By Sara Kehaulani Goo Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 24, 2001; Page A06
LaKesha Walker has $7 in her bank account.
For eight months now, the 22-year-old District resident and mother of three -- with one more on the way -- has been making $9 an hour as a medical assistant, a job she said she loves.
But even with the help of her fiance, a furniture mover who brings home about $1,500 a month, Walker still runs into what she calls "panic mode" -- when her bank account is running low, bills are coming due and her next paycheck is still a week away.
"I have three boys; they get hungry all the time," Walker said.
Despite the economic boom of the late 1990s, 4 million American working-class families such as Walker's wonder whether they will have enough money to meet basic expenses at the end of the month, according to a study to be released today by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that advocates a social safety net to help the poor.
The study examined how much it costs families yearly to pay for a "basic family budget," or the minimum necessary to cover meals, rent, utilities, transportation, health insurance, child care and other household necessities and account for taxes. In 1999, the institute figured a two-parent, two-child family needed $49,218 annually in the District of Columbia, making it one of the most costly communities in the country.
"Our goal was to really measure how many people are unable to make ends meet," said Heather Boushey, one of four authors of the year-long study.
In 1999, the U.S. Census Bureau set the poverty line at $17,463 for a family of the same size, with no variation according to location.
Boushey said many people consider the Census Bureau's definition of poverty to be too low. The bureau bases its model on the assumption that one-third of a family's budget is spent on food and that it is the biggest expense. According to Boushey, that assumption, while probably true in the 1960s when the formula was developed, has been eclipsed by rising housing and child care costs.
In Washington, for example, the average monthly day-care cost for a two-parent family with two children is $1,042, compared with $510 for food. Housing is the second-highest expense at $820. "In some communities, the lowest cost for housing is actually at or above their poverty line," Boushey said.
For Clemencia Lopez, a 27-year-old District mother of three boys ages 2, 4 and 8, food and health care are often the expenses that hurt the budget. A year ago, Lopez stopped receiving welfare assistance and took a job as a mail clerk for $11.50 an hour.
Lopez said she's much happier to have a job, but even with subsidized rent and child care, she sometimes has to dip into her modest savings account to pay for groceries. That makes it difficult for her to save for dental school, which she'd eventually like to attend. "It's still hard," Lopez said.
The institute said it is not redefining poverty, but rather examining how many Americans enjoy a "decent standard of living." It sampled every metropolitan statistical area of the nation and collected average costs for basic living from government sources.
Patrick Flagan, a senior analyst of family and culture at the Heritage Foundation, said the study assumed that every family needs to pay for child care, when many family networks serve that role.
Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said some of the study's assumptions about health-care costs and housing costs may be a bit too high. Sawhill said the study is useful, especially in comparing costs in different parts of the country, but does not examine whether the parents work full or part time.
Since the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, Boushey said, more women are expected to work, so the study assumed families would pay for child care. "We've decided we're not going to support women to stay at home to raise their children," Boushey said.
The study, which compiled 2,500 sample budgets for a variety of family combinations, examined the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey from 1997 to 1999 to conclude that more than twice as many Americans are struggling to make ends meet than are currently defined as living below the poverty line.
Most of the families whose incomes fall below the level required to cover the "basic family budget" are white. However, about half of all black and Hispanic families make amounts below that level, and three out of four single-parent families with two children fall below.
Although a higher number of struggling families lived in the South, the Northeast and West also had a significant number of families falling below the threshold. Across the nation, one-third of struggling families lived in the suburbs, one-third in urban areas and one-third in rural areas.