Thread: Poverty rate still near all-time high in Bay Area

Poverty rate still near all-time high in Bay Area

Apr 2, 2015, 12:03pm PDT

Not all ships have risen with the tide, especially in the Bay Area. The poverty rate in the region still hovers near its all-time high, with more than 800,000 people living below the poverty line.

About 11.3 percent of those living in the Bay Area are existing at or below the poverty line, according to a new report out on Wednesday from the Joint Venture Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies.

Joint Venture Silicon Valley

“It’s important that we have a better understanding of how poverty is changing in our region over time,” Rachel Massaro, a senior research associate for the Institute, said in a press release. “Poverty is an integral part of our persistent growth issues, like high housing costs and income inequality.”

The study used data from 2013, the most recent available, and defined poverty thresholds as annual income of $11,490 for a one-person household to $23,550 for a family of four.

The median income for skilled tech workers tops $118,700, while low-skill workers' wages hover around $27,000, according to a report from Joint Venture Silicon Valley earlier this year.

Here are some of the surprising facts about poverty in the region:

The wealth hasn’t spread

"Despite being one of the world's wealthiest regions, there were 829,547 people living in poverty in the Bay Area in 2013," the authors of the report wrote.

While the region has one of the fastest growing economies, many don’t have the skills to keep up with the tech-based economy.

Despite a booming economy, poverty rates are well above historic average

While poverty figures in the area are below the record level of 12 percent set in 2009 during the Great Recession, the current levels are significantly above the historic average of 9 percent for the region.

San Francisco has the highest rates of poverty, Alameda County not far behind

San Francisco saw the highest poverty level in the area at 13.8 percent, while Alameda County's poverty rate stood at 12.9 percent. Contra Costa County was at 10.8 percent, while Santa Clara County was at 10.5 percent. The lowest rate in the region was San Mateo County at 7.8 percent.

Comparatively, California has a poverty rate of 16.8 percent while the entire U.S. hovers around 15.8 percent. However, cost of living in the area is exponentially higher than in the rest of the country, putting greater stress on Bay Area residents.

“With rents in some parts of the Bay Area 185 percent higher, home prices up to 250 percent higher, and the cost of goods and services 6 percent higher than in the United States as a whole ... the ‘cost of living’ in the Bay Area is undoubtedly different,” the report stated. “As such, the poverty rate in the Bay Area could be as much as three or four percentage points higher, putting poverty in the Bay Area on par with the state and nation.”

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/n...-bay-area.html

The reason I posted this article is because Captainron said something in another thread that peaked my curiosity about San Francisco. I'd recently seen a special about the homeless people in San Francisco sleeping on the streets in tents, so many you could barely walk down the sidewalks around them.

Even San Francisco is suffering the problems of Democratic policies. San Francisco is a Sanctuary City, so I'm sure it's over-run with illegal aliens including the serious criminal illegal aliens who murdered Kate. An almost 14% poverty rate is an all-time high. And San Francisco has a very small black population, 6%.

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San Francisco’s black population dwindling

Maura Dolan
Originally published May 11, 2015 at 4:53 pm

In the wake of a police scandal involving racist text messages, some black leaders are again lamenting the shrinking size of the city’s black community.

By Maura Dolan
Los Angeles Times (TNS)

SAN FRANCISCO — When black friends come to visit, they inevitably ask Timothy Alan Simon the same question: Why are there so few African Americans?

A San Francisco native, Simon attended St. Ignatius College Preparatory, the University of San Francisco and Hastings College of the Law. At one time, he saw other black faces in all of the city’s neighborhoods. It seems every year there are fewer, he said. Even his own children prefer Oakland, which has a thriving and economically diverse black community.

“We’re down to bone marrow in San Francisco,” said Simon, 59, a lawyer and law professor.
By the numbers

Among the biggest 14 cities in the nation, San Francisco is near the bottom in the share of black residents. African Americans make up 25 percent of the population in New York City, 9.4 percent in Los Angeles and 27 percent in Indianapolis. The only city in the group with a smaller percentage is San Jose, with 3 percent.

In the wake of a police scandal involving racist text messages, some black leaders are again lamenting the shrinking size of the city’s black community. They have questioned whether a mass exodus of African Americans in recent decades has been driven as much by subtle forms of racism as by the city’s high cost of housing.

In 1970, blacks made up 13.4 percent of the city’s population. Today they account for less than 6 percent. City leaders have commissioned studies and task forces to reverse the trend, but to little avail.

According to the 2010 U.S. Census report, 42 percent of the city’s population is white, followed by 33 percent Asian, 15 percent Latino and 5 percent of two or more races.

Among the biggest 14 cities in the nation, San Francisco is near the bottom in the share of black residents. African Americans make up 25 percent of the population in New York City, 9.4 percent in Los Angeles and 27 percent in Indianapolis. The only city in the group with a smaller percentage is San Jose, with 3 percent.

“Vigilante groups aren’t chasing blacks out, but there are factors that are making other places more desirable,” Simon said.

Civil-rights leaders here attribute the exodus not just to the high cost of living, but to policies that have favored independent retailers over chains, urban renewal that tore down the housing where many African Americans lived, redlining by banks and high crime concentrated in neighborhoods where blacks lived.

“When I got here, there were nearly 100,000 African Americans, and now there are maybe 40,000,” said the Rev. Arnold Townsend, a board member of the local NAACP. “What we have now wouldn’t even fill up the stadium where the Giants play.”

Revelations of racist and homophobic texts by 14 police officers — which came to light in court papers — stirred shock and outrage in this traditionally liberal city. But many black residents said they were not surprised.

The city likes to congratulate itself for its open views and tolerance, but “before 1965, you couldn’t get a job teaching in San Francisco,” said the Rev. Amos Brown, another NAACP board member. “You had to go to Oakland or Berkeley.”

“We’ve had such a hemorrhaging of black folks,” Brown said. “The black churches are almost empty.”

He pointed to the Fillmore District west of downtown, once regarded as the Harlem of the West. African Americans who migrated from the South during World War II flocked to the jazz clubs and watering holes.

“All the black businesses in Fillmore are almost gone now,” Brown said. “The Chicago Barbershop — a 70-year-old institution? Gone. Marcus Books, the oldest depository of books by black authors? Gone.”

To be sure, there was a migration of African Americans to the suburbs in other big cities as well. San Francisco has had a black mayor — Willie Brown — and two members of the Board of Supervisors are African-American. About 9 percent of the city’s police force is African-American.

But many of the African Americans who live here are significantly poorer than other residents and much more likely to be arrested and incarcerated, studies show.

A 2012 report by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice examined a 40-year pattern of arrests and found that African Americans were arrested for felony drug crimes 19 times more often than other races and 7.3 times more often than blacks elsewhere in California. More than half of all youth drug felonies involved African Americans, the report said.

London Breed, who heads San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, said many black families moved from the Western Addition 20 years ago after the city decided to tear down housing projects and build new ones. The new housing is now filled with Russians and Asians, she said.

Crime also exploded, and black families migrated to the suburbs to keep their children safe, she said.

“When you concentrate people in poverty together without hope, there is a lot of tension,” said Breed, 40, an African American who grew up in a housing project in the Western Addition.

These days, black residents in her district are clamoring for a bigger police presence, and community policing has succeeded, she said.

But the absence of more black faces troubles her.

“I am just trying to hold onto evidence that blacks ever existed in San Francisco,” Breed said.

http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-w...ion-dwindling/

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So they Black Americans out while providing sanctuary to illegal aliens.

Now their poverty rate is at an all-time high.

Black Americans don't cause poverty, they are the victims of the people whose policies cause poverty.