Caught in the Money Gap
In an age of increasing disparity, people behind the statistics strive to make it day by day.
Behind every statistic about poverty are living, breathing, struggling children of God seeking work or stretching skimpy paychecks that won’t cover the basic necessities of life. Many of them are single women of color trying desperately to support children who, they hope, will break a cycle that goes back generations. Some seek help at First Presbyterian Church.
Erika is one of them. With no way to pay the rent after she lost her overnight job at a downtown Atlanta restaurant because of COVID, she and her eleven-year-old son moved in with her boyfriend. A few weeks later, she learned that she was pregnant, and her boyfriend demanded that she get an abortion. When she refused, he tried to strangle her. The next day, while he was at work, she moved out. She’s now renting a car for seventy dollars a day to deliver meals for Uber Eats, taking her son with her. He’s not in school because, with no real address, she doesn’t know where to register him.
“I want my children to … have better than me and my mom ever had. It’s not all about money, but money has a lot to do with just being able to maneuver in this world.”
DESIREE, 31
Some days she barely makes enough to pay for the car. Other days, when things go well, she is able to rent a motel room for the night. After a week in a Gwinnett County extended-stay inn paid for by the church, she and her son were back living day to day.
With a baby due in six weeks, she is becoming increasingly uncomfortable and exhausted. Sometimes she falls asleep in a restaurant parking lot while she waits for the order to be prepared. With more frequent obstetrical appointments as her due date nears, she is losing more work time. And because she can’t make telephone calls while driving, she has to take daytime hours out from behind the wheel to contact the resources on a list furnished to her by Community Ministries. She’s hoping to put together enough money to go to her home state of California, where she has family, to have the baby.
“I’m scraping,” said Erika, a pseudonym she asked to use because of the domestic violence incident.
The Great Divide
While Erika and her son were living out of her car and motel rooms, word reached the chattersphere that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had ordered a superyacht estimated to cost half a billion dollars, a boat—if you can call it that—so large that it has its own support yacht to hold its helicopter. While many American workers faced layoffs and salary cuts during the pandemic, billionaires became almost 40 percent wealthier, according to CNN Business.
Of course, billionaires are in a class of their own, but Grand Canyon-sized gaps exist in both income and wealth between rich and poor Americans. Income is defined as money coming in from salaries or wages, interest, rent, dividends, and profits. Wealth, or net worth, is the value of a person’s or household’s assets minus their debt.
Americans with incomes in the top 1 percent took in an average of $2 million a year in 2018, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Those in the lowest one-fifth of earners brought in an average of $22,500. Approximately one in ten Americans are classified as “poor” (below the federally defined poverty level). Another 30 percent are “low income” (bringing in less than twice the poverty level). In 2021, the federal poverty guideline was $26,500 for a family of four.
Income, well managed, contributes to wealth through the ability to save, invest, and buy a house instead of renting. Building equity is the primary source of net worth for most American families. In the United States, the wealth gap exceeds even the income gap. For 2016, the Pew Research Center found that the top 5 percent of Americans had 248 times as much wealth as those at the median, while the poorest 20 percent had zero or negative net worth, where debts exceeded holdings.
For the working poor, “one event can throw all their finances into a tailspin”—Tricia Passuth, director of Community Ministries.
The money gap isn’t just about whether a family can afford the latest model of car or the most stylish sneakers. Income and wealth lead to opportunity, from tennis lessons to tutors to tuition at elite educational institutions, from preschool to colleges. Dollars buy home libraries, electronics, travel, better wardrobes, quality medical care. And those things can affect health and well-being in the future by setting children further down the metaphorical road to success. Money can also pay for a support system of childcare centers, babysitters, and housekeepers—a safety net that helps people function with a minimum of disruption.
“You can think of income as water flowing into your bathtub, whereas wealth is like the water that’s sitting in the bathtub,” says Harvard sociology professor Alexandra Killewald. “Wealth is distinctive because it can be used as a cushion, and it can be directly passed down across generations.”
In both income and wealth, race and gender come to play in statistics about the haves and the have-nots. And despite its reputation as a sort of promised land for Black Americans, Atlanta holds the unfortunate distinction of having the greatest economic disparity of any major city in the country.
