The economy is churning out mixed signals these days, with a flurry of separate reports suggesting America is experiencing high growth and job creation — and rising poverty.
But Carolyn Solar, who leads an Inland Empire food bank, isn’t confused.
“For us, the numbers sort of speak for themselves,” said Solar, chief executive of Feeding America’s operations in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
Specifically, Solar was referring to the number of people served by her agency’s Senior Mobile Pantry program, which takes free food directly to people ages 60 and older. In January, the Mobile Pantry client list was 1,600; by September it was up to 2,300.
“It’s pretty clear,” Solar said. “Need is going up around here.”
In California, need is going up everywhere.
A report issued recently from the Public Policy Institute of California concluded that from late 2021 through the first quarter of 2023 the state poverty rate, including people of all ages and demographic profiles, jumped from 11.7% to 13.2%.
That defies a trend in which poverty rates, in California and nationally, fell during the pandemic. Economic forces throughout 2020 and much of 2021 played out in ways that weren’t expected, initially because of the layoffs and rehiring sprees that happened during lockdowns and high case counts, and later as federal and state relief efforts helped some lower-wage workers and others stave off homelessness.
Though California’s new poverty rate is well below the pre-pandemic rate (16.4% in 2019) economists and others suggested the swift upturn found in the PPIC report is troubling.
“What we’re seeing now is people who are working but still struggling. It’s a combination of people having better jobs, sure, but it’s also the expiration or reduction of a lot of the safety-net policies we had during the pandemic,” said Caroline Danielsen, a senior fellow at the PPIC and co-author of the report “Who’s in Poverty in California,” which…
Read the full article here
