in winter our unemployment rate is especially high when jobs in agriculture, construction and tourism go away. And also, people keep moving here. So that just means more people looking for work." Oregon State University economist Bruce Weber and sociologist Mark Edwards analyzed Current Population Survey data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census for 1999 and 2001 and found high rates of hunger among households that had below-average rates in other states: two parent families, households with no unemployed adult, and households with at least one full-time, year- round worker. The survey asked people about two levels of hunger: food insecurity, which means being uncertain of being able to put enough food on the table for everyone in the household due to lack of money or other resources; and food insecurity with hunger, which means one or more people in a household had to go without enough food at some time during the year. The latter measurement is also called the hunger rate. Weber and Edwards found poor households in Oregon had a hunger rate of 12 percent, compared to 9.8 percent in the rest of the nation, despite Oregon’s poverty rate being average. Unemployed households in Oregon had a hunger rate of 11.1 percent, more than double the rate of 5.2 percent for all Oregon households. The data pointed to tougher times for single moms in Oregon than two-parent families and men. Single mothers had a hunger rate of 9.4 percent, two-parent families 7.3 percent, male blue-collar workers 6.8 percent, female blue-collar workers 10.6 percent, and female administrative support and sales workers 7.5 percent. An Oregon Food Bank survey published this year had similar findings. Households with children under 18 accounted for 38 percent of those taking emergency food boxes. That’s 70,300 kids each month. People over 65 accounted for 6 percent. People with full-time jobs accounted for 20 percent, part-time jobs 15 percent and the unemployed 25 percent, while 80 percent were below the federal poverty level. The survey found 51 percent spend more than half their income on housing, and 25 percent spend more than 75 percent on housing, compared to a federal rule of thumb of 30 percent for rent. Ten percent were homeless A recent state Department of Housing and Community Services report found 64 percent of extremely low-income renters pay 50 percent or more of their income for housing, with demand for low-income housing far outstripping supply. Nelson fits right in. Since moving to Ashland to get away from a boyfriend who beat her, she found a job in a fast-food restaurant, where she works nearly 40 hours a week earning minimum wage of $7.05 an hour. That leaves her $1,000 below the federal poverty level of $15,670 a year for a family of three. A new boyfriend lives with her, and helps with the food and rent, but he sends half his paycheck to his family in Mexico. With one-bedroom apartments renting for $525 a month, Nelson feels lucky to have a two-bedroom mobile home for $495 a month. That’s 40 percent of her gross pay and 62 percent of her typical take-home pay. Two things help Nelson do better than others. She doesn’t have a car and all the expenses that go along with that. She walks to work and her brother drives her to a discount grocery store in Medford. And she knows how to cook, which stretches the $315 a month she and her kids get for food stamps. That’s enough to fix tuna casserole and Hamburger Helper, and a baked ham for Christmas, with dessert once a week. "There are a lot of parents who don’t cook and just buy those microwave things," she said. "They run out of food faster than I do. "I get really close (to running out of food) at the end of the month, but I’ve never been to where I don’t have something to feed the kids, whether it’s peanut butter on a piece of bread or Top Ramen and eggs." Weber also found that when governments reach out with food stamps, as Oregon has, people are less likely to be hungry. That is where the Oregon Hunger Relief Task Force concentrated its efforts in recent years, said executive director Patti Whitney-Wise. They worked with the state Department of Human Services to convince more people they qualify for food stamps — Oregon is one of the few states where people can make 185 percent of the federal poverty level and still get them — and make it easier to sign up. The form is now shorter and DHS staff have been trained to be friendlier. That pushed the number of people covered to 426,793 in November, up 4.5 percent from the year before, though an estimated 450,000 are eligible but still not getting them, she added. The Oregon Food Bank reported boosting the number of emergency food boxes distributed 11 percent in the past year to 721,000. Nicki Stroo, chairman of the Ashland Emergency Food Bank, said they are still at the mercy of donations, and can only offer one box a month with enough for three days — five if people know how to stretch. Many of their clients are families. "If they’re coming here, they’re hungry — that’s our main concern," she said. Whitney-Wise said legislation is needed to overcome low wages and high housing costs. The task force is pushing bills to give poor people an income tax credit up to $1,500 and restore tax deductions for rent, though both are longshots with the state budget already stretched thin. Dr. Susan Bagby, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University, told a recent workshop on hunger that a growing body of research indicates that lack of food for pregnant mothers and young children can have profound longterm effects. Research on pigs, rats and monkeys is showing that when protein is restricted during the second half of pregnancy, offspring develop high blood pressure, in some cases before puberty. One reason may be that lack of food leads to development of fewer nephrons, the functional units in kidneys. If food is plentiful later, the kidneys have to work harder, which can increase the chances for kidney failure and high blood pressure. Research out of Britain is showing that when a pregnant mother does not get enough to eat, her fetus may slow its metabolism to conserve calories. Some of these metabolic changes become permanent, contributing to obesity and the health problems that go with it — diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease — and can be passed on to successive generations. Other research indicates young children suffering from malnutrition may be more likely to show more aggressive and anti- social behavior as they grow up. "It’s really bad to have our children be hungry or have our mothers be hungry," Bagby said. Mail Tribune Home Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life Opinion - Politics | AP News | Archives | Site Map E Southern Oregon | Classified Copyright © 1997-2005 Mail Tribune. All rights reserved. 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