The Family Curse
Helena, forty-two, wants her three children to escape what she calls “the generational curse of struggling.” She believes she’s succeeded in overcoming another “family curse.” Her daughter, a high school senior who plans to be a nurse, has never been pregnant and is not sexually active, she said.
Born to a fourteen-year-old mother who, herself, was born when her mother was sixteen, Helena became pregnant at twelve. After being made to have an abortion, she was sent out to make her own way. For a while, she sold drugs. “It was the easiest way to make sure I could eat, had clothes, and had shoes,” she said. Pregnant again at eighteen, she had a miscarriage. She married, had a son when she was twenty-two, and a daughter at twenty-three.
“The main issue we see is that there is such a disparity between what individuals can bring home in a paycheck and what they need to earn in order to live in a safe, clean environment.”
TRICIA PASSUTH, DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY MINISTRIES, FPC
In 2007, she went through a bitter divorce and, with little child support coming in from her children’s father, went to work at a fast-food restaurant making $6.95 an hour. From there she took a job as a hotel housekeeper at $7.25 and then at a housecleaning service where the administrator kept half of every customer payment. “I never saw a $400 check for a week of house cleanings,” Helena said. Another hotel job followed that, at $9 an hour.
Her two children were latchkey kids from the ages of five and seven because she had no support system and not enough money to pay for a sitter, but she had to work.
In 2015, she reconnected with a boyfriend from her teenage years, who soon moved in with her but never contributed to household expenses. “I felt like I was carrying everybody,” she said. About the time she told him he had to leave, she learned she was pregnant again.
She determined immediately that she would have the baby—a boy. “I knew from the beginning I was going to do it myself,” she said. When she was ready to return to work, she found a sitter in her apartment complex who kept the baby for $65 a week.
She’s now working at a discount chain store warehouse for $16.65 an hour. She cleans houses on weekends for one or two families she knows from her days at the housecleaning service, taking her daughter and often her younger son with her. Occasionally, she picks up other work. Her daughter gets her little brother off to preschool and herself off to high school. At night, Helena cooks dinner or picks up prepared food, gets her younger son ready for bed, gets his clothes and hers ready for the next day, then goes to bed to get up at 4:45 a.m. to be at work by 6:00 a.m.
Her income-based rent is $375 a month, payments on her 2015 Nissan are $318, and insurance is $245. Her big splurge for the family is a cable television and internet package for her children. By making regular car payments, she was able to raise her credit score and was offered a $500-limit credit card.
During the early months of COVID, she was getting extra hours, up to fifty-two a week. “Those were nice checks,” she said. “The bills weren’t behind. The kids were eating well. I had a little money in the bank.” But recently her hours have been shortened to twenty-two a week, and she’s getting worried.
“Bills are backing up,” she said. “That puts more stress on me.” With every smaller paycheck, she pays part of several bills. She’s already stewing over how to provide Christmas presents for her children.
“I know the choices I made earlier in life determined how life would go later,” she said. “It all goes back to education. I could do so much more. I want to go to school. I’ve been wanting to go back for a long time. I tried to get my GED online, but somewhere along the way I just lost my motivation.”
Helena insisted that her real name be used. “This story needs to be told,” she said. “I am not embarrassed about my struggle. Believe me, I’m not the only one who’s struggling. I just have the opportunity to talk about it.”
History Still Felt
Georgia State economics professor David Sjoquist calls the economic differentials in Atlanta “stark and depressing.” While actual discrimination in hiring and pay may account for some differences in income and therefore wealth, other factors come into play, Sjoquist wrote in the SaportaReport.
“There is a mismatch between where Blacks live and the location of jobs,” he wrote. “This mismatch makes it more difficult for Blacks to find work and commute to a job. . . . For low-skilled jobs, the number of potential workers is greater in low-income communities. The law of supply and demand results in lower wages in those communities.”
Education is a “very significant factor in explaining differences in income,” according to Sjoquist. Eighty percent of whites in the city of Atlanta have college degrees, three times the rate of Black college graduates.
Pay gaps between women and men also affect the Black/white statistical divide, as does the presence of two parents in a household. About 55 percent of Black Atlanta adults are women, compared to 46 percent of whites. More than half of Atlanta’s white households are married couples, compared to about one-fifth of Black families.
