California's high cost of housing has given the state one of the worst poverty rates in the nation, according to an independent study that was welcomed by critics who believe the government's method of counting the poor overlooks many people.
Thousands of Silicon Valley residents, for example, are living in poverty even though they earn more than the official federal standard, according to researchers at the non-profit Public Policy Institute of California, who calculated the numbers after adjusting for local housing costs.
The study confirms what social workers and the working poor have known for years:
``If you're poor here, you're really poor,'' said Candy Capograssi, deputy executive director of the Santa Clara County Housing Authority, which recently had more than 70,000 people submit applications for a housing subsidy waiting list.
Using the official federal standard, California has the 15th-highest poverty rate in the country, with 13.3 percent of its residents living below the poverty threshold.
But when Reed adjusted the formula to reflect the cost of housing, California's poverty rate rose to 16.1 percent. That gave it the third-highest ranking in the country, Reed said -- behind only Washington, D.C., and New York.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Really House-Poor
California, look at what your "progressive" NIMBYism has wrought:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
"Reed adjusted the formula to reflect the cost of housing, California's poverty rate rose to 16.1 percent."
Why not adjust for coastline or sunshine? California is "poor" because we subsidize poverty and punish productivity. Nothing more. These kinds of "adjusted" "studies" are conclusions in search of justification. 2.5 million illegals so completely distort these metrics that you can adjust any way you wish.
That's such BS. Yeah, it's the immigrants' fault. Sure.
And why shouldn't the cost of housing be part of the calculation of the poverty rate? People just don't want to deal with the fact that the system is broken and it is easier to blame others especially when you are personally profiting from this bad situation.
Read the report yourself (warning, PDF):
http://tinyurl.com/eat4y
The reason the cost of housing shouldn't get excessive weight is because if we did California would look like the 3rd highest poverty rate location in the nation. You can't just "adjust" poverty calcualtions for one component. You can if you want to do the work and come up with alternative measures of poverty. In that case using housing costs, you'd need to account for dwelling unit occupancy and thus negate some of the high costs just like the Census and AHS.
Post a Comment