Slideshow: Getting back to nature in Gary, Indiana

Jon Lowenstein / NOOR

As both the economy and the population in Gary, Ind., decline, nature slowly takes over the city's abandoned homes and buildings.

Launch slideshow

By Nick Bogert, NBC News contributor

GARY, Ind. -- No matter which direction Arthur Joe looks from his home, he sees abandoned properties and the blight they attract.

Next door is an empty house where “drugheads” – as Joe calls them – often set up camp. Behind is a duplex with trash visible through every broken window, and an alley clogged with refuse spilling from several abandoned lots.

Across the street is a vacant house owned by Joe’s landlord. Joe mows the grass there, vowing “we’re going to put it back together.”

For decades, Gary has been ravaged by economic decline and a long, deep housing bust, and putting it back together won’t be easy. Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson thinks letting vast swaths of her once-prosperous city, the birthplace of Michael Jackson, return to nature might be a solution.

“I’d like to see 100,000 folks in Gary. That’d be great,” the mayor said recently, walking through a neighborhood where empty lots and structures outnumber occupied homes. “We could probably do it in 35 square miles.” That’s 25 percent more residents on nearly 40 percent less land.

Nick Bogert / for NBC News

Arthur Joe points to trash spilling into the alley behind his house from abandoned properties in Gary.

Abandoned properties tear at a city’s social fabric. Vacant homes, empty lots and illegal dumps make remaining residents feel isolated, kill community spirit, and breed crime. Providing city services to largely-abandoned neighborhoods wreaks havoc on Gary’s budget.

“All those buildings represent the deterioration of Gary,” said former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. “You have to get those down. If you don’t, that’s a symbol.”

Daley has been offering advice to Mayor Freeman-Wilson, and also the skills of public policy students he teaches at the University of Chicago.

“Neglect can lure criminals into neighborhoods that are normally safe,” observed grad student David Smith, one of about 20 students helping inventory abandoned properties in Gary on a recent Saturday.

Tracking the decay
They used a smartphone app to record answers to key questions: Is a structure occupied? Is it wood or brick? Is it secured? Is fire damage visible? Then they rank buildings with school-like grades, A to F.

There are a lot of D’s and F’s in Gary – homes barely standing, often open to the elements. They’re a reminder of what used to be. A city population that peaked at 180,000 in 1960 has fallen to about 80,000.

Named after a steel company president, Gary acutely suffered Big Steel’s decline. US Steel, for instance, once employed 25,000 people in its Gary operations; now only 5,000 locals work for that company. Median family income is $32,000, about half the national average. More than a third of Gary residents have incomes below the poverty line.

Gary is not only getting poorer— it’s getting older. “You can see it in the churches,” Mayor Freeman-Wilson said. Her own church, Israel CME, is in Midtown. She has fond memories of the days when the neighborhood was home to a thriving African-American middle class. Now she must figure out if it’s worth saving.

Lots of Rust Belt cities are making a priority of “urban removal.” In Detroit, a Blight Authority has been set up to speed demolition of abandoned structures. In Flint, Mich., a study found that $3.5 million spent on demolition raised the value of surrounding properties by $112 million.

Even though Gary’s redevelopment budget is almost entirely devoted to the task, it doesn’t have much money to demolish abandoned buildings. “We have to work smarter because we have so many limitations on resources,” the mayor said.

The housing inventory is a first step. The plan is to map the results and then overlay data about crime, city service calls, and infrastructure.

The results will help the city apply for grant money to do more demolitions and assist in deploying the Gary’s one-man board-up crew more efficiently, targeting neighborhoods where a single abandoned home may drag down the quality of life for residents who are maintaining their properties.

The city has other short-term fixes in mind— like a dollar-a-home fire sale.

$1 for a home
Redevelopment Director Joe Van Dyk figures 6,500 of the 7,000 properties the city owns – many of them for non-payment of taxes – are abandoned. Gary plans a dollar-a-home auction in the next few months, selling off dwellings needing $15,000-30,000 in repairs. Buyers would pledge to rehab their purchases quickly.

For buildings that can’t be restored easily, Gary officials have discussed a “deconstruction” program, hiring crews to disassemble buildings and recycle building materials. It might make removal of abandoned structures cheaper, and provide badly needed job opportunities.

But getting rid of blight is not easy. “Housing is very durable,” noted Professor Ben Keys of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, one of the volunteers helping with Gary’s housing census. “The solutions are either very harsh or very incremental.”

Giving up on entire neighborhoods and moving long-time residents to viable parts of the city will be harsh. City services would be cut off to moribund parts of town, though the city would retain ownership.

That’s critical, according to Daley: “Abandoned buildings are a liability. Land is always an asset.”

Freeman-Wilson and Daley are confident the city is headed for better days, given its transportation infrastructure, location on Lake Michigan waterfront and proximity to Chicago.

“This is solvable,” said Daley. “I see a great future for Gary.”

As Freeman-Wilson sent student volunteers out to quantify the blight that dominates her city, she had some parting words: “When you see Gary return, you’ll know you had a role.”

Related stories: 

• Broke and ashamed, many won't take handouts
• 'By the grace of God': How workers survive on $7.25 an hour
• Sprawling and struggling: Poverty hits America's suburbs

With five broken teeth, three cavities and a painful gum abscess spreading to her sinuses, Patty Kennedy knew she had to get in line early for a free dental clinic held last month in San Jose, Calif.

The 53-year-old woman from Modesto, nearly 100 miles away, was counting on the care to repair not only her smile and her worsening health -- but also her chances of getting a job.

“I’d love to work at a grocery store as a cashier. I’d even go for bagger,” said Kennedy, who camped out overnight at the CDA Cares clinic sponsored by the California Dental Association Foundation. “At this point, I’d do whatever.”

But like many of the more than 2,200 people who showed up for the 5:30 a.m. clinic on May 18 and 19, Kennedy knew that bad teeth translate into poor employment prospects, even for the best workers.

“I really don’t smile a lot,” said Kennedy, whose husband, Lucas, also 53, lost his job five years ago when California’s construction economy tanked. “I know that when you have a job, you want to have a pleasant attitude and you've got to smile and be friendly.”

Lack of access to dental care is a particular problem in California, where budget woes virtually eliminated access to the state’s Denti-Cal program in 2009, leaving an estimated 3 million poor, disabled and elderly people without oral health services. In 2012, CDA events provided about $2.8 million in free care to nearly 4,000 people.

But barriers to dental services are a problem nationwide, with more than 47 million people in the U.S. living in places with difficult access to care, according to the Federal Health Resources and Services Administration, or HRSA. Low-income adults are almost twice as likely as those with higher incomes to have no dental care in the previous year, according to a 2008 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which take effect in 2014, guarantee dental care for children, but not for adults. And without such care, adults already struggling to get by find that obvious dental problems – teeth that are missing, discolored, broken or badly crooked -- make their situation even harder, said Susan Hyde, a dentist and population scientist at the University of California at San Francisco.

In America, most people – including employers – make instant judgments based on appearance, including someone’s smile and teeth.

“If you want to portray someone as being wicked, they have missing front teeth. If they’re ignorant, they have buck teeth,” she said. “Even from a very early age, we associate how one presents their oral health with all kinds of biases that reflect some of the social biases that we have.”

Those views can prevent potential employers from recognizing potential assets, said Lindsey Robinson, a dentist and current president of the California Dental Association.

“If they have a job that requires them to interact socially with the public, it’s almost impossible for them to get that job,” she said. “Customer service jobs, good entry-level jobs, they’re not available to people who lack the basic ability to smile, to function, to chew properly.”

The problem is partly based on appearance, but also on the health effects of poor dental care, which have been linked to heart disease, diabetes and stroke. Acute dental conditions cost nearly two days of work per year per 100 people in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds. Even employed adults lose more than 164 million hours of work because of oral health problems or dental visits.

“When you’re sick and you don’t feel good, you can’t do anything,” said Kennedy, who had suffered with no care for five years. “Your appearance and your countenance suffer.”

The problem is also embarrassing, she added.

That makes anyone less likely to have the energy to job-hunt -- and to be less likely to land the position, Robinson said. But research also shows that when people are offered dental care, their chances of employment go up.

Hyde co-authored a 2006 study in which researchers offered interventions to nearly 400 welfare recipients with severe dental problems. Thirty percent had horribly receding gums, 85 percent were missing one or more teeth, 84 percent had one or more teeth decaying in their mouths, Hyde recalled. “One man told me, ‘I get my wife to chew my food for me first.'”

But when they were offered dental services, the patients flourished, she said. Those who completed their dental treatment were twice as likely to get jobs or move off welfare than those who didn’t finish treatment, the study showed.

That is the goal behind programs like CDA Cares, said Robinson. The foundation sponsors one or two events in different parts of the state each year.

“They go from broken-down, infected teeth or no teeth at all to feeling great about themselves again,” she said.

Patty Kennedy had her five broken back teeth pulled, X-rays taken and a dose of antibiotics that cleared up her abscessed gum and infected sinuses.

“I felt like I was treated with such dignity and respect and kindness and courtesy,” she said.

Now that she feels better both emotionally and physically, she may be up to the task of job-hunting, Kennedy said. She only hopes that others in her position can get help, too.

“There were a lot of people who absolutely didn’t have any teeth,” she said. “They needed some serious work done.”

Related: 

•  Broke and ashamed, many won't take handouts
• 'By the grace of God': How workers survive on $7.25 an hour
• Sprawling and struggling: Poverty hits America's suburbs

Spencer Platt / Getty Images file

People are handed bread during a food distribution by the Food Bank of the Southern Tier Mobile Food Pantry on June 20, 2012 in Oswego, N.Y.

Across the country, schools are getting out for the summer. And while most students will leave their classrooms happy for the break, some parents will be fretting about how to feed their children without meals provided through schools.

The hot summer months bring a fresh challenge for food banks in the nation’s poorest and hungriest counties: How to make sure millions of children get regular, healthy meals when they aren’t in school.

“The time of year in the United States (that) an American child is most likely to go hungry is the summertime, and the principal reason for that is school is out,” said Kevin Concannon, undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services with the USDA.

That often means summer vacations – not the winter holidays – are the busiest time of year for food banks, because they are struggling to fill the gap for children who are not getting regular meals through federally funded school lunch programs and other services.

“We know hunger, just generally across the board, is a bigger problem in summer,” said Celia Cole, chief executive of the Texas Food Bank Network, which represents regional food banks across the state.

Texas is home to six of the 10 counties in the country that had the highest rate of childhood food insecurity in 2011, according to data to be released next week by Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks. All told, nearly 1.9 million Texas children, or 27.6 percent of kids in the state, were living in food-insecure households in 2011, according to Feeding America.

Many food banks also see summer as a time to meet their most important need.

“There is just nothing better that we could be doing than feeding a child,” said Eric Cooper, chief executive of the San Antonio Food Bank.

That food bank serves 16 southwest Texas counties including Zavala County, where nearly half of county’s children were food-insecure in 2011, according to Feeding America.

A household is considered to be food-insecure if at times they had difficulty providing enough food for everyone in the family because of a lack of resources.

The San Antonio food bank and its partners will distribute more than 300,000 meals to kids this summer through the government’s summer food program. Cooper said that will serve about 10 percent of the kids who get meals when school is in session.

“It doesn’t scratch the surface of the kids that are fed during the school year,” he said.

True nationally too
That’s true on a national level as well. About 21.4 million children receive free or reduced-price lunches at school on a typical school day, according to the USDA. Some of the nation’s neediest kids also receive breakfast, snacks, dinner and even backpacks of weekend food through school and after-school programs.

But last summer, only about 3 million kids were fed through the federal government’s Summer Food Service Program, which provides meals to kids though school and community organizations, according to the USDA’s Concannon.

Concannon and others say kids have trouble getting to feeding sites when school buses aren’t running, and parents aren’t always even aware that the programs exist.

The groups that host the programs, in turn, are only paid by how many meals they serve. If turnout is low, it’s hard to justify the expense. Also, the program is mainly available only to high-need areas where half the kids were receiving free- or reduced-lunch during the school year.

Experts say that when kids don’t have regular, nutritious meals, they learn more slowly and have more behavioral problems. They also can develop unhealthy habits, such as binge eating, that puts them at risk for obesity and diabetes.

Kids who are hungry may take desperate measures to get through the summer, such as purposely failing classes so they can go to summer school and be assured of a meal, said the San Antonio Food Bank’s Cooper.

“For communities like ours that struggle with graduation rates, I think the power of nourishing the child can just help in so many ways,” he said.

To reach more kids, some food banks and community centers have tried to find innovative ways to bring food closer to kids.

Sonya Morgan-Wallace will not have to go far to get lunch for her four kids this summer. The Oak Meadow Villa community center, located in her San Antonio apartment complex, will serve one hot meal a day on site to her kids, who range in age from 7 to 17 years old. The meals are provided for free through the San Antonio Food Bank, and funded by the USDA’s summer program.

The program has helped sustain her family as they’ve struggled with unemployment and other setbacks.

Six years ago, Morgan-Wallace was making $15 an hour, with health insurance, working in a doctor’s office.

“We were self-sufficient,” she said.

But she said she had to leave that job when her now 9-year-old daughter, who has cerebral palsy, needed extensive surgery and care. Her husband, meanwhile, had been out of work after losing a job doing transport at a hospital and suffering from a cornea disease. He’s received one cornea transplant and is looking for part-time work while he recuperates and awaits another transplant.

