Cycle of Poverty in PGH

I few weeks ago I bookmarked an article in the Huffington Post and finally sat down to read it in its entirety.  There were a lot of great things in the article, so I decided to pull out a few relevant quotes. 

For many young people born into the cyclic deprivations of urban poverty -- failing schools, broken families, lack of jobs, violence, crime and drugs -- such lessons come far too late in life.

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A cleaning job has recently become available at a hotel near the airport, and Davis is hopeful that it will work out. But the commute to and fro will take six buses, two hours, and $5.50 out of his pocket each day -- money that he doesn't have at the moment.

Hill House will help with the fare until he gets his first paycheck, but the minimum-wage job won't be enough to cover his bills, and the area transit authority has targeted one of the bus routes for a service reduction. Without a car, he'll likely lose the job in a few months' time.

This part of the article described the situation that many of our clients must deal with every day.  They are happy to finally have work, but due to time constraints, bus schedules and rising public transportation costs, many are not able to keep the minimum wage jobs. 

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A full 6.7 percent of Americans, or roughly 20.5 million people, were earning less than half the official poverty rate -- a category generally known as "extreme poverty."  This amounts to almost 1 in every 10 children falling into the extreme poverty category. 

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“Very poor neighborhoods face a whole host of challenges that come from concentrated disadvantage -- from higher crime rates and poorer health outcomes to lower-quality educational opportunities and weaker job networks," writes Brookings researcher Elizabeth Kneebone and her co-authors in a report issued last fall. "A poor person or family in a very poor neighborhood must then deal not only with the challenges of individual poverty, but also with the added burdens that stem from the place in which they live.”

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The metrics showed that while median household income was $20,721 -- compared to the median household income of $36,019 for the city as a whole -- 34 percent of Hill District households earned less than $10,000 annually. About 40 percent of the population is below the poverty line.