The annual survey reports by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies are the best source of data on affordability I’ve found.

So I pulled figures from the latest report — most of them for 2009. Then did some calculations of my own — or more precisely, told Excel to do them.

Here’s a summary of key results, plus some Google gleanings about impacts.

Single Mothers Earning the Median

Single-mother families have average incomes significantly lower than families with two parents present. So I began my number crunching with them.

Lots of figures to enter. So I stuck with the costs of center-based care. It’s generally more expensive than care in a home setting, but also more frequently used.

NACCRA gives us breakouts for the median income of single-mother families in each state and the District of Columbia. Also the cost of care for infants and for four year olds as a percent of the median income .

Say a single mother needed child care for one of each. In 20 states and the District, she’d have had to pay more than two-thirds of her income if she earned the median.

Even in the lowest-cost states, nearly half her income would have had to go for child care.

In 30 states and the District, child care for only an infant would have consumed at least a third of her income.

Minimum Wage Workers

Things get worse, of course, for minimum wage workers — even if they work full time, year round, as many don’t.

But say we’ve got a minimum wage worker who does. In 26 states and the District, his/her entire pretax income would have been less than the costs of child care for the infant and four year old.*

Costs of care for the infant alone would have consumed more than half the full-time, year round minimum wage in 33 states and the District — and more than two-thirds in 14 states, plus the District.

Child care was unaffordable even for families with two full-time, year round minimum wage workers. For the two kids, they would have had to pay more than half their gross income in 27 states and the District.

In only one state — Mississippi — would they have had as much as two-thirds of their income for everything else a family needs.

So What’s a Poor Parent to Do?

According to the latest (not very recent) figures from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, roughly 39% of poor children eligible for federally-funded child care subsidies received them in 2006.

Eligibility here means that they were under 13, unless they had special needs. And their parents were either working or participating in education or training activities.

An additional 23% of eligible children in families with incomes between 101% and 150% of the federal poverty line also received child care subsidies.

Which leaves us with some 38% of poor and near-poor children whose parents worked — or were working toward work — without subsidized care.

As the National Women’s Law Center observes, some parents can rely on their parents or other relatives for child care. Somewhat more low-income parents than others do. But for a variety of reasons, many can’t.

And, as I hope I’ve demonstrated, many can’t afford child care at market rates. So what do they do?

Some, mostly moms, choose not to work. Better financially to have one parent out there earning and the other at home with the kids.

Others work part-time or in shifts, barely seeing each other awake for days on end.

And single mothers?

Some of them also decide they can’t go on working. They turn — or return — unwillingly to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. It’s a stopgap solution because TANF is time-limited. But it solves the child care problem for awhile.

One homeless mother says she worked nights while her kids slept in the car parked where she could keep an eye on them.

Surely we could do better for children, their parents and our economy. To say this would involve some reordering of priorities in Congress is an understatement.

* The federal minimum wage increased by 50 cents an hour in July 2009. This produced minimum wage increases in most states and the District. For my calculations, I used the post-increase rate.

Photo of PATH Gramercy by Ken Scott Photo.

Does the charity world need a similar hero?

A recent UCLA study revealed the urgent need for some sort of rescue effort for charities in Southern California. While trying to follow up with the nonprofit groups they had surveyed 10 years ago, UCLA found that 15% had gone out of business. And, of the housing and homelessness charities, nearly a quarter had disappeared.

It’s a sad fact: Charities are going out of business.

A Southern California funders collaborative hosted a sustainability summit for charities to explore the viability of nonprofits merging together in order to survive. More than 700 charity leaders showed up.

I have seen several charities go out of business just in the last year. From a nonprofit that helped homeless youth to an advocacy group that fought to feed hungry Americans. This fragile economy is not only hurting American families, but also the agencies that help them.

In the for-profit business world, many would say this is just Darwinism in action. Only the strong survive. Let the weak charities die.

But I disagree. There are amazing American philanthropists with the passion and ability to transform hurting people. Some of these leaders have the uncanny ability to help a teenaged gang member walk a new path, protect a woman from an abusive husband, or house a person who has been homeless for decades.

Unfortunately, these caring people don’t always have the skills to market their programs as well as Charity: Water does, or to balance their books like Deloitte & Touche. Being good at empowering hurting people doesn’t mean someone has an MBA from Harvard and knows how to make money. Marketing a cell phone to the masses is different than convincing a jaded American public to donate $20 per month to a good cause.