The family also suffered a tragedy last year, when their 12-year-old son died after having an asthma attack.

They rely on the community center for the summer meals and other services, including the emergency food pantry.

“I’m so thankful that they have this program,” Morgan-Wallace said.

Food banks innovate
In other parts of Texas, food banks and community groups also are trying more innovative ways to reach kids during the summer.

About six years ago, officials at the Boys and Girls Club of Pharr, Texas, began noticing that many kids were coming to their after-school programs hungry, so they started offering free, hot dinner and a snack. Stephanie Leal, the club’s director of operations, said they noticed a change in behavior, attitude and focus.

“Kids were having a better time because they were fed,” Leal said.

The program will continue through the summer, offering free breakfast and lunch to about 640 kids who participate in summer activities, plus any other children who show up and want a meal.

Summer meal programs will help, but it won’t be enough to meet all the need in Hidalgo County, where Pharr is located.

“That’s certainly an important component, but when it comes right down to it, most of (the kids) are being fed at home,” said Terri Drefke, chief executive of the Food Bank of the Rio Grande Valley.

The food bank serves three Texas counties, including Hidalgo, where around four in 10 children were living in food-insecure households in 2011, according to Feeding America.

Drefke said they find that most effective way to keep kids fed is to get food directly to families, in churches and community centers that are within walking distance of people in need.

“Our major focus is reaching the family, and trying to make the families accountable for feeding families,” she said.

Editor's note: This report was produced as part of a collaboration with InPlainSight.nbcnews.com, TheGrio.com, NBCLatino.com, msnbc.com, and NBC's owned television stations.

By Erin McClam, Staff Writer, NBC News

Two decades after President Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it," Americans blame government handouts for persistent poverty in the United States more than any other single factor, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday.

Given a list of eight factors and asked to choose the one most responsible for the continuing problem of poverty, 24 percent of respondents in the poll chose "too much government welfare that prevents initiative."

Whether Americans are too dependent on government was a flashpoint of the presidential campaign last year, and shrinking government has been a focus of the Tea Party movement, which has risen since the election of President Barack Obama.

"Lack of job opportunities" was the second most popular answer, at 18 percent, followed by "lack of good educational opportunities" and "breakdown of families," with 13 percent apiece.

The other four options in the poll, in descending order, were "lack of work ethic," "lack of government funding," "drugs" and "racial discrimination." Eight percent of respondents said that all eight factors were equally responsible.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll asked a similar question about poverty in September 1994, during a congressional campaign that focused in part on personal responsibility and the role of welfare.

That poll asked about poverty "in our nation’s inner cities," and did not include welfare as a possible response. The leading answer was "lack of job opportunities," at 31 percent, followed by "breakdown of families," at 23 percent.

Between the two polls, the shape of country’s approach to fighting poverty has changed markedly — particularly after welfare itself was overhauled in 1996 under Clinton.

The number of families receiving cash welfare has dropped by more than half, from about 5 million in the early 1990s to about 2 million in 2011, according to the federal government.

At the same time, the number of Americans receiving food stamps has soared, from about 27 million in 1994 to more than 46 million last year, with a spike in the past few years, after the recession struck.

The recent poll sampled 1,000 adults from May 30 through June 2, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Related:

Poll: Health care law's unpopularity reaches new highs

Ax hovers over food stamp program as costs grow

Financial strain pushes many veterans to the breaking point

Peter "Hopper" Stone

Mitchell (blue shirt) and Cameron (red jacket) are a well-to-do gay couple raising an adopted daughter, Lily, on the TV show Modern Family.

By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News

When gays and lesbians are featured in popular culture, what do we see? White, wealthy women who host talk shows or affluent men doting on their kids -- like Mitchell and Cameron from "Modern Family." So it’s no wonder that the conventional wisdom is that gay people in America have tons of money and fewer economic struggles than the rest of the population.

But the truth is significantly different.

“I think people are surprised there are any poor gay people,” says M.V. Lee Badgett, professor of economics and research director for The Williams Institute, a national think tank at UCLA Law School researches sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy. “This ‘myth of gay affluence’ has been around for a long time. It gets in the way of people even imagining that LGBT people can be poor.”

On Monday, the Williams Institute will release a detailed study about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and their real economic status. Drawing on recent data from four different sources, the report finds a sexual orientation “poverty gap”: LGBT Americans are more likely to be poor than heterosexuals, with African-Americans and women particularly vulnerable. [update: the report is here.]

Badgett spoke with NBC News about the results of the study, "The Gay Affluence Myth: New Research on LGBT Poverty."

Let’s start with a very basic question: Why measure LGBT poverty at all?

What people think they know is that gay people are pretty well-off economically. We don’t see poor LGBT people on television, we don’t see them in movies, we don’t see articles about them when discussions about marriage show up in the newspaper. But it doesn’t mean they’re not there. It just means we haven’t looked for them. And we haven’t looked for them because we think they’re not there.

The government measures poverty for a lot of other groups. What are some of the challenges and difficulties in trying to measure poverty among the LGBT population?

The biggest issue is that LGBT people are invisible in most big surveys. The biggest surveys that the Census Bureau does have asked no questions about sexual orientation or gender identity. Every survey has questions about race, about marital status, about disability, about ethnicity, about whether people have kids – all these things that matter in people’s lives and influence people’s vulnerability to poverty – but they don’t ask whether you’re lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in most surveys. They have started asking about household relationships in ways that allow us to identify people who are living with an unmarried partner of the same sex. That’s created a big statistical revolution in terms of LGBT research but there still are a lot of people who are left out.

Now to some of the conclusions: You find a “gay poverty gap” in America, especially for certain subgroups of gay people.

Yes. There are lots of people in same-sex couples who are poor, and that is an important takeaway. The gap is clear in the raw data for some of these comparisons. For example, for lesbians, if you just look at the poverty rate for women in same-sex couples (7.6 percent), it’s higher than the poverty rate for women in different-sex couples (5.7 percent). For gay men, it’s a little more complicated a story, and race plays a big part. The economic status of lesbians is quite different and often more vulnerable compared to men. It’s a reminder of just how much of an important role gender still plays in determining people’s economic outcome.

Another conclusion is that children of LGB parents are especially vulnerable to poverty. With a poverty rate of roughly 20 percent among children living with gay parents, they are almost twice as likely to be poor as in married opposite-sex couple households. The gap is even bigger for children living with African-American same sex-couples. Why is that?

It’s always shocking to me to see these figures for kids, and the higher poverty rates for the households that have kids. The burden that seems to happen for African-American same-sex couples and their kids is very troubling. It could very well be because of where they live. A lot of those families live in areas with high poverty rates, in the South in particular. African-American people in same-sex couples earn less than white people in same-sex couples, and they earn less than married different sex couples across the board. Those are the things I think are most likely to explain it.

The issue of kids comes up all the time, and we do worry that it will be seen that same-sex couples aren’t good parents, aren’t fit parents, or that African-American same-sex couples aren’t good parents or fit parents. The economic situations that people find themselves in don’t reflect their fitness at being parents. It just reflects how hard it is for them to raise their kids and shows there’s a need for support, including the right to marry and to strengthen their family’s economic situation or to make it more secure by being able to tap into all the benefits that come with marriage.  

The government safety net – cash welfare and food stamps in particular – seems to play a bigger role for LGB poor people and couples than for other poor Americans, according to your research. Does this suggest that the safety net is particularly hospitable to LGB people?

It's probably just the opposite. LGBT people and their families have problems fitting into definitions of family and the regulations, so they may not get a very supportive reception when they come and try to sign up for benefits.

We think there’s something else going on. It could be they are more likely to need the benefits – they may be even more poor than we can see in our data – or it could be that they’re seen as more eligible, because [in most states] they can’t marry. The government may not recognize their relationships when they come in to apply for these benefits. That means that if the spouse with lower income or lower assets applies, they don’t have to [consider] the other person’s income and assets, so they’re more likely to be eligible for those benefits.

Do your findings suggest that policymakers need to adjust their approach to preventing poverty, or to helping people gays and lesbians get out of poverty?

Yes. Making sure that the systems are welcoming and understanding of the life situations of LGBT people is very important. If they feel like their relationships are going to be looked down upon or they’re stigmatized in some other way, they might need those benefits but be unwilling to go in and apply for them.

The findings also suggest that there are other kinds of things to prevent poverty that need to be addressed. For instance, we don’t have any protection against discrimination against LGBT people at the federal level. Only 21 states outlaw discrimination for sexual orientation and 16 states for gender identity. People who lose jobs because of discrimination are very likely to run into problems with poverty. If they don’t have incomes, they will be a whole lot poorer. So, nondiscrimination laws are very important.

Also, marriage is designed to give people a framework for living their economic lives together as well as their family lives, and when people in same-sex couples don’t have access to that framework, then they are automatically deprived of certain kinds of economic supports. Not having the right to marry makes people more economically vulnerable as well.

Editor's Note: This interview has been edited and condensed.

By Eun Kyung Kim, Avni Patel and Erica Hill, NBC News 

Christina Hubbert recently started on the road to a better life with the help of a low-interest loan that allowed her to buy a 2006 Honda, ending her dependence on public transportation.

A car means Hubbert no longer spends two hours each way to and from work in suburban Atlanta. It means spending more time with her 3-year-old daughter — and no longer having to wake her up at 5 every morning so she can be in the office by 8. It also means saving hundreds of dollars each week in day care late fees she incurred when she couldn’t get to the center before its 6:30 p.m. closing time.

“There was just no room to relax, no room to breathe. It was always just go, go, go, go, go,” the 24-year-old single mom told TODAY’s Erica Hill about a life dependent on public transportation and  family who could provide her with rides.

Hubbert bought her car in late March through Ways to Work, a program that offers low-income families loans on used cars after recipients successfully complete a series of educational workshops in financial literacy.

For more information on Ways to Work, click here 

The program proved vital to Hubbert, who maxed out her credit cards in college and made other poor financial choices that left her with a low credit score that made her ineligible for a car loan with an interest rate lower than 18 percent. She says that would have left her with a huge car payment she couldn’t afford.

“I was either going to have to pay for a day care or a car,” she said.

Through Ways to Work, Hubbert now pays back her no-down-payment loan with 8 percent interest.

“This is a hand up,” said Jeff Faulkner, the organization’s president. “Our clients buy their cars, and they pay interest on their car and if they are late, then they pay a fee on it.”

TODAY

Many in the program rely on  public transportation to get to work, but transit’s lack of reliability can make it hard for them to keep a job, and limits  their ability to earn more money for their families. 

Experts say that's because transit systems haven't kept pace with the movement of jobs and people from city centers to the suburbs. On average, low-income workers using public transit in metropolitan areas can only access 22 percent of the low-to-medium-skilled jobs for which they may be qualified, according to a Brookings Institution study on job accessibility in metropolitan areas. 

Faulkner said car ownership can have a direct impact on an individual’s financial success. He cited UCLA research that examined how job opportunities open up for someone with a car, versus someone who can only reach work, or a job interview, by city bus.

“The number of job opportunities that are available in the car circle is about four times the number of opportunities that are available in the bus circle,” he said.

Faulkner said Ways to Work places a heavy emphasis on helping its recipients understand steps they can take to repair their credit and improve their financial lives once they leave the program.

“We provide the education and the kick in the behind to make them be successful with this obligation,” Faulkner said.

Nearly all of the program’s recipients have reported their cars have helped improve their lives, according to the organization’s 2011 evaluation survey. About half said they not only made it to work on time more often, they also missed fewer days. About 44 percent reported getting a promotion or a pay increase since getting their car, the report found.

“A car really is a freedom and economic driver for them,” Faulkner said.

TODAY

A vehicle certainly has freed up life for Hubbert. She says she now has hours of more time every day to spend with her daughter. She also has been able to talk to her daughter's day care teacher and get a full report from her every day.

“It’s amazing. The best feeling in the world,” she said.

Hubbert is also saving money just by picking up her daughter on time, whereas once she could easily incur $100 in a single afternoon by being late.

“Maybe four or five times a week. I was paying an extra $500,” she said, sometimes having to seek the extra money from her grandfather.

It now takes Hubbert about 45 minutes to get to work instead of two hours, two trains and one bus. Ways to Work, she said, has left her dreaming about improving her credit history and possibly a better future.

“I’m more confident in myself. That when I go to job interviews I don't have to necessarily plan two or three hours ahead, waiting on a bus,” she said. “If I want, I can work closer to my house, because I don't have to worry about, 'Oh, the bus goes here and doesn't go there.' To be able to actually think about career moves and where I want to go, and going back to school.”

Jim Seida / NBC News

Nora Gonzalez, right, is unable to work as a caregiver because of criminal justice debt she has been unable to pay since being convicted of passing a bad check in 2005. Here, she assists Cleo Nimietz, her boyfriend's mother, who suffers from sarcoma, in the latter's Federal Way, Wash., home.

By Lisa Riordan Seville and Hannah Rappleye, NBC News 

Cash-strapped cities and states increasingly are trying to tap a previously overlooked pot of money – uncollected fines, fees and other costs imposed by civil and criminal courts – in order to help them balance their books.

And when people don’t pay these court-ordered debts, some local officials have not been shy about tossing them in jail, leading to the creation of modern-day “debtor’s prisons” full of poor offenders, advocates say.

