Poverty rate still high in Georgia, but may no longer be rising

Metro Atlanta poverty level percentage

After soaring during the recession and remaining stubbornly high in the years after, Georgia poverty rates appear to have finally leveled off.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 14.6 percent of Georgians lived below the poverty line in 2008. That spiked to 16.5 percent the next year, 17.9 percent in 2010 and 19.1 percent in 2011. By then, the economy was producing jobs and unemployment was slipping – typically things that cut poverty.

The poverty rate didn’t fall, but it only inched up to 19.2 percent the next year, said Trudi Renwick, chief of the poverty statistics branch of the Census Bureau. “Last year and this year, it’s really been kind of flat.”

The painfully high plateau is still visible in the lines for food at the door of the North Gwinnett Cooperative Ministries in Buford.

The number of new families, applying for services for the first time, has fallen. But the total number of families receiving assistance has not, said Maureen Kornowa, executive director of the agency, which provides food to the needy.

“We are still seeing 370 to 400 families every single month,” she said. “These are families that are at or below the poverty line, many of them two-income families – both working – with kids.”

Nationally, the poverty rate is 15.9 percent.

In data released Tuesday, the bureau spotlighted Clay County, in southwest Georgia, as having the highest poverty rate in the state: 47.7 percent. That was more than twice as high as Clayton, the poorest county in metro Atlanta with a 21.6 percent rate.

Tied for the state’s lowest poverty rates were Fayette and Forsyth counties at 6.7 percent.

In a report issued Tuesday, the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute said the state is now the sixth-poorest in the nation, with poverty at its highest since 1982. The GBPI report concentrated on poverty from early 2010, the point where unemployment started falling, through 2012.

In the time since the economy started improving, about 160,000 more people have fallen below the poverty line, said Melissa Johnson, policy analyst for the GBPI.

According to the Census, more than half the families in poverty have at least one working person, including part-timers. But roughly 123,000 Georgians work full-time and are still in poverty, she said. “It is a pretty grim report, but grim is the way it looks.”

In Georgia, a larger than average portion of the poor are young.

As inexperienced workers were laid off in droves, the recession badly hurt young families, said Rebecca Rice, coordinator for Kids Count, an advocacy program in Georgia funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

But the last year has offered some encouragement, she said. “We are hopeful that the poverty rates for children are stabilizing.”

Georgia’s unemployment rate crested at 10.4 percent in early 2010. The jobless rate in October was 8.1 percent. November’s rate is to be announced on Thursday.

Georgia has added 153,053 jobs since then 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That still leaves Georgia more than 200,000 jobs shy of the pre-recession levels, so the job growth has not been enough to soak up a huge pool of job-seekers. It’s also a question of job quality, said economist David Sjoquist of the Andrew Young School at Georgia State University.

“There is a bifurcation of the labor market,” Sjoquist said. “There are low-wage jobs being created and high-wage jobs being created, but only a few in the middle.”

Low pay may be enough to sustain a worker or even his family, but it is often not enough to lift them out of poverty. Moreover, poverty strains social services, challenges charity groups and acts as a brake on economic recovery, he said.

At North Gwinnett Cooperative Ministries, the demand has not slackened, Kornowa said. “When they cut food stamps recently, we saw another small increase. So far, we have been able to meet it.”