The nonprofit world needs help. Companies like Twitter need to help our struggling charities learn how to market their cause on social media. Companies like Apple, that are raking in more money than most nations, need to help social good organizations create their own crowd of fanboys (or fangirls).

The charities that know how to transform America’s hurting people need to be taught how to attract the eye of America’s donors.

We need the Robert Irvine of charities to make over the way we present ourselves in this changing world.

Otherwise, the most effective social good organizations will be forced to close their doors because more experienced marketers have shut them down.

Photo Credit: Marius Watz

First, a word of clarification. The reference to 30 million is just sloppy blogging. The Foundation’s actual report says “over 30 million.” Technically accurate, but minimizing. The latest Census Bureau income and poverty report tell us that there were nearly 43.6 million people in poverty in 2009.

As I (and many others) have written before, this figure is based on a rather primitive and woefully outdated measure, i.e., the inflation-adjusted cost of what used to be the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s cheapest meal plan.

The Census Bureau is developing an alternative measure based on recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences.

But the Heritage Foundation doesn’t care for that — indeed, has delivered its latest blast in part to argue (again) that the new measure is a sneaky scheme by the Obama administration to advance a “spread the wealth” agenda.

Its main goal, however, is to give aid and comfort to Republicans in Congress who want to slash spending on public benefits.

As with the House budget plan and Congressman Paul Ryan’s defensethereof, the Foundation aims to foster to view that they’re now going to people who aren’t “truly in need.”

Also apparently to gain currency for the Republican Study Committee’s uniquely expansive view of “welfare.”

As in 2007, the Foundation makes a big deal of the results of a 2005 survey the U.S. Energy Department conducted to find out, among other things, what energy-consuming appliances and other equipment different types of households had.

The Foundation calculated a median average for what it calls “household amenities” in households below the federal poverty line. This becomes “the typical poor household” — a slippery piece of rhetoric, I think.

The household had a lot of “amenities” — not just refrigerators, stoves and the like, but a washer and dryer, two color TVs and more. Not, however, a personal computer, unless there were children in the family, or an internet connection, even if there were.

Still, it’s certainly the case that lots of poor households have “modern conveniences” that were unaffordable to the middle class some years ago. A main reason, as Derek Thompson at The Atlantic shows, is that productivity increases have made consumer electronics extremely cheap.

Not the case for basic necessities like housing. Well, the Heritage Foundation has something to say about that too.

“Poor Americans,” it asserts, “are well housed and rarely overcrowded.” In fact, they’ve got more space than the average European — a dubious shorthand for the average resident of a major city like Paris or London.

Moreover, “nearly all the houses and apartments of the poor are in good condition.” This, the numbers show, means that “only” 12% have moderate or severe physical problems.

The Foundation constructs its rosy picture from the reported results of a national survey conducted for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2009.

I find some of the relevant data difficult to parse. And, frankly, there are good reasons, in this report as well as others, to mistrust the Foundation’s analyses.

But say, for the sake of argument, that it’s reporting the housing data accurately. What do they tell us?

One important thing, I think, is that federal housing assistance programs are working, though not so well as they might.

For example, HUD requires public housing authorities to ensure that vouchers are used to help pay rental costs only for units that “meet minimum standards of health and safety.” And it charges them with determining the appropriate unit size “based on family size and composition.”

This could help explain the relatively low percent of houses and apartments with more than minimal physical problems. The fact that vouchers enable recipients to rent in the private market could explain more, e.g., the high percentage of poor households with air conditioning.

The Foundation handles homelessness and hunger in similar ways. It uses reports issued by federal agencies and highlights the relatively few Americans in the worst-case categories.

The figures, it says, show that the Census Bureau, news media and “liberal advocacy groups” are misleading the American public. True poverty, it claims, means “serious material deprivation.” And, by its showing, there’s not much of that.

Does it follow then that Congress should slash federal safety net spending? The Heritage Foundation clearly thinks so. But the argument it’s constructed is built on a hill of sand.

We don’t have vast numbers of people living on the streets or literally starving to death because we’ve decided that public assistance in the richest country in the world should meet basic human needs.

Our safety net doesn’t do this as well as it should. We see this even in the Foundation’s data points.

But if we backtrack, as it all but recommends, we’ll surely have millions more Americans who meet its willfully minimizing definition of poverty.

Photo credit: Tim Samoff

Data in the social sector is tricky. We face considerable barriers to collecting reliable information. There are those who rightly question the validity of information collected from homeless counts. Walking into a park at night doing a headcount with a group of volunteers is an obviously error prone approach.