“The system doesn’t really work when the courts, instead of administering justice, are debt collection agencies,” said Roopal Patel, co-author of a 2010 report on the issue by the Brennan Center for Justice. “If a court is preoccupied with fundraising and turning toward the poorest people going through the system to raise money, it really undermines the function of the courts.”

While there is no comprehensive data on how many states jail citizens for court-related debt, several organizations, including the Brennan Center, have raised alarms over what they say is the widespread practice of locking up poor offenders in violation of federal law, citing Supreme Court rulings that someone can only be incarcerated for “willfully” refusing to pay.

James Robert Nason could be a case study for the court-debt-prison cycle.

In 1999, when he was 18, he pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary in Spokane, Wash. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail, community service, and ordered to pay $735 in court costs, attorney fees and restitution. That debt began to accrue 12 percent annual interest from the day of his sentencing.

Nason didn’t finish the community service, and didn’t keep up with the payments. As a result he served more than 120 days behind bars over several years, despite arguing that he couldn’t afford to pay. At one hearing, he said he was both homeless and unemployed.

In 2006, as he faced 120 more days in jail, his court-appointed appellate  lawyer argued that Spokane’s self-described “auto jail,” which put Nason behind bars without a hearing whenever he failed to pay, violated his rights to due process.

In 2010, the Washington State Supreme Court agreed. Before imposing sanctions for failure to pay court debt, “a trial court must inquire into the offender’s ability to pay,” the court wrote in its decision in Nason’s case. Spokane court officials declined to comment, citing pending lawsuits.

Certain counties in Florida, Ohio, Georgia and elsewhere also routinely imprison people who fail to keep up with court debt, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and the Brennan Center. In practice, advocates said, courts often fail to inquire about a defendant’s ability to pay until after they’re incarcerated.

Trying to collect
Even states that do not regularly jail debtors may use the threat of jail to go after fees and fines -- with consequences that can play out for years.

Jim Seida / NBC News

Nora Gonzalez must pay about $3,000 in outstanding fines, fees and interest payments, then wait five years before she can have her record expunged and become re-licensed in her former occupation as a caregiver.

Nora Gonzalez, a 40-year-old Seattle resident, discovered how persistent court-ordered debt can be after she was convicted in 2005 of passing a bad check. She served a few days in jail at the time and was sentenced to make payments to the court.

“What I paid back to the courts was close to $600,” she said. “I thought I was finished, but I guess I wasn’t.”

Last year, she found she owed more than $3,000 in restitution, which has now gone to collections. She must pay her outstanding fines and fees, then wait five years, before she can have her record expunged and become re-licensed in her former occupation as a caregiver. Without a job, she struggles to pay it. But until she pays it, she cannot work.

“If I had the money I would definitely go pay,” she said. “I feel it weighing over me. It’s holding me back.”

In what critics see as an example of collection efforts run amok, Philadelphia in 2010 began to collect court-related debt dating to 1971, after a series in the Philadelphia Inquirer revealed the city had failed to collect an estimated $1.5 billion.

A review by the courts determined that an estimated 400,000 residents owed the city money – cash that Philadelphia, facing a $1.35 billion budget shortfall over five years, sorely needs.

First Judicial District President Judge Pamela Dembe defended the program, which critics say has been problematic because of often incomplete payment information, making it difficult --and in some cases impossible -- to prove whether the debt has been paid.

“When, and only when, an individual is convicted of a crime, there are state required fees and court costs which the defendant must pay,” she said in a written statement. “If the defendant doesn’t pay, law-abiding taxpayers must pay these costs.”

Critics argue that that debt and aggressive collection efforts can prevent poor defendants, many of whom lack legal representation, from contributing to society.

“We’re talking about saddling a population that has nothing with debt, and then telling them they’re supposed to successfully re-enter society and be productive,” said Rebecca Vallas, an attorney with Community Legal Services, which provides legal assistance to poor Philadelphia residents.

'Stunted my growth'
Tyeisha Gamble, 26, who lives on Philadelphia’s north side with her 2-year-old son and her boyfriend, said she has been trying to extricate herself from the system for seven years.

In 2006 she was convicted of simple assault, a misdemeanor, after an altercation with a co-worker. Included in her criminal conviction -- her first and only -- were about $500 in court-ordered fees and fines.

She said she did her best to pay her debt while attending school, racking up more debt with student loans, but fell behind. In 2011, she earned her BA in fashion marketing from the Philadelphia Institute of Art. But Gamble said her criminal record, which can’t be expunged unless she pays her debt, has made it nearly impossible to land a job in her field.

“It’s stunted my growth,” Gamble said of the $300 she still owes the court. “I’ve put out so many applications, and sometimes I get as far as the interview part, or I actually landed the job, and then got the job taken away from me because of my record.”

Compounding the problem, in Pennsylvania, as in most states, criminal justice debt can also lead to civil penalties, including suspension of drivers’ licenses, garnishment of wages and loss of public benefits.

Sanctions like jail or suspended licenses do not always bring money in, however, so some courts are looking to private companies to help. States such as California and New Jersey have passed laws that allow private vendors to help bring in outstanding fines.

In these instances, courts and municipalities contract with traditional debt-collection agencies, often the same firms that collect on credit card or health care debt. The companies, in turn, often tack additional one-time or monthly service fees onto debtors’ bills.

Other companies have moved beyond collections work to become a part of the criminal justice system itself by overseeing probation. Over the past 15 years, these for-profit probation companies have emerged as important players in court systems across the country, particularly in the South.

Judicial Correction Services, a probation company operating widely in Georgia, Alabama and Florida, has placed advertisements in publications geared at municipalities promising increased revenue, streamlined court dockets and reduced expense. “Unpaid fines are nearly eliminated,” the ad promises.

The role of private companies in enforcing court-ordered financial penalties has led to legal challenges in Alabama, Georgia and Washington, among others.

The suits allege that the companies, which charge monthly supervision fees and additional fees for monitoring, drug testing and other services on top of court fees and fines, routinely seek to incarcerate offenders who fall behind on their payments. In a ruling last summer on a suit involving Judicial Correction Services, an Alabama judge said that the probation system in one town had led to a “debtor’s prison.” The company said it was merely complying with a state mandate to collect on court-ordered fines and fees.

Judicial Corrections Services did not respond to requests from NBC News for comment.

Those skeptical of the for-profit model worry that private companies are more focused on the bottom line than the public good.

Dale Allen, chief probation officer for Athens County, Ga., said that although the county’s publicly run probation program charges monthly supervision fees, probation officers there are less focused on collecting fees than a for-profit company may be.

“I’m not a collection agency,” Allen said in a recent interview. “I want to be a compliance agency.”

“Financial compliance is part of the sentence,” he added. “But there’s a difference between not being able to pay, and not wanting to pay.”

The reporting for this story was supported in part through a grant from the nonprofit Open Society Institute, which says its mission is to "build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens."

More In Plain Sight coverage 

Ax hovers over food stamp program as costs grow

Policy expert says we've made poverty 'too comfortable'

'Like a drug': Payday loan users hooked on quick cash cycle

By Izhar Harpaz and Sopan Deb
Rock Center

For millions of people struggling with the Great Recession, the American dream had become just another jaded catchphrase. But for single dad and Army veteran Dan Greeley, a Longmont, Colo., resident, the future looked promising.

In 2011, Greeley was about to be promoted to director of operations at Sister Carmen, a nonprofit community center and food pantry, and he was certain that his higher income would finally allow him to fulfill a dream: to buy a house for his three young children, ages two, four and six.

“Everything I do is for my kids,” Greeley told NBC News' Lester Holt in an interview airing Friday, March 15 at 10pm/9CDT on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams. “I can live in an apartment and be happy. But they want a house, they want a backyard. They’re going to get a house and they’re going to get a backyard.”

But instead of getting a raise, Greeley was forced to take a pay cut.

He fell victim to what is known as the "Cliff Effect," when a small increase in a family's income can lead to an abrupt termination of an essential public benefit like food stamps, health insurance or child care assistance.

For Greeley it was child care. As the single parent of three young children he needed lots of it and it came at a high cost -- $2300 a month, almost all of his take-home pay. And that was before his rent, car payments, utilities and health care bills. Not to mention the money he needed to put food on the table.

“The way I was brought up, we didn't ask for help,” Greeley said. “We just figured it out and this was the first time I had to ask for help.”

As long as he earned below $50,000 a year, Greeley qualified for as much as $1,700 a month through Colorado’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), a fund jointly subsidized by the state and federal government to support working parents.   But as a result of budget cuts in 2010, Boulder County lowered the income limit to 185 percent of the federal poverty level for a family of four – about $41,000. That was $3000 less than what Greeley was making.  And even though his upcoming raise would have increased his income a bit more, it would not have been nearly enough for Greeley to pay for his kids’ child care on his own; Greeley would have been earning more, but would in fact be worse off.

“My stomach was in knots,” Greeley said. “Supposed to get a raise, and instead, I took a pay cut.”

Sister Carmen CEO Suzanne Crawford, Dan’s employer, couldn't believe it when her newly minted director of operations showed up ashen-faced at her office. “For me, it was really educational,” she said. “Because I would never in a million years expect an employee to come in and ask me for a pay cut.”

She agreed to cut his pay, but with reservations.

“I was angry, as an employer, that somebody that works so hard and is so dedicated to the organization has to take a pay cut in order to keep working here and to have care for his children,” Crawford said. “It’s just really frustrating.”

Roadblocks to self-sufficiency

“Parents who are trying to work at low or moderate wage jobs and raise kids often run into roadblocks where the system just doesn't make sense,”  said Olivia Golden, an expert on child and family assistance programs at the Urban Institute, a non-partisan economic and social policy research organization based in Washington, D.C.

A possible solution would be to gradually phase out benefits as a family’s income grows rather than cutting it off. But the problem, Golden said, is that federal support for child care assistance is capped, and in a weak economy states cannot generate enough additional revenue to assist all those in need.

“It's like trying to take a sheet that's not big enough for the bed and pull it and tug it across,” Golden said.  “States find themselves trying to use those dollars to meet a need that's much bigger than what they can meet.”

The federal government estimates that one in three families who are eligible for child care assistance do not receive any help at all. And the ones who do are subject to income limits that may fit a state or county’s tight budget – but do little to help families become self-sufficient. Low-income working families can face other benefit cliffs when they cross income thresholds that lead to loss of food stamps or Medicaid, but Golden said that the loss of child care assistance is perhaps the most significant for those families like Greeley’s who are on the cusp of a middle class life.

“We've been talking a lot about the middle class and the American dream,” Golden said. “And to me, people who are working hard, trying to raise their kids, and on the edge of that middle class life, it should be one of our priorities to help them gain the stability they need to have that life that we all aspire to.”

Searching for a home

Greeley wakes up every morning at 3:00 a.m.  An hour later, he packs his children’s bags and then drops them off at a day care facility that has been able to accommodate his early work schedule.  At 4:00 p.m., he’s back with the kids to start what he considers his “real job.”

“I get home. I got food to cook. I got bath time. I’ve got play time. I’ve got school homework,” Greeley said. “Yeah, I don’t get a break. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m going to say that. I love it, every minute of it. It’s my life.”

A life Greeley hoped would include a home he and his kids could call their own. But his pay cut threatened his goal of buying a home. While it managed to save his child care benefits, it also lowered the mortgage he qualified for. By June 2012, after six months of searching, Greeley still had not been able to find a house he could afford. His first six offers were rejected.

“The American Dream is owning a home,” Greeley said. “I fought for it. I served my country for it. And I felt like I was getting left behind.”

When a doubled income creates hardship

Colorado’s Gov. John Hickenlooper is trying to figure out how to lend a helping hand to working families like Greeley’s.

“That's the age-old challenge,” Hickenlooper said, “You want to provide a hand up, not a hand out.” 

The governor came face-to-face with the Cliff Effect when he hired his executive assistant, a single mother who had been earning $9 an hour at her previous job.

“We said, ‘We’ll start you at $16 an hour, almost double.’ When she sat down and looked at what that did to her entire universe -- she would lose her health care, she’d lose her child care,” Hickenlooper said. “We almost doubled her income and she was going to come out worse.”

The governor recently signed legislation that would help families with child care even after they exceed the income limit. Now he has to find the money to pay for it.

“We have to look at our priorities. Certainly child care and early childhood education is critically important to our state,” Hickenlooper said, “If we’re going to add something, we’ve got to figure out where it’s going to come from.”

The governor fears that not giving working families the help and incentives to rise out of poverty will create a collective disillusion that may hamper the nation’s recovery.

“If people aren't fully committed to doing better, and getting a promotion, and working harder, then the business is never going to do as well as it can,” Hickenlooper said. “And if your businesses aren't doing well, then the country's not going to do well.”

On a sunny day in July,  Greeley finally got lucky. For the sake of his children he made another offer on a house, and was surprised to learn that the offer -- the seventh one on the seventh house -- was accepted.

“I was happy,” Greeley said. “I was so excited to come and tell the kids, ‘Hey, you got your new house, the one you love.’”

The good news did not stop there. As he was moving into his new home, Greeley found out that Boulder County, helped by a property tax hike, had found some more money in its coffers and increased the child care income limit. That meant that after three years Dan was finally able to get that raise.

“What a feeling,” Greeley said. 

Editor's Note: Lester Holt's full report, 'Cliffhanger' airs Friday, May 24 at 10pm/9c on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams.

