Persistent poverty

Number of poor in NW Arkansas higher than ever the here”

NWA Democrat-Gazette/J.T. WAMPLER -Char Smith of Springdale completes an online survey for Tyson Foods Tuesday June 2, 2015. Smith has been struggling to find work and was eager to complete the survey since it paid $25.
NWA Democrat-Gazette/J.T. WAMPLER -Char Smith of Springdale completes an online survey for Tyson Foods Tuesday June 2, 2015. Smith has been struggling to find work and was eager to complete the survey since it paid $25.

The recession ended years ago and the local economy is booming, but the number of poor people in Northwest Arkansas is higher than ever.

"When I was looking for a job in 2001, you were one in 10 people applying for every position," said Charlotte "Char" Smith, 59, of Springdale, an unemployed former business owner. "Now you're one in 75 or one in 80."

If anything, the area's economic recovery encouraged more poor people to move here, said Ed Clifford, chief executive of the Jones Trust charities. He was president of the Bentonville Bella Vista Chamber of Commerce for 17 years and is a retired executive for Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

"The better the times get, the more people move here," especially families with children to provide for, Clifford said. "We're feeding more and more hungry kids."

The number of Benton and Washington county residents living in poverty jumped from 37,305 to 65,431 between 2000 and 2010, U.S. Census Bureau figures show. By 2013, the number of people in poverty in the two counties approached 73,000, according to the bureau's latest figures, which are estimates.

Charity and assistance services are swamped, said Sandy Stout, a career specialist at Goodwill Industries in Springdale. Northwest Arkansas is a string of towns that each took care of its own community, Stout said. Residents of each city contribute food, health and job assistance for the poor within their own towns. Now each of those local systems is overburdened on its own and has a new problem -- a poor population mobile enough to travel from town to town and exhaust the resources of each in turn, she said.

"I have a resource list, a list of places where you can get milk at this spot, clothes at another and assistance with your phone bill or rent or prescription medications someplace else," Stout said. "There are people who will go to each one of those places in each town, then start over again when they've visited them all."

"Everything has grown so fast we haven't been able to keep up with the need," Stout said. "The poor population's getting older, too. They're baby boomers too. They're going to need more and more services, especially prescriptions," she said.

Long-term, the region's rapid population growth magnifies the effect of small percentage increases in the poverty rate. Between 1960 and 2010, the poverty rate in Benton and Washington counties fell by more than half, according to census data. At the same time the number of people living in poverty in those two counties more than doubled.

LEAPS AND BOUNDS

The jump in the poor population between 2000 and 2010 is largely explained by the recession, said Tracy Farrigan, a research geographer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture who tracks poverty. The department runs nutrition programs for the poor. What's puzzling is that the region's poverty rate did not go down as the overall economy improved, she said.

"Back in 2005, your metropolitan statistical area was well below the national level on poverty," Farrigan said. "At that time, you were at 12 percent and the national average was 15.6 percent." The local statistical area consists of Benton, Washington and Madison counties and McDonald County in Missouri.

"For the nation as a whole, the recession started at 2007," she said. "At that point, your average was 14.1 percent, which was still close to the national average of 13 percent. By 2009, though, you were at 17 percent compared to 14.3 percent nationwide. What's more, and this is kind of disturbing, your child poverty rate in your region sort of skyrocketed. In 2007, it was 17.8 percent. In 2009, it was 25 percent.

"I don't know what caused that or why it's persisting," Farrigan said. The poverty rate should have dropped back toward pre-recession levels as the recession eased, she said.

Clifford isn't puzzled. Neither is Stout nor Erika Rodriguez, also a career specialist at Goodwill Industries in Springdale. The first factor cited by all three in the persistence of poverty was its connection to the building trades -- directly and indirectly.

"My unprofessional opinion is that when the recession hit the people in the skilled building trades left," Stout said. "They either went somewhere where there was still work or they went home. The people who came in droves, stayed here and lost their entry-level jobs were the people who were working for businesses that sold goods and services to those skilled workers during the boom. They're the people without commercial driver's licenses or carpentry or electrical journeyman certifications."

THE JOB HUNT

Char Smith and her previous husband moved to Northwest Arkansas from Indianapolis in 1996 after researching markets across the country. They wanted to open a learning center and tutoring business and picked this region because of its rapid growth.

"It was between here and Joplin, Mo., and this area was growing faster," Smith said.

The business was sold in the couple's 2001 divorce, but she found a job in 2001 that lasted through the recession. She lost it in 2014 in a reorganization of her employer's company, she said.

