Get a job, or a better-paying job, and a poor family will become less poor. Right? Wrong. Not in New Haven. So reveals a new report called The High Cost of Being Poor in New Haven. It’ll blow your mind. And it offers practical solutions.
How could getting a new job or a raise make a family poorer?
The family often needs a car because so many jobs are in the suburbs, away from convenient bus lines. It costs extra for poor families in New Haven to buy a car than it does for middle-class and suburban families, because they have fewer savings and worse credit. It costs them more to insure a car. (For instance: A New Havener living on Whalley Avenue pays 25 percent more a year, or more than $200, than someone in Hamden to insure the same 1992 Honda Accord.) Most importantly, working-poor families lose government health care and child care benefits if parents get a new or slightly better job.
Let’s say a mom raising a family in West Rock or Fair Haven makes $15,000 a year. If her pay goes up to $16,000 — the family ends up losing thousands of dollars and slipping into debt.
Working-poor families also pay thousands extra to have taxes done because of predatory outfits aimed at the poor; they lose up to 10 percent of their tax rebates to these sleazy outfits. They often can’t qualify for conventional bank loans to buy homes, so they pay more to sub-prime lenders who more often end up taking back the house anyway or forcing families into bankruptcy. They pay more for the same food at the grocery store.
Casey Family Services put out this report. Irene Liu wrote it. She worked with, among others, Empower New Haven, city government, and the New Haven Economic Security Coalition. Click here to read the report in full.
Besides reading these revelations, what can people in New Haven do? The report lists a bunch of ideas that can make a real difference. They include guaranteeing slots in the state child care subsidy program for all eligible working-poor families (even Wisconsin does that); increasing slots for the HUSKY health-care and Section 8 rent-subsidy programs; forcing insurance companies to stop redlining cities; creating a state earned income tax credit; and preserving some benefits for working-poor families gradually increasing their income. That all requires bugging our state legislators to change laws and state agency rules. Locally, the report likes efforts such as Empower New Haven’s to help families sock away a little bit of money at a time to buy homes or pay tuition later on.
Groups to contact to get involved:
New Haven Economic Security Coalition
Empower New Haven