When Americans think about poverty, chances are they don’t picture places such as the suburbs surrounding Cape Coral, Fla., Colorado Springs, Colo., and Atlanta.

But a new book, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America,” finds those were among the suburban areas that saw some of the biggest increases in the number of poor people between 2000 and 2010. The growth was part of a broader shift toward increasing poverty among suburban residents over that decade.

The Brookings Institution book, which was released Monday, detailed the findings the think tank shared with NBC News in March for its report on how poverty has shifted to the suburbs.

The number of suburban residents living in poverty rose by nearly 64 percent between 2000 and 2011, to about 16.4 million people, according to Brookings. That’s more than double the rate of growth for urban poverty in major metropolitan areas, and means that for the first time there were more poor people living in suburbs than in cities.

“I think we have an outdated perception of where poverty is and who it is affecting,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the research, told NBC News in March. “We tend to think of it as a very urban and a very rural phenomenon, but it is increasingly suburban.”

In the suburbs of Cape Coral, the poverty rate increased by 8 percentage points between 2000 and 2011, to 18.6 percent. In the suburbs surrounding Colorado Springs, the poverty rate increased by 6 percentage points over the 10-year period, to 12.4 percent. In the Atlanta suburbs, it rose 5.9 percentage points to 13.9 percent.

Of course, there are still plenty of metropolitan areas struggling with far higher rates of poverty than their suburban counterparts.

In Grand Rapids, Mich., for example, the poverty rate increased by 14.3 percentage points between 2000 and 2010, to 30 percent. Over that same period, the suburbs of Grand Rapids saw the poverty rate rise by 5.8 percent, to 12.1 percent.

The official release of the Brookings data prompted a number of news outlets to take a look at how poverty demographics have changed in their area.

In Southern California, the Los Angeles Times reported on how the shift in demographics has created tensions in some communities, while the need has been hard to spot in other traditionally well-to-do areas.

In Washington state, The Seattle Times reported on how poverty has sprung up in the south suburbs of Seattle, where immigrants and refugees mix with low-income families who could no longer afford Seattle’s real estate costs.

And in Minnesota, the Star-Tribune explored how a rise in suburban poverty has increased the need for community services such as emergency aid and food assistance in the suburbs of Minneapolis-Saint Paul.

In the Washington, D.C., area National Public Radio detailed how those agencies have struggled to adapt to the changing demographics of poverty, and meet the needs of the suburban poor.

Getty Images file

A sign in a market window advertises the acceptance of food stamps in New York City.

By Andrew Rafferty, Staff Writer, NBC News

A heated battle is brewing on Capitol Hill over cuts to the food stamp program, with lawmakers quoting Bible verses at each other and benefits for millions of people hanging in the balance.

Nearly 47 million people – one in seven Americans – rely on food stamps for some or all of their daily sustenance, according to the Department of Agriculture, a number that has grown nearly 70 percent since the financial collapse of 2008.  

The increased enrollment has caused costs to soar from $35 billion in 2007 to $80 billion last year, and now lawmakers in both the House and the Senate are targeting program for cuts even as advocates cry foul.

Legislation making its way through Congress would eliminate billions of dollars in funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. Last week, a Senate committee approved striking $4.1 billion from the program over 10 years and a House committee backed cuts five times as large.

Those actions set the stage for a congressional showdown not only over how much to slash the program, but also over the role of government in fighting hunger and poverty.

During contentious debate over the Farm Bill, which funds food stamps, in the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., invoked the Book of Matthew as he noted his opposition to the cuts.

“[Jesus] says how you treat the least among us, the least of our brothers, that’s how you treat him,” Vargas, adding that Jesus specifically mentions the importance of feeding the hungry.

Republican Congressman Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, who supports cuts to the program, had his own Bible verse from the Book of Thessalonians to quote back to Vargas: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat,” he said.

The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the House version of the farm bill making would throw nearly 2 million people off food stamps, most of whom are working families with children or senior citizens. More than 200,000 kids would lose access to free school lunches, according to the group.

The more modest Senate proposal would cost half a million SNAP recipients $90 each month, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. For a family of four, the current maximum monthly allotment is $668; recipients get less as their income rises. The cuts come on top of the looming expiration of a temporary funding boost the program received in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that will also slash recipient benefits.

“It is impossible to impose these types of cuts to SNAP without having the most vulnerable in our society suffer,” said Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy for the center.

Most households that get food stamps include either a child, a person over 60 or someone who is disabled, according to federal data. And all are either poor or low-income:  To be eligible for food assistance, income must not exceed 130 percent of the federal poverty line -- roughly $30,000 annually for a family of four.      

AP

Stacks of paperwork await members of the House Agriculture Committee as they consider the 2013 Farm Bill, which includes cuts to the $80 billion-a-year food stamp program.

As the economy slowly improves, dependence on food stamps has yet to decline. Decreased enrollment in the program typically lags substantially behind economic recovery, and congressional forecasters predict that under current law more people will seek benefits from the program before the rolls go down. Advocates for food stamps argue that many of the jobs created during the recovery have been low-wage, and as result the working poor often qualify for food stamps even though they are employed.  

Rachel Sheffield, a policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the proposed cuts to the food stamp program are minimal and are part of a much larger issue over how much the government spends on welfare as the country continues to go into debt. 

"The approach of the federal government really has been throwing money at the symptoms of poverty rather than addressing the causes of it," said Sheffield. The think tank calls for adjusting spending on SNAP to pre-recession levels, taking into account inflation, and also strengthening the work requirements for able-bodied adults.

Some Republicans believe the expansion of food stamps under President Barack Obama has been an intentional political strategy to win the support of low-income voters, an issue that took prominence during his 2012 re-election campaign.

“It seems to me that the goal of this administration is to expand the rolls of people who are on SNAP benefits, the purpose of which is to expand the dependency class," said Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa.

Advocates for the program say it has helped stave off hunger and deprivation for many families at a time when jobs have been hard to come by.    

James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, is working with food banks and organizations that focus on hunger issues to lobby Congress against slashing food stamp spending. For them, it is not a matter of politics or theories on the role of government, but a matter of getting people the assistance they need.

“People in the field know how much harm these cuts can cause,” said Weill. “Those who actually work with low-income Americans around the country know they can’t provide a sufficient amount of people with the help they need if these cuts take place.”

By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News

What if, instead of operating a variety of anti-poverty programs, the government simply mailed every poor person in America a check big enough to lift them out of poverty? That, says the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner, would make more sense than what we do now – and, he says, we’d still have money left over.

Michael Tanner, CATO Institute senior fellow.

Here’s Tanner’s math: By his count, the federal government spends more than $668 billion a year on a total of 126 anti-poverty programs, including those that address housing, hunger, health care, and cash assistance. They range from TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), which most people associate with traditional welfare, to much smaller programs for Indian tribes, at-risk youth, and others. If you divide Tanner’s total by the roughly 46 million people with incomes below the poverty line, you get nearly $15,000 for every poor man, woman, and child in the U.S.

Tanner acknowledges that poor individuals don’t receive that much money, and that’s his point: government spending isn’t laser-targeted to those most in need. In fact, he says, “throwing money at the problem has neither reduced poverty nor made the poor self-sufficient. It is time to re-evaluate our approach to fighting poverty.”

You’ve taken a fair amount of heat for saying that America should “focus less on making poverty more comfortable.” What do you mean by that? Is poverty ever comfortable?

Poverty is never a good thing. But most of the programs we have to combat poverty are based on taking people who are in poverty and giving them a little more income so their poverty doesn’t feel quite as bad. Instead, we should be focused on how to we get more people out of poverty.

What do you think we are doing wrong?

The problem is that our welfare programs aren’t targeted at the right things: education, pregnancy prevention, and job creation. They’re targeted at giving people who are poor the resources to live in poverty.

We know that if you drop out of high school you’re likely to be poor. If you graduate from college, your chances of escaping poverty are much greater.  

We know that if you’re a woman, don’t get pregnant if you’re not married. That’s not a moral judgment, it’s an economic one. It’s simply more difficult to raise a child if you have one income rather than two.

And get a job, any job, even a low-wage job, and stick with it. Even a low-paying job is better than no job at all. People are more likely to move out of poverty if they have a low-paying job than if they are on welfare.

And we need to create more jobs. The fact is, we still have an anti-job atmosphere. Too many taxes, too many regulations. We don’t do a very good job of creating an environment that’s going to create more jobs.

What do we do about the millions of people who are in poverty right now? They are poor, they don’t have skills, they don’t have a good education, they don’t have or can’t get a job. Do we pull the safety net out from under them?

We should target our aid to those people who need the help the most. We have created a situation in which there are a certain number of people who are not going to be able to become an economically viable family unit anytime soon, and we probably have to support them in the short term. In the long term, however, we want to give people in the future more of an opportunity to avoid poverty and to get out of poverty.

It’s unfair to compare my approach to utopia. Let’s compare it to the real world and in the real world, the approach I’m talking about would mean fewer poor people than there are today. Would there be zero? No. I don’t know if a society in the history of the world has ever had zero. Poverty in many ways is the natural condition of man. Throughout most of mankind’s history, most people were poor. The question is, how do you create more prosperity?

People on my side of this have often appeared to be hard-hearted, by arguing on a dollars-and-cents basis. But you shouldn’t measure compassion by inputs. You measure by outcomes. And by that measure, we’re failing. And the burden is on the poor, who are the ones suffering in poverty.

So you think it would be more compassionate to blow up and restructure the system?

It’s not fun to live in poverty. Poor people don’t want to be poor. Most poor people would like to work. Most poor people would like to be non-poor. But we’re not giving them that opportunity. The goal should be that each person gets to achieve their full potential. Most people trapped in the welfare system are not getting to do that.

It was Ronald Reagan who said, we fought a war on poverty and poverty won. Do you agree with that?

Let’s put it this way: We are certainly not beating poverty. We may have had a draw but that’s not where we want to be.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed.

Glenn Oakley / for NBC News

"I'm not dumb, but I did a dumb thing," Raymond Chaney says of getting involved in high-interest loans that eventually got him kicked out of his apartment. Chaney rides the bus to whittle away the time -- sometimes for hours at a time.

By Bob Sullivan, Senior Writer, NBC News

For Raymond Chaney, taking out a payday loan was like hiring a taxi to drive across the country. He ended up broke — and stranded.

The 66-year-old veteran from Boise lives off of Social Security benefits, but borrowed from an Internet payday lender last November after his car broke down and didn’t have the $400 for repairs. When the 14-day loan came due, he couldn’t pay, so he renewed it several times.

Within months, the cash flow nightmare spun out of control. Chaney ended up taking out multiple loans from multiple sites, trying to to stave off bank overdraft fees and pay his rent. By February, payday lenders — who had direct access to his checking account as part of the loan terms — took every cent of his Social Security payment, and he was kicked out of his apartment. He had borrowed nearly $3,000 and owed $12,000.

“I’m not dumb, but I did a dumb thing,” said Chaney, who is now homeless, living in a rescue mission in Boise.

Twelve million Americans take these types of high-interest, short-term loans annually. Most don’t have the cash to cover regular expenses and can’t turn to credit cards to cover a shortfall. Instead, they turn to what the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) calls "Alternative Financial Services" — services outside typical banking systems that low-income consumers depend on, such as storefronts that offer check-cashing for people without bank accounts and high-interest payday loans. 

Payday loans often work like a two-week advance on a paycheck -- as a quick fix, that's fine, but like that cross-country taxi, they turn absurdly expensive for the long haul. Some states ban the loans, while others have placed hard caps on interest rates lenders can charge consumers. However, anyone with an Internet connection can find online avenues to access quick cash.

The consequences can be dire.

Chaney’s story of getting trapped in a payday loan cycle is all too typical, consumer agencies say. Only 13 percent of payday borrowers take out one or two loans per year. More than one-third of borrowers do what Chaney did, and take out between 11 and 19 loans, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) says — a hole that’s hard to dig out of.  

Glenn Oakley / for NBC News

With snacks purchased from a convenience store, Raymond Chaney walks to the Boise public library where he will spend the rest of the afternoon on the Internet.

Glenn Oakley / for NBC News

Raymond Chaney gets a soft drink outside the River of Life Mission in Boise, Idaho.

“These products may become harmful for consumers when they are used to make up for chronic cash flow shortages,” the CFPB said last week in its first-ever report on payday loans, which began with the now familiar taxi analogy. The agency is now charged with cleaning up the largely unregulated alternative lending industry, which has proliferated beyond shops to online operators able to skirt state caps on interest rates.  

'People get hooked ... like a drug'
While the CFPB has threatened to impose new rules, two other federal regulators recently told the nation’s banks they must change the way they offer so-called “deposit advance loans” — products traditional banks invented to compete with payday lenders. Banks should begin assessing consumers’ ability to repay the loans, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the FDIC said recently, and should stop issuing loans to consumers who haven’t repaid earlier loans.

Payday loan costs appear deceptively simple — users typically pay $15 to obtain a two-week loan for every $100 borrowed. That might sound like 15 percent — cheaper than a high-interest credit card — but on an annual basis, the rate is actually 391 percent. And the loan is due in full after 14 days. Borrowers typically don’t change their financial situation in that two-week period, so they must renew the loan multiple times.

The CFPB found that an average payday lender pays $458 in fees to borrow $350 for about five months. A recent examination of the title loan industry by the agency was even more bleak: an average title borrower pays $2,140 to borrow $950 for 10 months.