Aside from data collection difficulties and methodologies, and as Joel pointed out in his piece on Monday, following every homeless count there is a political spin. Homeless advocates claim the counts under-represent while some non-profits and localities claim victory at anything resembling a negative slope.

In all the data murkiness and political positioning, my question is, who cares?

When Data Matters

Data only matters in so far as it informs future decision making. If homeless advocates conceeded that homelessness really did decline, would they call it a day, stop protesting, stop caring?

Hardly.

If a city reports a decline in homelessness, does the Mayor tell citizens concerned about homelessness to shove it?

I hope not.

The numbers being mentioned around declines in homelessness generally point south, but they are also quite modest. Is this evidence that Housing First works? I dunno. Should we continue the strategies we have in place? Unambiguously maybe.

What we need, more than homeless counts, more than  enumeration, is actionable information. Actionable information is information that is collected to answer a question that will yield a policy answer.

On face a homeless count seems like it might fit the bill. Homelessness certainly is a policy issue, but what do you do with a number? Homelessness going up  or goes down says nothing about how to combat homelessness.

Instead, actionable information exposes a possible cause and effect. Housing First is a powerful example of this type of information application, linking homelessness and public expenditures data.

Discovering the true cost of letting someone suffer on the street versus housing that person solicited a policy response where a static number could not.

Ending homelessness, hunger, and poverty requires a serious intentionality around data that transcends political pandering and simplistic directional assessments of singular indicators. The key to better use of data is to first have more interesting questions that don’t start with “How many” and instead focus on “How should we”.

Only by understanding the relationship between what we do, and how we impact people’s lives, will we innovate solutions to our most pressing social problems.

Photo credit: Leslie Duss

The press release issued by the Census Bureau had the following to say about poverty in the 2009 report:

• Thirty-one states saw increases in both the number and percentage of people in poverty between 2008 and 2009.
• No state had a statistically significant decline in either the number in poverty or the poverty rate.

Last week I looked at how national poverty rates can obscure racial and even age related income inequalities. For this post I used the newly released 2009 ACS data to illustrate how poverty levels vary by state.

Geography Matters

While the national poverty rate is now an alarming 14.3%, this average does not actually represent the reality of any particular state. In fact, the percentage of people living in poverty varies considerably from state to state.

The state with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire at 8.5%. The state with the highest poverty rate was Mississippi with 21.9%.

The following map shows the poverty rates by state across the country. Each state is labeled with its respective poverty rate and is color-coded. The light blue states indicate low poverty with bright red indicating high poverty.

Click to enlarge this map

Looking at the poverty rates by state we can see that high poverty is concentrated in the Southern parts of the country, with relatively lower poverty on the East coast and poverty rates that are in line with the national average on the West coast.

Although some states have lower poverty than others, living in a low-poverty state is no consolation to those experiencing it. Instead, what this map illustrates is that national statistics are far too aggregated to mean much.

If we are to get more out of poverty data, and convert jarring statistics into meaningful social solutions, we have to take a closer look at the nuance of what the data tells us.

Photo credit: alykat

Like any aggregated statistic, the national poverty rate is a summation of all people across the country experiencing poverty. Poverty levels differ by geography, race, gender, age, and a number of other factors.

Indeed, while the overall rate is astonishing, it is in the unpacking of the Census poverty data that more disturbing trends can be seen.

For this post I took a closer look at the data the Census used to report the new national poverty statistic. I examined the poverty levels at different household sizes and by race and ethnicity in 2009.

Household Size

The following graph shows the poverty level by household size in 2009. With the exception of those living in a household of only one person, you can see that as households grow larger, people are more likely to live in poverty.

At six or more persons in a household, the rate well exceeds the national average of 14.3%.

While it may seem logical that adding more people to a household unit increases the financial burden, why is poverty so high for people who live alone?

The answer to this question likely has less to do with household size, and more to do with who is likely to live alone.

Elderly persons whose children have long left and spouses’ have died are most likely to live in a household size of one. The 22% poverty rate for persons living alone probably reflects the dramatic senior poverty rates in the U.S.

Race and Ethnicity

Poverty rates vary greatly across racial and ethnic lines. The following graph shows that poverty levels are significantly higher for Blacks and Hispanics than Whites.

While national statistics are useful for creating a snapshot of poverty in America, it is important not to make assumptions about what aggregate statistics mean for individuals. The fact is that some people are more likely to be victims of poverty than others.

The real story poverty statistics tell is not that poverty affects everyone, but rather that demographic indicators are frighteningly predictive of who gets forced into poverty, and who is spared.

Photo credit: Esther Gibbons