Staten Island's poverty continues to grow

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- As she paid for a half gallon of milk with an electronic, food benefits card last week at a Tomkinsville deli, a young mother said it hurts not to be able to indulge in extras during the holiday season.

"This year, I am giving him some toys I got from the lady whose house I clean," she said, referring to her 8-year-old son, who lives with her in a two-bedroom apartment in Tomkinsville they also share with her cousin's family.

Last year, the 28-year-old who would only give her name as Rosa said she went to a toy give-away so her son could have something at Christmas.

Although Staten Island still has the lowest percentage of people living in poverty in the city, the ranks of the needy here have grown practically every year since the federal government first began a survey on the poor two decades ago -- even as poverty rates declined in other parts of the city.

More than one in ten, or 11.4 percent, of Staten Islanders lived in poverty in 2009, according to recently released Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) from the U.S. Census. That translates to about 56,000 Islanders who wake every morning wake up wondering if they have enough money to get through the day, the week, the month.

The survey also found nearly 16 percent Staten Islanders under the age of 18 were poor -- meaning some 17,800 youngsters here understand the futility of asking for a holiday gift when their parents struggle just to put food on the table.

For a family of two adults and two children to qualify as "poor" according to this federal tally, they bring in less than $21,904 last year.

Hilton Flores/Staten Island AdvanceThe Rev. Terry Troia says Staten Island has seen "an enormous jump" in poverty.

"It's an enormous jump from 20 years ago," said the Rev. Terry Troia, executive director of Project Hospitality, who has long worked with the borough's poor. Twenty years ago, when there were just a few soup kitchens and locations to access social services here, many of the poor on the Island were single and adrift, she said.

And as is true for so many stories about the new face of Staten Island, the infrastructure here has not kept pace with the changing demographic, she said.

"Now I get more phone calls now from school principals and guidance counselors about impoverished kids in family situations. Those calls wouldn't have come 20 years ago."

The Census survey, which culls administrative records and population estimates to gauge the numbers of poor in counties and school districts was launched in 1989. That year, 6.5 percent of Islanders were determined to be poor. In 2000, the poverty rate here was 8.9 percent.

Meanwhile the overall poverty rate in Manhattan dropped in the same time period from 20 percent to 16 percent, according to the survey.

"The growth in the impoverished is in the working poor, with unemployment and layoffs or jobs paying minimum wage," said the Rev. Troia. More than 1,100 families sought assistance through the agency's two outreach offices in the first six months of this year alone, she said.

"A lot of what happened with the hate crimes in Port Richmond can be pointed to economic depression and youth not getting jobs," she said. "We need more subsidized housing and reinforcement of emergency food and services -- this is the first line of defense against this. We don't have the star power of Manhattan and the other boroughs in attracting donors."

For Islanders in the jaws of poverty, there is no mistaking what it means not to have enough money to survive; it is a raw and ugly feeling of terror.

It means a North Shore 7-year-old who died of illness last week could not be buried until the community and a not-for-profit stepped in to pay funeral costs; or that at one borough school, where the staff regularly pay out of pocket for dinner meetings for the community, so they know, the next day, when kids come to the classroom, they will at least have eaten the night before.

But defining poverty and tallying the ranks of the needy has never been an exact science.

While the Census American Community Survey found an overall decline New York City's poverty rate from 19.1 percent in 2005 to 17.6 percent in 2008, a city-sponsored study on poverty for the same time period produced a strikingly different picture:

According to the Center for Economic Opportunity, poverty is growing citywide and 22 percent of New Yorkers were poor in 2008, compared to 20.6 percent in 2005.

The increase is largely in the growing ranks of the working poor, according to the study's authors, who have also devised a more complex picture of what it means to be poor here.

The study looked at the incomes of New Yorkers in the margins, as well as their access to tax breaks and social services, noting those supplements offer the only way to mitigate the crippling effects of not having enough money in the pockets.

"If you take two families who have the same income and are both working poor, and one family is paying for their housing at a market rate and one's family is getting a voucher, the second family is so much better off because they're only paying one third of their income in housing," said Mark K. Levitan, the director of poverty research for the Center for Economic Opportunity. "How can we not measure that?"

The city study also found the increase in poor was largely among New York City's working poor -- even if their incomes are too high to qualify as "poor" under federal guideline.

In New York City, the Center determined the poverty line should be drawn at $30,419 for the same family of four -- nearly one third higher than the federal benchmark.

Nearly 400 of those Staten Island youngsters whose families cannot afford anything beyond the basics showed up Friday night for toy donations at the West Brighton Community Center -- more than double the amount of people from last year, said Frank Sullivan of Brothers Care Inc., which sponsored the event.

"I see a lot of needy people," said Sullivan, recalling his youth on the Island several decades ago. "It was different back in the day; people could afford things. Now they need a lot more."