"People get hooked on this stuff, like a drug,” says Jennifer Tescher, CEO of the Center for Financial Services Innovation, which advocates for access to financial services.

The alternative lending industry's lobbying group, the Financial Service Centers of America, says its members serve populations that have been abandoned by traditional banks, such as minority neighborhoods. And they give consumers alternatives to bouncing checks or paying late fees on important bills

"Financial independence and freedom of choice go hand in hand. It’s why our industry got started, and it’s why we’re in business today," Joseph M. Doyle, the group’s chairman, said in a message on the interest group's website. He also argues that short-term loans can be a cost-effective way to plug an emergency cash-flow gap.

Most payday borrowers are poor. The largest chunk of borrowers came from those making between $10,000 and $20,000 per year, the CFPB says. And most are repeat users: About two-thirds had more than seven transactions over 12 months. In Oklahoma, payday users were more likely to take about 17 payday loans during a 12-month span than only one.

A Pew survey found last year that seven out of 10 payday borrowers use the money to pay -- not for emergencies — but for everyday living expenses, like rent, said Pew researcher Nick Bourke.

“The sweet spot (for lenders) is somebody who is struggling to pay their regular living expenses, but somebody who can afford to pay the fee every two weeks,” he said. “That’s where they make their money.”

Not a bank to be seen
Sometimes people turn to retail financial storefronts for a very practical reason: there is no bank nearby. It's hard to quantify the problem of "bank deserts," but the National Community Reinvestment Coalition has tried. It calculates that from 2007 to 2010, bank and credit union branches decreased by 530 nationwide in low or moderate income neighborhoods, while increased by nearly 1,000 in middle and upper class neighborhoods.

“When bank branches close in neighborhoods, fringe institutions such as abusive payday lenders or check cashers increase in number and charge exorbitant interest rates for services that were provided more cheaply by bank branches,” the organization said in its 2012 report. “In contrast to the wealth creation promoted by bank branches, fringe lenders represent wealth ex­traction from modest income communities.”

But even consumer advocates acknowledge there's a place for short-term loans like payday loans. The problem isn’t the term, it’s the interest rates, says Tesch.

“What makes it more difficult is people are philosophically divided on this issue,” said Tesch, alluding to the costs of the loans. “Trying to find middle ground — it’s hard.”

Chaney is working with the Idaho Consumer Finance Bureau to get back on his feet. Once he straightens out his debt problems, he’s hoping to find a new apartment.

In the meantime, he has advice for anyone considering a payday loan: “I had a friend who had back surgery, and it was so painful, he said, ‘If the choice is between back surgery and dying, consider dying.’

“Well, I give people the same advice about payday loans,” Chaney said. “If the alternative to a payday loan is dying, think long and hard about dying.”

Related: Millions of Americans too broke for bank accounts

Bob Sullivan writes The Red Tape Chronicles blog on NBCNews.com. Follow him on Twitteror Facebook.

By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News

"Poverty in America can be solved."

So says our colleague on MSNBC, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Sunday morning, she's devoting her show to finding solutions to poverty in America, putting the issue and the possible solutions in plain sight.

"I keep wondering what our country would be like if we solved poverty," Harris-Perry says.

What if children in our classrooms didn't question if there would be dinner that night? What if mothers didn't have to huddle in parked cars at night because they don't have a home? What if veterans didn't have to beg for pocket change? The first step to finding meaningful solutions to our crisis of poverty and inequality is to ask the question, what if? We do not have to simply accept inequality. We can choose a different future. We will certainly not have all the answers on Sunday, but we are going to at least ask the questions.

 

Sunday's guests do not march in lockstep. They come from across the ideological and political spectrum. They will tackle everything from economic mobility in America -- is it a myth? --  to housing, hunger and criminal justice reform.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, suggests in a blog post written for the show that school choice could go a long way to lifting people out of poverty. "Food stamps recipients can choose their grocery stores and their groceries," she says, "but parents can't choose their schools. Parents should be given school stamps, and told to choose their schools." And, she argues, get rid of the minimum wage and other policies that she says make it hard for firms to hire workers. "The economic solutions to reducing poverty are simple," says Furchtgott-Roth, "but the politics of implementing these solutions appear overwhelming, helping the poor to stay poor."

Other guests on Sunday's show will address how prisons keep many locked into poverty even after they're released, how something as simple as a new pair of boots can make it possible to get a better job, and how supporting mothers will go a long way toward lifting struggling families out of poverty.

"We refuse to see women who are low-income as they really are: kind, hard-working, smart, tenacious, and downright entrepreneurial," says Mariana Chilton, Director of Drexel University's Center for Hunger-Free Communities. "How do we end poverty in America? By honoring America's mothers."

It's bound to be an interesting and in-depth Mother's Day conversation. We'll be watching.

Jennifer Brown / The Star-Ledger

Newark Eagles Little League team player William Jones gives Coach Rodney Mason a high-five as he arrives at practice at the practice field at Weequahic Park on May 15, 2008.

The statistics are sobering. Newark, N.J., has a murder rate double that of the Bronx. A third of its residents live in poverty. Only 40 percent of its students graduate from high school. Behind those numbers, though, are people trying to beat the odds.

In his new book, “A Chance to Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City,” reporter Jonathan Schuppe chronicles that effort through the story of a fledgling Little League team, its improbable coach and inspiring players.

At the center of the narrative is Rodney Mason, a drug-peddling ex-con left paralyzed from a drive-by shooting who decides he can make a difference by starting a baseball team in a city where America’s pastime holds little allure.

Below is an excerpt from “A Chance to Win,” published May 7 by Henry Holt:

For weeks, Rodney had been combing the neighborhood for recruits, but now it was late March, a couple of weeks before the start of the 2008 Little League season, and he had only a handful of completed registration forms.

Baseball just didn’t seem to be on many people’s minds. Some kids had actually told Rodney that they hated baseball, recoiling as if it were some kind of social disease. He couldn’t understand it. This was the national pastime, the game everyone played when he was growing up.

Jennifer Brown / The Star-Ledger

Coach Rodney Mason talks to the Newark Eagles Little League team after they suffered an emotional loss against the Philly Stars at Weequahic Park on May 14, 2008.

And today was the day. If kids didn’t show up this morning, then they never would.

Rodney hoisted himself out of the tub and dried off. He slipped on a condom, fitted to a urine collection bag, and strapped the contraption to his right leg. He ironed his jeans and white T-shirt and switched to a battery-powered scooter that the family of an elderly neighbor had given him after the old man died.

Then he rode a lurching elevator to the lobby and rolled out in the gray chill. The neighborhood was just starting to come alive, people stepping onto their stoops, assessing the weather, waving to neighbors, retreating inside.

The field was empty. So was the parking lot. Rodney pulled up to the dugout, jammed his hands into the pockets of his Yankees windbreaker, and waited. Please god, he prayed. Help me make this happen.

***

Sometimes, when he was not working and his children were at school, Thaiquan Scott stopped by the Jackie Robinson South Ward Little League’s old field at the St. Peter’s Recreation Center to catch a game.

The diamond was lousy with lumps and the quality of play was terrible, but he occasionally noticed a gifted athlete who, if he found the right coach and stuck with it, could probably go on to play in high school or college. Thaiquan wondered why more black kids weren’t interested in baseball.

Thaiquan and his family lived on the second floor of a narrow three-family house with cream-colored vinyl siding on Peshine Avenue. Their block was not what you’d call kid-friendly, though there were many children.

Dope fiends and drunks puttered around in the abandoned lot across the street. Brash young drug dealers played noisy games of dice on the stoops of homes, the tenants too frightened or too complacent to complain. A few days after the Scotts moved in, a thirty-nine-year-old woman was killed in a drive-by around the corner.

Thaiquan and his wife wanted to leave Peshine Avenue, but their house was one of the only places they could find that was cheap and large enough for the seven of them. So they made the best of it by keeping the kids busy and trying to expose them to the world outside the city.

Thaiquan saw baseball, and sports in general, as a bulwark against the streets; the more his kids played, the less chance that something bad would ever happen to them. His father had been an amateur player – a damn good one, he’d heard, but drinking got in the way, and the old man left home without ever passing the game on to Thaiquan.

Now he wanted to give his two oldest children – Nasir, his biological son, and Kaneisha, his stepdaughter – that chance he never got. He pledged that as soon as they reached playing age, he’d sign them up for Little League.

In late March, Thaiquan got word that Nasir and Kaneisha had been assigned to a team. They went to meet their coach and were surprised to see that he was in a wheelchair. Thaiquan introduced himself and felt like he understood Rodney immediately.

“He’s from the struggle,” Thaiquan said later. “But that don’t mean he’s not about the kids. He’s a product of his environment, so he knows how the kids are and how they grow up. I could tell right away that he was doing it from the heart.”

***

It began with a trickle: a child here, another there, and soon there was a crowd. Among the first arrivals was Derek Fykes, who arrived with his grandmother Irene. He was ten but had the face of a tired man: eyes narrowed, brow rumpled, lips slack.

He had just been removed from his father’s apartment by the state child welfare agency. This wasn’t the first time he’d been abruptly pulled from one home and placed in another. Probably wouldn’t be the last, either. Irene worried about the lasting damage of an unsettled childhood. But baseball was one of the few things that helped Derek regain his footing.

Derek was an anomaly in that he’d played Little League before. Just one other boy, a heavy trash-talker named William (who went by “Pooh”), had any experience. The others were young and scrawny and clueless; most didn’t have gloves, and some didn’t know if they threw right-handed or left-handed.

Jennifer Brown / The Star-Ledger

Newark Eagles coach Rodney Mason leads the way back to the bus stop after buying DeWan "Puda" Johnson a new baseball glove and batting gloves.

DeWan Johnson, a magnetic 10-year-old with a gap-toothed grin and nubby dreadlocks that poked from his head like spring shoots, was one of the most promising recruits. No one had taught him how to swing a bat or throw a ball or encouraged him to play baseball at all, for that matter. What little he knew about the game came from watching kids in the park and the Yankees on TV. He had an untethered rocket of an arm and bravely planted himself in front of hard-hit grounders. Rodney assigned him to third base.

The kids were arriving in packs now. A pickup game began. Rodney suddenly looked overwhelmed. A couple of fathers offered to hit grounders, keep the books, whatever they could do to assist. Another man showed up and said he, too, wanted to coach.

By that afternoon, Rodney figured that he’d talked to about a hundred people. When Kelley, the league president, stopped by to see how things were going, she found dozens of kids calling themselves Eagles. They threw like shot-putters, swung bats like axes, ran shrieking through the infield with little clue what they were doing.

It was hard not to chuckle, watching them swirl around Rodney as he tried to figure out what to do next. His sister Darlene showed up and was startled by the sight.

“Where did you get those kids?” she said, aghast. “They cannot play baseball.”

Rodney didn’t care. The hardest part, in his mind, was over; he now had something to work with, something that he could shape into a team. It would not be pretty. But it would happen. Finally. He couldn’t wait to get started.

“That’s all right,” Rodney told his sister. “I’m-a teach them.”

Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Schuppe 

Jonathan Schuppe is a national enterprise reporter for NBC's local news websites and a former staff writer at the Newark Star-Ledger

Jennifer Brown / The Star-Ledger

Newark Eagles Little League player Nasir Scott slides into home after a victory lap following the team's win over the Black Yankees at Weequahic Park on June 14, 2008.

Courtesy Adam Legg

Navy veteran Adam Legg said a long jobless spell after tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan left him feeling hopeless and led him to "go weeks without smiling, walking around like a shadow, like you're not there."

By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor

Hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been flying home to a fresh fox hole: A debt crater that’s sucking in entire military families and could be helping to fuel the veteran suicide crisis.

Courtesy Adam Legg

"I was a watch commander where I had 25 to 30 people working beneath me, in charge of millions of dollars worth of ammunitions, weapons, vehicles, computers," said Adam Legg, a Navy veteran. "And then when I come home, not only can I not find a job, I can't take care of my family."

A bad job market, a long backlog for federal disability benefits, and occasionally unwise spending habits have been conspiring to strain the financial and mental health of many veterans, experts say.

"We keep hearing of suicides rising. How much pressure do you think one person can take?" asks Christopher Fitzpatrick, deputy director of VeteransPlus, a nonprofit that has fielded more than 170,000 calls from ex-service members with imminent financial concerns. 

"No one wants to talk about the fact that there are other reasons, besides PTSD, for suicide at 2 in the morning. You know how we know? We have an online form people use to contact us, and we get those emails — they’re sent at 1, 2, 3, 4 in the morning. People are reaching out, literally: 'Can you please help me? I’m losing everything.'"

It's a problem that could get even worse in coming years, with more than one million service members expected to make the transition to civilian life.

Navy veteran Adam Legg, 30, ran into financial trouble following two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. A jobless and hopeless period that began after his service separation in 2009 led him to "go weeks without smiling, walking around like a shadow, like you're not there," he said.

He couldn't secure a job at his local McDonald's or at dozens of other companies to which he applied in Central Florida. With a wife, Melissa, and a young daughter to feed, he maxed out a credit card that he was able to pay off with money he'd saved during his eight years in the Navy. 

'Very, very dark place'
But bigger bills — like the mortgage — went untouched. After losing his Florida home to foreclosure and two cars to repossession, Legg said he began to consider suicide. 