Two adults in a home with children allows the potential for more than one income and shared responsibilities in childcare and household management. A single parent, on the other hand, has to juggle all the family roles while trying to maintain a job that may offer no paid time off. In Atlanta, 38 percent of Black households are headed by women, compared to only 6 percent of white families.
Connections and networks built up through families and alma maters also create opportunities for white people, according to Jay Bailey, president and CEO of the Russell Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit organization promoting Black-founded businesses. Think of connections made over tennis matches or golf games that might result in a kind of relationship capital not usually available to Black people, Bailey told the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
Economists and historians trace today’s racial inequities back to the seventeenth century and slavery, follow it through the discriminatory Jim Crow laws that kept Black citizens out of certain jobs and schools until the 1960s, and on to banking practices that denied Black families loans to buy homes.
The compound effect of money that makes more money means the gap between white family wealth and Black family wealth continues to grow. Meanwhile, escape from poverty is becoming more unlikely.
Helena insisted that her name be used. “I’m not embarrassed about my struggle,” she said.
Living “Miracle to Miracle”
“We’re living check to check, miracle to miracle,” said Desiree, thirty-one, a pseudonym for a mother of three who does not want her real name used because she’s not ready for her thirteen-year-old daughter to learn that her children are the result of her time in the sex trade.
“If you don’t come from money, you’re unable to get a good education and better jobs,” she said. “I want my children to be able to focus on their education, to be fit for society, to find a great-paying job or get into entrepreneurship. I want them to have better than me and my mom ever had. It’s not all about money, but money has a lot to do with just being able to maneuver in this world.”
She especially wants her children to avoid the kind of pitfalls that led her to leave high school for a “modeling” job that quickly turned into prostitution. She was jailed in her early twenties, but authorities regarded her as a victim, and she was released and found a reliable but poor-paying job.
She was making $10.50 an hour—$1,820 a month with full-time hours—as an aide in a nursing home when the facility started cutting back her hours in late summer. She had to seek help three times, including from We Thrive Riverside Renters’ Association, an aid and advocacy group for tenants.
Three weeks before being interviewed for this article, she started a job scanning package labels into a database for $15 an hour, or about $2,600 a month in a full forty-hour week. Rent on her two-bedroom Cobb County apartment costs $1,000 a month, payment on her 2010 Toyota Camry is $300, and utilities are another $330.
She estimates that she spends roughly $300 a month on groceries after food stamps. That leaves less than $700 a month for gasoline, clothes, car insurance, school supplies, and any other expenses, including emergencies.
Her shift begins at 3:00 a.m. and runs until 11:00 a.m. At 2:00 a.m., ready for work, she wakes her children—daughters, thirteen and eight, and a son, seven—and drops them off about ten minutes away with her mother, who will drive them to school. When she gets off work, she has a few hours to sleep before picking her children up at separate middle and elementary schools, supervising their homework, feeding them dinner, and preparing for a few more hours of sleep and the next day. About half the time, she cooks enough food to be able to heat meals for the other evenings.
“I’m working and going to church and trying to support my children the best way I know how,” she said. “I’m making enough to not get put out on the street, but it’s a stretch.”
For many families, the COVID pandemic has only made matters worse. Many hospitality, entertainment, and recreation workers saw their jobs eliminated or hours cut back. Single parents who still had jobs often found themselves with children suddenly at home during the day as schools went to online classes.
Although conditions for many families improved after the enactment of the American Rescue Plan and expanded childcare credits, millions of households faced food shortages, and millions fell behind on rent and mortgage payments, according to figures from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, launched in April 2020 to keep up with the ongoing consequences of the pandemic.
Figures released in September 2021 showed that 6 percent of white adults and 15 percent of Black adults said their household did not get enough food in August. One in ten white tenants were behind on rent payments, according to the survey. The rate among Black adults was greater than one in five.
Community Ministries at Work
The Community Ministries staff of First Presbyterian Church sees and hears from people behind the statistics every day.
“The main issue we see is that there is such a disparity between what individuals can bring home in a paycheck and what they need to earn in order to live in a safe, clean environment,” said director Tricia Passuth. “It just doesn’t match. While there may be housing options available, they’re in high-crime areas with lots of drugs. They’re infested with roaches. They’re in places most people would not want to live.”