"The biggest difference between looking for a job now and looking for one years ago is that you can never get an in-person interview," Smith said. "Everything's done through an application online and you never even get to met the person doing the hiring. I'm pretty confident that if I could ever get an interview, I could convince whoever I talked to that I can use a mop and would do a good job.

"Look, I ran a business. I know when you're sorting through electronic records the first thing you scan for is a reason not to hire that person," Smith said. "They're not supposed to ask you your age, but they get around that by asking questions like when you graduated from high school. The assumption is that if you're older or overqualified, you're just going to leave for a better job as soon as you find one. The problem with that theory is believing there are better jobs out there."

Renee Bell, 29, of Fayetteville said she has had job interviews with eight to 10 people being interviewed at once, all for the same job. Bell was unemployed until finding a job recently, she said.

"It's really tense, sitting there next to the person you're competing with for the same job," Bell said.

She also said companies hired more people before the recession. Now they operate with fewer people doing the same amount of work. "No place I've worked for in years ever hired enough people," she said.

BEYOND BOOM AND BUST

Another key factor in persistent poverty is local industries that pay well are not the rapidly growing ones, Clifford said. Many available positions are service-related jobs catering to customers from those established industries.

"They're all lower level jobs that can't support a family of four people," he said. So even in families where one of the adults finds work, he or she cannot lift the rest of the family out of poverty.

Both Clifford and Stout cited the reluctance of employers to hire full-time workers with fear of the added expense of health care.

"The effect of Obamacare is undeniable," Stout said.

Clifford said the fear was not well-founded.

"There's this myth that if you get over 50 people in your business that you'll have to get them all health insurance," he said. The Affordable Care Act could assign tax penalties to employers who do not provide such care, but options are available, Clifford said.

Another factor is that many people who moved into Northwest Arkansas before the recession are older and have children now, Stout said. They are competing for entry level jobs with a younger generation.

Language and culture also play a role, Rodriguez said. Northwest Arkansas is home to large numbers of Spanish-only speakers and to Marshall Islanders. Language and culture are bigger barriers to employment for members of these groups than any ethnic bias, she said.

"I'm the first in my family to go to college," she said. "The assumption was that when I was old enough, I was going to get a job and help support the family. I had to tell my parents no, that I was going to go to college and get a degree. It was a huge break in the cycle."

Even English speakers are having trouble with language these days, Stout said.

"With phones and social media, people can't spell," Stout said. "The only words they ever use are abbreviations. They can't even read our writing because they can't read cursive."

Being poor has a culture of its own, Stout said.

"When you're poor, you live day to day, and if you have enough money to get through today then you think you have enough money," she said.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

The region needs a better system of workforce training to give its large, growing body of workers some key skills, Clifford said. Even if such a system cannot train everyone, the region needs it to give potential employers confidence the area can train workers on short notice.

The retail, food and trucking industries that gave the region its job growth in the past are still pillars of the economy, Clifford said, but the area is going to have to attract new, different and growing businesses if it wants to start pulling ahead of its poverty problem.

"There's an end game here, and Detroit showed it to us," Clifford said. "If you don't have people making jobs that pay enough money to pay taxes, you're not going to have the kind of community everybody wants."

Stout agreed that skills are needed, but cited a different reason. The biggest problem in filing out resumes for the poor is finding something, anything that will make one resume stand out from the others, she said.

A big step toward easing poverty would be to get nonviolent, nonsexual crimes off the records of those who are able to show they have reformed, Stout said. Goodwill supports "traditional employment opportunities" that will get those records cleared if the person involved stays in a participating employment program for 18 weeks and maintains a good employment record. Having a criminal record, however old or however slight, is an almost impossible burden to overcome in this job market, she said.

And transportation is an issue, Farrigan said.

"You've already done something great for fighting poverty with the Razorback Regional Greenway," she said.

The system of walking trails that spans the major cities will be a major boon to the poor who will use it to reach jobs, to reach stores and lessen the need to buy fuel and repairs for a vehicle all while improving their health, she said.

Still, the public transit system here needs improvement, she said.

The region needs to be careful to avoid "residential sorting," or the grouping of residences by class, ethnic or economic divisions, Farrigan said. Such sorting makes it harder for anyone to be socially mobile and get out of whatever social or economic class they come from, she said.

Bell said businesses need more realistic expectations. Pre-recession prosperity made up for weak management in many businesses, she said. Not anymore. Her most frequent reason for losing a job is because the business she worked for closed, she said.

Doug Thompson can be reached by email at dthompson@nwadg.com.

NW News on 06/14/2015

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