"When you feel like you can’t take care of your family, feed them, shelter them, it’s a very, very dark place. A feeling of uselessness that maybe they would be better off if you’re not around," Legg said. 

"We've been below the poverty line, absolutely. I was a watch commander where I had 25 to 30 people working beneath me, in charge of millions of dollars worth of ammunitions, weapons, vehicles, computers. And then when I come home, not only can I not find a job, I can’t take care of my family. If it weren’t for my wife, if she was not supportive the way she was, I really don’t think I’d be here right now."

According to VeteransPlus, fewer than 20 percent of their clients have stockpiled a six-month savings cushion while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan despite untaxed, hazardous-duty wages that fattened paychecks.

Some returning veterans planned to live off their credit cards until landing civilian work, even though the veteran unemployment rate is two points higher than the civilian rate, Fitzpatrick said. Some expected to support themselves via VA benefits, apparently unaware that average wait time for that money approaches — and sometimes eclipses — one year.  

The Pentagon urges military personnel and their families to bank some money while in the service. This year, during “Military Saves Week," service members were reminded to “set a goal, make a place and save automatically.” Service members also can take advantage of the Thrift Savings Plan, a federally sponsored retirement savings and investment program resembling a civilian 401(k).

But even some of those who build up savings while serving abroad find their stash exhausted after buying gifts for family and plucking shiny toys, like motorcycles, for themselves when they come home from war, according to VeteransPlus.

"We don’t like using the word ‘entitlement,’ but often that’s what it really is for these young men and women who feel like they’ve served their country and are coming home with some money and ‘now it’s my turn,’" Fitzpatrick said. 

Move west, young man
For Legg, the way out was to escape Florida, not his life. He and his wife packed up their daughter, dog, cat and remaining belongings and recently drove to the Pacific Northwest. Two things lured the Legg family to Baker City, Ore.: a lower cost of living and its proximity to a military-friendly college, Eastern Oregon University. 

He's now a full-time student, living off of his GI Bill and his VA benefits for a diagnosed anxiety disorder (not PTSD), damaged knees, a bad back, and an injured left arm — combat baggage that requires daily Vicodin consumption. They live in a small, rented house.

Melissa was scheduled to deliver their second child last Wednesday. Soon, Legg plans to file for bankruptcy. 

Courtesy Adam Legg

Navy veteran Adam Legg and his family moved to Oregon from Florida.

"I have no choice. We're at that rock bottom line," he said. "I'm not the only one. Of the (veteran) friends I've kept up with, most are struggling." 

Many veterans panic when they face getting kicked out of their homes, or must decide between buying food or diapers, said Kristy Kauffman, executive director of Code of Support, an Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit that proclaims to "bridge the gap between civilian and military America."

"It happens far too often. We get at least one call, email, or referral every week," she said.

Kaufmann agrees with Fitzpatrick that poverty is one factor behind the veteran suicide rate, adding: "It does increase the risk." 

"The vast majority of those who have worn the uniform," she said, "are imbued with a strong sense of mission and pride in 'getting it done.' For those who have trouble reintegrating into the civilian world — whether due to physical or mental health issues, or lack of employment opportunities — it's that loss of mission that seems most debilitating."

Related:

• Companies honored for hiring and supporting veterans
• Pentagon looks to cut up to 50,000 civilians over 5 years
• Hiring Our Heroes job fair part of week-long, national hiring push

Keystone / Getty Images

How one poor neighborhood in Chicago looked in 1963, the year the federal poverty line was determined.

It is responsible for an estimated half-trillion dollars in federal spending every year, is hated by nearly everyone who studies it and is based on an American lifestyle older than the space program.

Yet the figure known as the “poverty line” is almost certainly here to stay. That’s partly because a more accurate measure of who is poor could add millions of Americans to the rolls — something few lawmakers want to have happen on their watch.

“People (are) talking about eliminating poverty in this country,” said Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., whose proposal to change the measure died in Congress five years ago. “You’re not going to eliminate poverty in this country with the definition we have. You can make yourself feel good, but you’re not going to eliminate poverty.”

The poverty line was conceived by a civil servant named Mollie Orshansky who worked for the Social Security Administration and was herself the daughter of poor Ukrainian immigrants. She totaled up the cost of the cheapest three-meals-a-day plan that the federal government considered nutritionally adequate in 1963.

A decade earlier, the Eisenhower administration had calculated that the typical family spent a third of its money on food. So Orshansky multiplied by three. It was that simple. The poverty line was born.

The problem, as social scientists and at least some legislators see it, is that measuring poverty that way is not just outdated but simplistic:

• The federal poverty line — $11,945 in cash income for a single adult, $23,283 for a couple with two kids — is the same whether you are poor in New York, the most expensive city in the United States, or poor in a small town in Nebraska.
• It is the same whether you take transit to work or are hostage to the whims of gas prices. It is the same whether Medicaid helps you with medical expenses or you pay out of pocket. It is the same whether you receive food stamps or pay for child care.
• It is the same regardless of how poor you are. For the purposes of some federal benefits, someone making a dollar below the poverty line is treated the same is someone making virtually nothing.

“There are better ways to measure,” said Robert Haveman, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on poverty. “Nearly any one of them is a better indicator of true poverty than the one we use.”

The federal measure is linked to about half a trillion dollars in federal spending every year, according to a paper published last year by two professors, Bruce D. Meyer of the University of Chicago and James X. Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame, in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Among them: Food stamps, anti-poverty block grants for cities, heating and air-conditioning aid, AIDS drug subsidies, family planning services, Head Start and job-finding assistance.

The Census Bureau, which is responsible for updating the poverty line every year to account for inflation, makes no secret of its flaws as a way to determine who qualifies as poor.

Two years ago, the bureau and the Labor Department agreed on a different way — a poverty line that accounts for medical expenses, geographic differences, the cost of shelter and clothing and other factors.

SSA History Archives

Mollie Orshansky, the civil servant who developed the poverty line, pictured in 1967. She died in 2006.

It’s called the Supplemental Poverty Measure. But it exists only for federal number-crunchers. It has no teeth.

Look into the numbers and it’s easy to see why: Using the existing poverty line, there are 45.8 million poor people in the United States, or about 15 percent of the population. Using the supplemental measure, there are 2.6 million more.

West Virginia’s poverty rate would fall about four percentage points if the supplemental measure were updated — meaning fewer federal dollars for its people. California’s poverty rate would soar, from 16 percent to 23 percent.

“Some states would get gored, and some states would be happy,” Haveman said. “You get all sorts of political opposition. It’s a gridlock.”

Because of what analysts have called a historical accident, any change to the poverty measure has to come from the Office of Management and Budget, under the president. And no president wants to suddenly have millions more poor people on his watch.

All the other major economic statistics are controlled by federal statistical agencies, which have to review and update them regularly, Rebecca Blank, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Congress in 2008.

“There is no other economic statistic in use today that relies on 1955 data and methods developed in the early 1960s,” she said. Blank is now the acting commerce secretary and declined an interview request through a spokeswoman.

Frustrated by the federal poverty measure, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg adopted his own in 2008. The city took into account the higher local cost of living, among other expenses, and set the line about $8,000 higher for a family of four.

The result was a higher poverty rate — 21 percent in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, compared with 19 percent using the federal line.

But because the New York measure also accounts for help for the poor, like tax credits and food stamps, it also led the city to conclude that Bush administration tax cuts and the Obama stimulus package had helped keep poverty from going even higher.

McDermott, the Washington congressman, introduced a similar nationwide bill in 2008. It would have taken into account modern costs of living and benefits for the poor. It never came up for a vote.

“One can only speculate about why,” he said in an interview. “Except the fact that you’re much more likely to find a lot of people poor.”

By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News

What does it mean to be part of America’s middle class? And who is middle class? A new poll asked Americans to define what it means to be part of the middle class, and to put themselves somewhere along the spectrum between upper-, upper-middle, middle-, lower-middle- and lower-class.

• 46 percent of Americans consider themselves solidly middle class. But it’s not necessarily a source of comfort. As the pollsters put it, “the American middle class is anxious and in flux. While many dream of upward mobility, most are concerned about falling out of their economic class” over the next few years.
• While half of all Americans consider higher education to be the most effective way to protect and earn middle class standing, many middle class Americans are struggling with  how to pay for the high cost of that education.
• Perhaps most noteworthy is what might be called the downsizing of the American dream. Traditionally, that dream included upward financial and professional mobility, buying a home, yearly vacations and saving for the future. Now, the poll found, a solid majority (54 percent) of Americans believe that being middle class these days means keeping up with expenses and holding a steady job, not falling behind or taking on too much debt.

High anxiety, in plain sight.

Scott Olson / Getty Images

This 2009 file photo shows a fence surrounding the shuttered GM assembly plant in Janesville, Wis.

By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News

Call it the painfully long tail of the Great Recession: about two of every five people who lose a job these days, according to census figures, cannot find another one for six months or longer.

Even as overall unemployment has been improving, this long-term unemployment hasn’t been getting better – and it’s far worse than at any other time since the government began keeping track after World War Two.

Amy Goldstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer on leave from The Washington Post, has spent the past 1-1/2 years researching the small city of Janesville, Wis., taking an intensely close look at what has happened in one community where thousands of people lost their jobs when the country’s oldest operating auto plant closed its doors. More than four years later, many of the people laid off from the plant and other local companies are still struggling to find a job with decent pay—or any job at all.

Goldstein talked to NBC News about the book she is writing and what she has learned during her time in Janesville.

Tell us a little about your project and the questions you are trying to answer.

Amy Goldstein: I am writing about what’s happened in one perfectly ordinary community since a lot of jobs there vanished a few years ago. When work goes away, what happens then? That’s my main question. I’m doing this because there’s been a real problem in this country lately with people being laid off and then stuck out of work. And, a lot of people who do manage to work again are ending up in part-time jobs or full-time ones with worse pay, because that’s all they could find. So that means people in the United States are falling out of the middle class, and that seemed to me a big, important change, and I wanted to understand close-up what it really looks like.

Why, of all the places you could have been writing about, did you pick Janesville?

For starters, I wanted a place that had never been part of the Rust Belt, so that I’d be looking just at the effects of the country’s recent economic crisis and not at decades of accumulated economic decay. Janesville definitely fit the bill. Two days before Christmas of 2008, the Janesville Assembly Plant shut down. It belonged to General Motors and was a 4.8 million square foot behemoth that had begun turning out Chevrolets in 1923. When it closed, it laid off about 3,000 people and took thousands of other jobs with it, because Janesville also had local companies that had supplied goods and services to the plant, and when GM went away, they went away too. And after that, some small businesses couldn’t make it either.

Janesville also had been the home of Parker Pen, which at one point was the world’s largest manufacturer of writing instruments. It eventually was sold, and the company’s final Janesville workers lost their jobs early in 2010. And because these industries had been around so long, a lot of families have deep roots in town, so I thought that would make it interesting.

Plus, it’s interesting politically. It happens to be the hometown of Paul Ryan. I actually picked Janesville a year before Mitt Romney picked Rep. Ryan last summer as his running mate. So you have a leading conservative as the congressman who represents what’s basically an old union town. And it’s in Wisconsin, which is led by a polarizing Republican governor, Scott Walker, who last year became the first U.S. governor ever to survive a recall election.

So, what does it look like in a community when thousands of good, middle-class jobs go away and they don’t come back?

I think the main thing I’ve been learning is that falling out of the middle class is very different than having been poor all along. If you’ve grown up poor – been in generational poverty, it’s called – you are used to it. Often, people around you are poor and, even if there are not great options, you pretty much know what to do: apply for what used to be known as food stamps, for instance, or go to the local emergency room if you’re sick. But when you’ve always thought of yourself as middle class, and suddenly you’ve tumbled downhill, well, that can be a real stunner. You don’t want your neighbors to know, and you’re not sure where to turn for help. You don’t even want to ask for help, because you never saw yourself as someone who would need it.

Beyond the changes for people who have lost jobs, a lot of other things in town have changed, too. The school system, for instance, has had to adjust because now more than half the kids are poor enough for federal lunch subsidies – double what it was a few years ago. A little health clinic  that has been around for a long time – and treats just people who are uninsured – is now overwhelmed. So is the main food pantry in town, which has to turn people away some mornings. Janesville is a very generous-spirited place, with fundraising going on all the time; but it’s hard to keep up with the new demand.

And the cleavage points in town have changed. Some people used to resent the GM’ers, who had such good wages and benefits. Now, some people are angry at schoolteachers for similar reasons; at least one teacher has changed when she goes grocery shopping, because she’d gotten yelled at in the store more than once by people in town who resented her summers off and her pension.

Tell us about just a few of the people you’ve met in Janesville whose individual experiences tell a larger story.

I’ve met people who are trying hard to help their family and their community: Twins girls – bright and aware high school seniors – who are juggling a lot of jobs (they have become Tupperware saleswomen, among other things) and buy the groceries now and then because their parents are low on cash. People who commute to jobs at other GM plants hundreds of miles away from their families. A social studies teacher who has created a “closet” at her school so kids whose families are struggling can pick up canned food or used jeans.

You wrote an article about job retraining for the dislocated workers of Janesville. As you pointed out, the idea of retraining has a lot of bipartisan political support, and it sounds like a great idea – teach people how to do the jobs that are available so they can get back on their feet.  Does retraining work?

