04.19.2007 - New Agency for Poor Facing Shift in Poverty - Columbus Dispatch

New Agency for Poor Facing Shift in Poverty
Thursday,  April 19, 2007
By Rita Price

The last time Columbus and Franklin County started a community-action agency, poverty liked the city life.

Now, the enemy has a new address. Actually, lots of them.

"It's one thing to say people are scattered around," Roberta Garber said. "It's another to be able to look at a map and say that more than half the poor are no longer in the old city.

"This is quite a phenomenon."

Garber, executive director of Community Research Partners, presented that finding, and many others, at a forum yesterday on the changing face of poverty in Franklin County.

The information is particularly important to the fledgling Columbus/Franklin County Community Action Agency. In November, the state chose that group to become the metro area's new anti-poverty agency.

The old one, the Columbus Metropolitan Area Community Action Organization, collapsed two years ago in a heap of debt and scandal.

CMACAO was 41 years old and focused on the inner city. Only one of its six offices cozied up to the Outerbelt.

"Things definitely will change," said Carla Williams-Scott, an assistant director in the Columbus Department of Development and a member of the task force that created the new agency.

"We're looking at where to put those satellites," she said. "Look at where the people are. It's a big eye-opener."

In 1970, Garber said, about three-quarters of those living at the poverty level were in old Columbus. That area is defined as the city according to its 1950s boundaries, before aggressive growth and annexation policies dramatically increased its size.

By 2000, a slight majority of the poor, about 51 percent, lived outside old Columbus.

"The lines crossed," Garber said.

Among the report's other findings:

• Between 1970 and 2004, the number of people living in poverty in Franklin County grew at twice the rate of the overall population. Total population grew 27.9 percent; the poor increased 59.1 percent.



• Nearly half of all female-headed families with young children lived in poverty in 2004, while only about 3 percent of married-couple families were poor. The number of married couples continues to decline, and increasing numbers of single mothers live outside the inner city.



• In 2004, Franklin County's black or African-American and Latino populations had poverty rates three times higher than those for whites and Asians. From 1980 to 2000, the growth rates of the Asian, Latino and African-American populations were five to 35 times the rate of growth among whites.



• From 1990 to 2004, the county's foreign-born population more than doubled. Nearly 10 percent of county residents age 5 or older (98,260 people) speak a language other than English at home; 22,482 speak English "not well" or "not at all."



• Researchers say that a household needs an income of at least 200 percent of the official federal poverty measure to have a decent standard of living. In 2004, one in four Franklin County residents lived below 200 percent of the poverty line. For a single parent with two children in 2004, the poverty line was $15,219.



• From 1993 to 2004, nearly 50,000 people, many with higher incomes, left Franklin County for adjacent counties.

Garber said that many of the findings help to paint a new, updated portrait of the poor. They also serve as a warning for those who seek to craft both a new agency and a community response.

"Poverty is one of the most important markers," she said. "How do we start dealing with what's happening?"

Publications

• Poverty: Carla Williams-Scott (City of Columbus)
• Poverty: Douglas Lumpkin (FCDJFS)
• Poverty: Roberta F. Garber (CRP)