For people considered the working poor, she said, “one event can throw all their finances into a tailspin.”
Many of the church’s clients have jobs that offer no benefits. “If a child gets sick and they have to take off work, they miss their pay,” she said. Then, when the rent is late, landlords often tack on a late fee of at least $100, and the debts keep growing.
Another complication is that many businesses with low-wage employees post their work schedules week to week, leaving workers unable to schedule appointments with doctors, with their children’s teachers, or interviews for better jobs. “With no constancy in schedule, it’s hard for them to even visit our food pantry,” Passuth said.
In desperation, people sometimes fall for scams. One woman with two children had scraped together enough for a deposit on a rental house, only to lose the money to a con artist who claimed to be the landlord but wasn’t. Another thought she was buying a car with her $1,400 government stimulus check but never saw the car or the money again.
Kate Culver, pastor for Community Ministries, said the church staff has tried to be “nimble” since COVID increased the demand for services and several other organizations that served the needy shut down. “Mostly,” she said, “we’re trying to be a place of belonging for people when there is nowhere else to belong.”
With “hiring” and “help wanted” posters in so many businesses, it seems unfathomable that First Presbyterian’s mostly male clients have difficulty finding jobs. One man comes in every weekday to work with recently hired FPC case manager Devon Harness to find employment. “He has a history of janitorial and dishwashing work, but nobody is hiring him,” she said. Other people can’t be hired because they lack the necessary birth certificates or state identification. “A lot of our work is getting people the documentation they need in order to apply for a job,” she said. “It’s difficult to get documents and keep them safe if you’re homeless.”
Mary (pronounced Marie) Wandera, administrative assistant for Community Ministries, helps many in need apply for copies of their birth certificates and other identification so that they can move toward employment and housing.
On the Tuesday after Labor Day, twenty-one messages were waiting on the Community Ministries help line, several from the same woman who, perhaps not realizing that the church was closed for a long weekend, sounded in greater despair with each call.
The church has strict requirements for assisting with rent or mortgage money. Applicants must have been in their residence for six months, have a late notice or an eviction letter, be able to prove their income, verify their rent rate and past-due amount, and not have received assistance from the church before. Payments from the church go directly to the landlord or mortgage holder. Community Ministries staff members speak to landlords and try to persuade them to drop penalties and late fees.
“People are coming in now who are $5,000 to $6,000 behind,” Passuth said. “There’s no way we can help with that.”
The number of requests per month far exceed the limited slots available for assistance. By September 10, 2021, all the spots for the month had been taken. “It’s especially hard to say no,” Wandera said. “On the other hand, it’s very exhilarating when we are able to help somebody. Sometimes I feel like I’m on a roller coaster. It’s always up and down, up and down.”
The factors contributing to income and wealth differences are complicated and entangled. Several years ago, the Atlanta Women’s Foundation produced a report on generational poverty among women. Its purpose was to address the conditions of women who are “born to teenage mothers, become pregnant, drop out without a high school diploma, and grow old watching their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren take the same path.”
The foundation identified formal and informal education, family planning, health, employment, housing, and transportation as areas that need to be addressed in order to put today’s children, and tomorrow’s, on a different route. Tearing apart the web that entraps people in poverty requires community, commitment, and cooperation—a holistic approach to systematic ills.
The Community Ministries staff see the results of ignoring, postponing, or giving only lip service to the overall situation. Wandera also takes issues of income and wealth disparity personally. Her family faced the threat of eviction several years ago, and she had to seek rental assistance herself. “I am forever grateful,” she said, “but more importantly, that serves as a constant reminder to me on how humbling that process can be.”
She gets frustrated with agencies that seem to think problems of poverty can be overcome with budgeting workshops. “The problem isn’t that people can’t budget,” she said. “The problem is that they don’t have enough income. If I can’t afford to pay my rent, I can budget for the rest of my life and it won’t make any difference. The assistance we’re providing, even though it helps a lot of people, is still a Band-Aid. If someone is making minimum wage in a country with so much wealth, chances are that in a month or two they’ll be back where they are. The cycle continues.”