I think retraining can work, but it doesn’t always. I looked at a two-year college in Janesville, called Blackhawk Tech, which was deluged with former factory workers. It’s been doing basically everything that policymakers recommend: working closely with local employers, steering students into fields where jobs seem most likely to exist, providing extra help for these people who’d been thrown out of their jobs and, sometimes, were scared, angry, depressed and nervous about whether they could succeed in school. Still, not everyone who has retrained there has found a good job – or any job at all. As one counselor at the college told me, “Retraining, yes. But retraining for what?”

Travis Dove / for NBC News

Kim James outside the Dove House, a half-way house in Durham, NC that helped her recover from poverty and addiction. James has since been able to start banking again through the Self Help Credit Union.

There are plenty of reasons people still live all-cash lives, but the sheer number who do it might surprise you. At a time when the majority of Americans use online banking, and some even deposit checks using their cellphone cameras, roughly eight percent of America's 115 million households don’t have a checking or savings account, according to census data compiled by the FDIC. 

The numbers are far higher among minorities: More than 20 percent of African-Americans and Hispanics are essentially left out of the American banking system.

Frozen in the cash-only past, they face myriad “kick-them-while-they-are-down” situations where getting money costs money. Banks typically charge $6 to cash checks. Want to secure an apartment? Fee-based money orders are the only option. Without credit cards, they must turn to triple-digit interest rate payday loans for emergencies.

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Lasonia Christon of Jackson, Miss., tries to avoid getting paid in checks, but when her state tax refund for $231 arrived recently, she had to pay $7 to cash it at a nearby convenience store.

Christon works at Wal-Mart. Her paychecks are deposited onto a prepaid debit card -- an improvement over old-fashioned paper paychecks, which led to high check-cashing fees. It’s hardly a good substitute for direct deposit, however. One cash withdrawal per period is free, but others cost $2. She can avoid the fee by shopping at Wal-Mart and getting cash back at checkout.

She is among the 60 percent of unbanked Americans who previously had a checking account. Christon used to share one with her sister, but It cost her dearly.

"There was an overdraft here and an overdraft there, and it just didn't work out," she said.

Travis Dove / for NBC News

Kim James at the Dove House, a half-way house in Durham, NC that helped her get back on her feet after struggles with poverty and addiction.

Fuentes-Sanchez made a fairly good living working for a tree removal company in Lumber Bridge, N.C., for about 10 years. But he was skeptical of banks, and when he tried to open an account, he was surprised by the cost.

"Instead of making money, I would have to pay fees," he said, through a translator. "(So) we used to keep money in the house. We were always trying to look for ways to hide the money in the house and keep it safe."

At one time, Fuentes-Sanchez had $25,000 stashed in different places throughout the house – his Latino community had been plagued by house burglaries because neighbors did the same. When his wife got cancer, her treatments devoured all their savings. Down to their last $500, and before she passed away, she convinced him to open a bank account at Latino Community Credit Union, which was opened in part to help stem the burglary problem.

“She managed the money," and was disciplined enough to avoid spending it, said Fuentes-Sanchez, 37, who now raises five children alone. "(I) sometimes see something and I am tempted to buy it ... Now the money is in the bank.”

Saving -- putting money out of temptation's reach -- is the core concept of consumer banking. But the importance of participating in the financial system has stretched far beyond the quaint notion of interest, said Jennifer Tescher, CEO of the Center for Financial Services Innovation, who is generally regarded as the person responsible for popularizing the term unbanked.

"A bank account in a way has become like a passport or a driver's license," said Tesch. "It's a kind of access device."

James, 55, has been in and out of homelessness for several years.  She now lives at a half-way house called Dove House in Durham, N.C., and figured she could never move into her own apartment unless she could stash away the money needed for a security deposit. Without a savings account, that was a challenge.

"Cash in hand is cash spent, my mother always said," she said.

Two years ago, she met Duke University student Janet Xiao, who was part of a group named the Community Empowerment Fund, which visited Dove House offering life skills training, including a class on personal finance where she nudged women to open a bank account.  James was reluctant.

"It's really demoralizing to open up an account and have it sitting in there with no money in it," Xiao said. “I think most folks want to take one step at a time, and get a job first. Also, there is this fear of being charged fees you don't understand.”

When James got a part-time job in January, she finally took up Xiao’s offer of help.  The two set up an account with the Self-Help Credit Union on Xiao’s laptop right at the Dove House kitchen table.

"She even put the first $5 in there for me," James said. After depositing her first paycheck in person at Self-Help, Xiao said, James did a little dance. 

“Now whenever I get even $10 or $20, I go to the bank and deposit it,” James said. Within a few months, she put together enough to pay her security deposit and first’s month’s rent. As soon as she saves enough for a bed, she’ll move in.

Travis Dove / for NBC News

James has been able to start banking again through the Self Help Credit Union, and has saved enough to pay a security deposit and the first month's rent for her own apartment..

'Saving for the future'
Self-Help is part of a growing set of financial companies called Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs). Supported by the U.S. Treasury Department, their mission is to help the unbanked get into the financial system.

”You make sure people are getting products and services they need,” said Mark Pinsky ,CEO of the Opportunity Finance Network, which helps fund CDFIs. “Banks may be the best place, they may not, but we don't want to just leave them vulnerable to the predators out there.”

Christon has recently been persuaded to open an account in a different way. Her 3-year-old twins’ day-care facility was recently visited by representatives of the Mississippi College Savings Account program, who helped her open a small account for the children. She then realized she needed her own savings account.

Camerique - ClassicStock - Corbi

The Hollywood image of the care-free, freckle-faced, teenage hamburger flipper is no longer the norm.

By Amy Langfield, NBC News contributor

Wendy Lott's career has made a detour to a small-town pizzeria in South Carolina.

She works 10 hours a week making pizza for minimum wage. She has no other job, no health insurance and no idea how she can afford to go back to college, let alone pay the hospital that treated her asthma-related bronchitis.

She’s 27, lives with her mother and most of her take-home pay goes to gas and household items. “It would be nice to get off food stamps, but on $62, I can’t,” Lott said, referring to her weekly take-home pay from her $7.25-an-hour minimum-wage job.

In many ways, she is a typical fast-food worker: She's older than you'd expect, has more years of schooling and works in the industry not for entry-level experience, but to try to keep her head above the financial storm that threatens to swamp her. 

Due to the lingering effects of the Great Recession, the Hollywood image of the care-free, freckle-faced, teenage hamburger flipper is no longer the norm. Only 16 percent of fast food industry jobs now go to teens, down from 25 percent a decade ago.

And many of the older workers are educated. More than 42 percent of restaurant and fast-food employees over the age of 25 have at least some college education, including 753,000 with a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Related story: Fast food workers serve up classic role in pop culture

In many cases, teens have been squeezed out of the workforce before they even begin. While the overall U.S. population posted an unemployment rate of 7.6 in March, for teenagers 16 through 19, it was 24.2 percent, according to the BLS.

“Young people have been hit very hard by this downturn,” said Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University. Studies show a worker's most rapid wage growth happens in the 5 to 10 years after graduation as you switch jobs and find what you’re good at, Holzer said. “That whole process is disrupted by this downturn.”

Ed Maker / The Denver Post file

On average fast-food employees work only 24 hours a week. Those who can get full-time hours make a median annual salary of $17,813 a year.

Fast-food workers are part of the lowest-paying major occupational group in the United States, according to government data. On average they work only 24 hours a week. Those who can get full-time hours make a median annual salary of $17,813 a year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Others find they don’t get as many hours as they need, and erratic schedules make it difficult to juggle more than one job at a time.

“I’ve been trying to find a better job,” said Lott, who has been requesting more hours for the entire year she’s been at the pizza place. Two weeks ago she was turned down for a grocery store job she hoped would supplement her 10-hour week schedule. “I was not hired because I wasn’t available enough,” she said.

The food services industry is rebounding faster than the rest of the economy, and has been creating jobs. Prior to the Great Recession, 35 percent of industry employers said their No. 1 worry was recruiting and retaining employees, according to the Restaurant Industry Tracking Survey. This year, only 5 percent said it was a prime problem.

“With the national jobless rate hovering around 8 percent and more than 20 million individuals still unemployed or underemployed, the labor pool remains sufficiently deep for most,” said the National Restaurant Association's 2013 outlook.

Restaurant industry officials have argued they provide good first-time jobs for many people, and that President Barack Obama's proposed increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 by the end of 2015 would hurt them.

Related: Most memorable fast-food workers in movies, TV

“The restaurant industry is dominated by small businesses. More than seven in ten eating and drinking establishments are single-unit operations,” Melvin Sickler, who operates Auntie Anne’s Pretzels and Cinnabon franchises in New Jersey, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in March. “Food and labor costs are the two most significant line items for a restaurant. With average pre-tax margins of roughly 4 to 6 percent, increases in food and labor costs can have a dramatic impact on a restaurant’s bottom line.”

Not everyone agrees.

The corporations have intentionally created a “disposable workforce” with high turnover rates, argues Saru Jayaraman, the author of “Behind the Kitchen Door” and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. The restaurant industry lobbies against a hike in the minimum wage and intentionally keeps workers at minimal hours with erratic schedules to prevent them from being able to organize or claim benefits, she said.

“People are piecing together jobs to work full-time,” said Jayaraman, who is also the co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers.

Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Fast-food employees are not like they used to be. Today, more than 42 percent of restaurant and fast-food employees over the age of 25 have at least some college education. About 753,000 have a bachelor's degree or higher.

Some fast-food chains are doing it right, Jayaraman said, such as Five Guys and In-N-Out Burger.

In-N-Out, for example, starts its employees at $10 per hour and offers benefits. “We do enjoy lower turnover and that, of course, leads to a more experienced team working in our restaurants,” Carl Van Fleet, the vice president of planning and development at In-N-Out Burger, told NBC News via email. “Our associates do work pretty hard to make sure our customers have a great experience. A higher pay structure is helpful in making that happen but it is only part of our approach. It is equally important to us that we treat our associates well and maintain that positive working environment in all of our restaurants.”

As for Wendy Lott, she continues to look for another job and hopes to find a way to finish her final year at the Art Institute of Atlanta, where she was working toward a bachelor’s degree in video game art and design. But when she left, due to her father’s death from diabetes, she was already in arrears for $5,000.

A slip-and-fall at her first waitress job left her with a torn Achilles tendon and fractured ankle that still causes her pain and limits her work options. She said the one-time $800 worker’s compensation payment doesn’t help long term. “A lot of jobs in my area require heavy lifting or for you to be fast on your feet,” she said.

And she finds the competition for the other jobs is tough, especially with layoffs at the nearby Savannah River Site nuclear facility. “Everybody gets underemployed across the board. It trickles down,” Lott said.

Charles V. Tines / The Detroit News

In their film, Troy students Jason Ji, left, and Frank Boudon make the case that the nation's poverty crisis could be solved by reforming education.

By Lou Dubois, NBC News

What a difference 20 miles makes.

In Detroit, the median household income is $27,862, and 57 percent of the children live below the poverty line.

Roughly 20 miles to the north is the affluent suburb of Troy, Mich., where the median household income is almost $117,000, and nearly all high school graduates go on to college. Money Magazine has named Troy, with its great safety record and stellar community sports programs, one of the best small cities in America.

Frank Boudon and Jason Ji are sophomores at Troy High School who are getting national attention for their unique look at poverty, which they call the most pressing issue facing this country.

“While we may be just kids,” Ji told NBC News, “we are deeply aware of the issues that impact our surrounding communities. Living in metro Detroit has exposed us to the tragedy of poverty. It is shocking to see the number of peers and young children living in poverty.”

Their short film, “Poverty: America’s Untold Crisis,” was among the top finishers in a C-Span contest that drew nearly 2,000 submissions from students nationwide.

“At the most basic level,” Boudon added, “I, like the majority of humans, hate to watch others suffer. Drawing attention to the issue of poverty was a way to promote interest and spur action for the cause. “

Related:
Meet your new professor: transient, poorly paid
Fast food workers strike, citing low wages
Has disability become a 'de facto welfare program'?

Editor's note: An earlier version of the story misidentified one of the students as Jason Li.

John Gress / Reuters

Students walk to class at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois, February 21, 2013.

By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News

This is the time of year many high school seniors are getting their long-awaited, highly anticipated college acceptance letters. What those letters and the glossy admissions brochures don’t talk about is a surprising fact: despite their graduate degrees and years of experience, the large majority -- three out of four -- of teachers in college classrooms are in low-paying, part-time jobs or insecure, non-tenure positions.

In its annual survey on faculty compensation and the economics of higher education, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) finds 76 percent of teachers in colleges and universities are what the organization calls “contingent,” meaning full-time faculty members who are off the secure and relatively well-paid tenure track or part-timers (often known as adjuncts) and graduate students.

The median pay for adjuncts is just $2,700 for teaching a three-month course – and these professors are almost always on their own when it comes to health insurance and other benefits.

“There are PhD's working as adjuncts and living in poverty, on food stamps, etc.,” an adjunct professor who lives and works in California wrote to NBC News. She is a poet with a master's degree, who asked that we not identify her or her school for fear of losing her job.

“Despite the fact that I basically work full-time hours teaching, tending to administrative duties, and holding office hours,” she wrote, “I am on the verge of renting a garage apartment that does not have a kitchen or bathroom because that's all I can afford (and barely).”

