This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 26, 2011 - Deidra Thomas-Murray knows what it's like to lose everything -- a job, a home and hope. Her life as a school social worker in New Orleans changed drastically six years ago when Hurricane Katrina struck the city. Now living in St. Louis, she has recovered and risen again into the American middle class.
She mentions her experience as a way of saying she feels the pain that the economic downturn has inflicted on a growing number of St. Louisans. New U.S. Census figures show that the overall poverty rate continues to rise across the metropolitan area. In St. Louis, the overall rate is now nearly 28 percent, the highest in the region -- followed by 17 percent in Franklin County, 13 percent in Jefferson County, nearly 11 percent in St. Louis County, slightly less than 6 percent in St. Charles County, and about 15 percent each in Madison and St. Clair counties in Illinois.
As bad as these numbers are, they don't tell the whole story for some groups within the general population. African Americans and Latinos, for example, are more likely than people in general to live below the poverty line and to fall into poverty. The poverty rate among blacks in St. Louis is 39.8 percent, according to Census data released Thursday. The rate for blacks in the city of St. Louis rose more than 7 percentage points between 2007 and 2010 -- from 32.44 percent to 39.8 percent. The data also offer a rough poverty estimate of 35 percent for city residents of Hispanic or Latino origin. (There are no comparable figures for Hispanics.)
These numbers have cradle-to-grave implications for those stuck at the bottom, says Melinda Ohlemiller, CEO of Nurses for Newborns Foundation. Children growing up in impoverished, stress-filled environments have a higher chance of being malnourished and are more likely to face health and emotional consequences that can last a lifetime, she says.
"Povery provides an uneven playing field right out of the gate for a child," she says. "It's imperative that we figure this out as a community and make sure that all children can be protected in some way from the harm that can come from growing up in poverty."
Public policy responses so far have not kept pace with the problem, says Tim McBride, associate dean of public health at Washington University's Brown School of Social Work.
"The overall poverty rate of 27.8 percent in St. Louis represents huge overall growth," he says. "Of course, the overall rate of 21 percent in the city was high back in 2000, but the size of the jump is pretty big if the numbers are to be believed. It's bigger than I expected."
He says it probably will take a year or two to get the overall unemployment rate down again.
Tattered safety net
"In the meantime, we are going to have to deal with some safety-net issues. I know some states are cutting Medicaid programs. Unfortunately, that means state budgets are going in the wrong direction when we really need them," he said.
Ruth Ehresman, director of health and budget policy at the Missouri Budget Project, says the safety net has prevented the poverty numbers from getting worse. Besides Medicaid, these programs, she said, include unemployment insurance, nutrition assistance and earned income tax credits.
"Boosting the incomes of the poorest families has a significant impact on children's educational performance and increases those children's earnings as adults," Ehresman said.
The impact of poverty on inner-city children is a special concern of Thomas-Murray, 47, the former New Orleans resident. She formerly worked in the New Orleans schools and is now homeless coordinator for the St. Louis schools.
"I can relate to their problems because I've experienced some of them," she said, mentioning sleeping on a stranger's floor and helping her mother cope after a radical mastectomy two weeks before Hurrican Katrina struck. The family eventually headed for St. Louis partly because her mother wanted to get treatment at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
As the district's homeless coordinator here, she encounters plenty of families where the parents have been left impoverished by the economic downturn and cannot find afford housing.
"You have families who are highly transient, moving three, four, five, or six times throughout the school year. The children don't know where they are going to sleep tonight," she said.
The poverty can be stressful to the point of preventing some parents from taking good care of their children. "The parents may have been up all night, and the children don't get to school until 11 or 12. The children have missed breakfast and a significant part of learning and instructional time."
Role of government
Her message to those facing poverty is that they can cope just as many like her did following Katrina.
"Some of us become overwhelmed by thinking about the problem of poverty rather than focus on overcoming the problem," she said. "I did have a good educational background, but the thing that helped the most was the will to overcome. That, to me, is the key."
On a practical level, government should step in and do more to assist the expanding needy population, says Vetta Sanders Thompson, an associate professor at Brown School of Social Work.
"If you look at the statistics, you not only see a rise in urban poverty but in suburban poverty as well," she said. "It's occurring across groups, and it really reflects increasing inequity in income and wealth in our society."
On thing that's missing, she argues, is a "rational debate" about solutions. What has passed for debate so far, she says, "raises concern about focusing entirely on cuts to balance the budget" without safeguards to produce better health, education and mental health outcomes for the poor.
While stressing that the Census data show that pain is occuring across the region and the nation, she notes that blacks still suffer the equivalent of pneumonia whenever the larger society catches the flu.
Black Americans, she says, tend to lack the reserves to shield themselves from the consequences of economic slowdowns.
"Historically, we haven't been able to accumulate wealth. We always take a large hit when we have these downturns."
Funding for the Beacon's health reporting is provided in part by the Missouri Foundation for Health, a philanthropic organization that aims to improve the health of the people in the communities it serves.