She claims the system is not only unfair to her and her colleagues, but to students as well. Despite increasing tuition bills and a possible doubling in student loan rates just a few months from now, she wrote, the students “are not being given the quality their money is paying for, e.g. a well-rested professor who isn't a walking zombie from holding numerous teaching jobs to barely make the rent each month.”

Colleges, however, argue that they have no choice but to employ a flexible, non-tenured workforce.

Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, said the "slow, steady increase" in non-tenured and adjunct faculty positions is "largely a response to current economic conditions."

"Tenure," he said, "often results in an employment guarantee that can last 40 years, and very few organizations in our society make those guarantees anymore."

Hartle takes issue with the AAUP's assertion that part-time faculty offer students a lower-quality educational experience. While acknowledging they "don't play the same role on campus," Hartle points out that, in a changing economy, these contingent faculty slots may be to students' advantage, allowing colleges to teach new and evolving subjects and courses.

“I enjoy teaching!” wrote the California adjunct. “I just wish I could get paid a livable wage to do it.”

Related:
Interest on student loans set to double
Fast food workers strike, citing low wages
Key word for job seekers: geography 
Has disability become a 'de facto welfare program'?

Matt Nighswander / NBC News

Fast food workers and supporters picket outside a McDonald's restaurant Thursday, April 4, 2013, in Midtown Manhattan.

By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News

They work for some of the biggest businesses in the United States, yet they are among the country's lowest-paid workers.

On Thursday, fast-food workers staged walkouts at McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell and other restaurants in New York City to call attention to their plight. Organizers scheduled the job actions to commemorate the day Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 45 years ago in Memphis, where he was supporting a strike by sanitation workers.

"It's not enough," Elba Godoy, a crew member at a McDonald's just a few blocks from Times Square, said of her $7.25-per-hour minimum wage, which helps support her extended family of seven. "They don't like [that we're out here], but we have to do it. We cannot survive on $7.25."

Godoy and her colleagues are seeking a raise to $15 an hour and the right to form a union without retaliation. The walkout is part of a national movement by low-wage workers to raise wages and gain rights.

The National Employment Law Project, a group that advocates for a higher minimum wage, says the purchasing power of the minimum wage is 30 percent lower today than it was in 1968. It has documented, since the start of the recession, a growth in low-wage jobs and the disappearance of jobs that it calls "mid-wage." Specifically, NELP finds:

• Lower-wage occupations constituted 21 percent of recession losses, but 58 percent of recovery growth;
• Mid-wage occupations constituted 60 percent of recession losses, but only 22 percent of recovery growth;
• Higher-wage occupations constituted 19 percent of recession job losses, and 20 percent of recovery growth.

In the fast food industry, NELP says, the big names have weathered the recession, and they are seeing solid profits and passing them along to top executives and shareholders, but not to their lowest-paid workers. Fast food and other low-wage workers often qualify for food stamps and other public assistance, meaning that taxpayers subsidize their wages. 

Matt Nighswander / NBC News

"We cannot survive on $7.25," says Elba Godoy, a McDonald's worker.

The low-wage trend is expected to continue; the government estimates that six out of the top 10 growing occupations over the next decade will be in relatively low-wage, low-skill jobs.

In a statement, McDonald's said the company and its franchises "work hard every day to treat McDonald's employees with dignity and respect. Employees are paid competitive wages and have access to a range of benefits to meet their individual needs."

"In addition," the company said, "employees who want to go from crew to management can take advantage of a variety of training and professional development opportunities."

Michael Saltsman, research director at the free market-leaning Employment Policies Institute, says that by demanding $15 an hour, these employees are hastening their own demise.

“The workers aren’t in a fight with management,” he said, “they’re in a fight with technology.” At some point, he said, “the cost of service is going to get trumped by the customers’ demand for lower prices,” and people will be replaced by less expensive machines, like a burger-making robot being marketed by a San Francisco company.

For those looking to climb the wage ladder, a recent government report contained some sobering news: some of the most numerous and available jobs in America are also its lowest-paying.

Topping the list of most common jobs is retail salespeople, followed by cashiers, and, in third place, food service workers. There are more than 2.9 million of those folks, and they earn the lowest median wage in America: $8.78 an hour, for an average annual wage of $18,720 per year -- if, that is, they work full-time. That amount is just above the poverty line for a family of three; below the line for a family of four or more.

"Enough’s enough," said 24-year-old Alterique Hall, one of Godoy's co-workers. "Low-paid workers are sick and tired of being sick and tired at the end of the day. We get a pat on the back saying, ‘You’ll be fine, you’ll make it somehow."" He says he can't make ends meet on the $8-per-hour he's paid, and often relies on his grandmother and aunt for meals.

"Help us get a job at your office," he said, gesturing to the army of white collar workers scurrying to their high-rise buildings.

Related:
Key word for job seekers: geography 
Has disability become a 'de facto welfare program'?
Broke and ashamed: Many won't take handouts despite need

Matt Nighswander / NBC News

Alterique Hall says he can't make ends meet on the $8-per-hour he's paid, and often relies on his grandmother and aunt for meals.

Jim Seida / NBC News

"I had seen some stuff that I probably would have never seen before in life had I not been in Marine Corps, some good stuff and some stuff I just don't care to think about anymore," said Iraq War veteran Eric Swinney, seen here outside his room at Grand Veterans Village in Phoenix.

By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor

Despite funding that has reached $5.8 billion annually and a slew of innovative community partnerships, the Obama administration is lagging in its goal to end homelessness among veterans – or, as federal veterans' leaders like to say, “drive to zero” – by the end of 2015.

If the current rate of progress is maintained, roughly 45,000 veterans would still be without homes when the deadline passes -- a big improvement since the drive was launched but also evidence of how difficult it is to eradicate the problem.

"I don’t truly think you can end homelessness,” said John Scott, who heads the Phoenix office of U.S. Vets, a national, nonprofit service provider to homeless and at-risk veterans that receives some federal funding. “Things happen that can precipitate homelessness for anyone, and it can happen quite rapidly. However, we can effect change in veterans who have been chronically homeless.”

Scott, a former Marine Corps sergeant, was a keynote speaker at the November 2009 summit where Veterans Administration Secretary Eric Shinseki proclaimed that he and President Obama were "personally committed to ending homelessness among veterans within the next five years.” (The VA now cites the end of 2015 as its target.)

That crusade thus far has housed 12,990 veterans, an average of 361 per month. At the last count, which took place in January 2012 and was released in December, some 62,000 veterans still were homeless, meaning the campaign would need to average about 1,300 per month to meet its mark.

“While there may have been those who did not think ending veteran homelessness was possible (when Shinseki made his 2009 vow), it brought much needed attention to the matter," Scott said. “And it has, in turn, created many new funding opportunities for veterans experiencing homelessness.”

Scott hammers at the problem in a state VA officials hold out as a shining prototype, where in 2012 veterans accounted for just 13 percent of the adult homeless population — down from 20 percent in 2011. He oversees a tangible symbol of that drive, a former Howard Johnson hotel refurbished into apartments meant to shelter more than 130 homeless veterans. It’s called Grand Veterans Village.

Flashbacks, panic attacks
Manning the community’s gas grill most days is Iraq veteran Eric Swinney, who arrived there in early March. Originally from Mississippi, the former Marine’s barbecued specialties include ribs, chicken and pork chops. He doesn’t talk much about his brief homeless stretch. But his spiral seems fueled by what he saw in Iraq — and what he sees in his nightmares.

“I picked up heads, legs. I picked up blown-up hips from two blocks away, from the roofs of houses. Numerous, numerous occasions. Iraqi people parts,” said Swinney, 26. The human pieces were ripped away and strewn during firefights or suicide-bomber blasts.

Jim Seida / NBC News

Smoking and joking on the second floor of what used to be a Howard Johnson's in Phoenix, Iraq War vets Zeb Alford, left, Trent Stubbs, center, and Swinney pass the time at Grand Veterans Village.

“I have this one image, every time I sleep, of picking up the head of an Iraqi.” In his room at Grand Veterans Village, the flashback wakes him often, he said, leaving him soaked in perspiration.

Nothing new, though. Swinney began feeling what he calls “mental anguish” before leaving Iraq in 2008. From there, his descent reads like a manual on post-traumatic stress disorder: foreboding and booze and bad luck. “Every time something happened that reminded me of Iraq, I would just go get me a bottle and start drinking.” Then, a DUI arrest in Georgia. Then, panic attacks, which left him unable to hold any of his six or so post-war jobs.

He tried to physically flee that internal storm, moving to Phoenix last June: “A new change, a new climate.” He got an apartment. He got a job as a security guard. But when his car was stolen on Super Bowl Sunday, he had no ride to work. The rent money ran dry. He lost his room. “Ever since I left the Marine Corps, stuff just keeps happening.”

During his eight months in Phoenix, however, Swinney also had been visiting the local VA center, meeting with caseworkers. When he became homeless, they steered him to U.S. Vets, to Scott and to Grand Avenue. There, his rent is covered by U.S. Vets. Next, Swinney will be paired with local experts who "are going to assist him with some of the trauma he's brought back from war," Scott said.

The plan is to have Swinney find his financial footing and, eventually, move into a more permanent apartment where he will be responsible for the lease.

'Daunting challenge'
That federal-community safety net — housing wrapped around social services, in dozens of cities — is precisely why VA officials remain outwardly confident they can meet Shinseki's 2015 objective.

"Yes, we know it’s an aggressive goal. But we work hard at this every day to try to achieve it. Because for us, it’s really just not acceptable to have anybody on the streets with the capabilities and the opportunities that are around now," said Vincent Kane, director of the VA National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans.

"With the focus, the attention and the commitment we're putting to this as a health-care system, [VA has] the best opportunity now than at any other point in the history of our program" to hit that mark, Kane said.

One program making a dent is HUD-VASH, run jointly by the VA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Under that plan, veterans receive housing vouchers and access to case management and clinical services. Since 2008, Congress has appropriated $350 million to HUD-VASH, which has handed housing vouchers to more than 47,000 veterans and their families, according to HUD.

Armed with such initiatives, "we believe we are going to quicken the pace" to house all veterans, Kane said. "We know it’s a daunting challenge.

Nightmares and all, Swinney plans to be one of the success stories in that intended final tally of zero. He is a proud man, and thankful for his service, no matter where it has taken him five years after leaving Iraq.

"I hate when people feel entitled to stuff. Being a Marine helped me in a lot of ways. Yes, it had its drawbacks. But what it all boils down to is we’re average Americans, like everybody else. We just had more dangerous jobs," he said. "Nobody owes me anything."

Related: 

Has disability become a 'de facto welfare program'?

Broke and ashamed: Many won't take handouts despite need

'By the Grace of God:' How workers survive on $7.25 an hour

This story was originally published on Fri Mar 29, 2013 3:16 PM EDT

By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News

When President Clinton signed "welfare reform" into law in 1996, he promised to end welfare as we know it. Now, some new reporting suggests we've created a new kind of welfare -- only most Americans aren't aware of it. 

The number of people who depend on checks from Social Security's disability programs has soared in recent years, according to NPR's series "Unfit for Work: the Startling Rise of Disability in America." The reports, which began over the weekend and continue this week, raise the question: How disabled are the recipients, really? As you might imagine, they have touched a nerve.

A quick primer: the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program provides monthly cash assistance to people who are poor and disabled, including families with disabled children. The basic monthly SSI cash benefit is a set amount -- currently $710 for an individual and $1,066 for a couple. The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program also provides monthly cash assistance, to disabled people who have worked in jobs covered by Social Security.  People who leave the workforce and go on disability also qualify for Medicare. 

After six months of investigation, NPR reporter Chana Joffee-Walt concluded that Social Security's disability programs have become "a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills." In the past three decades, she reports, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed:

Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. [...]

[And] story of these programs -- who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that -- is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It's the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.

Joffee-Walt's report takes listeners to Hale County, Ala., where one in four working-age adults is on disability, a local doctor is the go-to-guy for people in pain, and on "the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale" because people are relatively flush with cash.

She takes us inside "the disability industrial complex," including one of the private call centers that states pay to scrutinize their welfare rolls, contact as many people as possible who might qualify for federal disability payments, and move them off the state's rolls and into the federal disability system. 

The PCG [Public Consulting Group] agents help the potentially disabled fill out the Social Security disability application over the phone. And by help, I mean the agents actually do the filling out. When the potentially disabled don't have the right medical documentation to prove a disability, the agents at PCG help them get it. They call doctors' offices; they get records faxed. If the right medical records do not exist, PCG sets up doctors' appointments and calls applicants the day before to remind them of those appointments.

Joffee-Walt also reports on the 1.3 million kids on SSI, and says that some parents in Hale County told her they want kids who can "pull a check" so the family gets extra income. She suggests that some families who are surviving on that check may be holding their kids back from overcoming disabilities because they don't want to lose the money. 

Critics call the report riddled with factual errors, devoid of context and "ill-informed". NPR's This American Life says it stands by its story.

The essence of the backlash is this: While critics admit the NPR report raises worthwhile questions, they say it does so in a sensational manner, traffics in inaccuracies and myths about Social Security's disability programs, and fails to tell the story about the millions of people these disability programs help. Here's how one critical analysis puts it:

The piece ignored that the recent rise in disability benefits is tied to the recession and higher rates of poverty, that qualifying for benefits is difficult, that SSI encourages employment, and that the current program has significantly reduced poverty among children with disabilities.

Listen to the report, read the criticisms, tell us your thoughts and personal experiences with the Social Security disability programs.