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Fresno Tackling Poverty

Washington Post

Sunday 27 November 2005, 9:43 pm
Keywords: News Articles

By Evelyn Nieves, Washington Post Staff Writer

Fresno, the largest city in California's expansive Central Valley, may have gleaming new office buildings and an award-winning baseball stadium, but it remains a poor city overwhelmed by need. A short hop from City Hall, people live in slum buildings where roaches crawl in tenants' ears, the black mold looks like wallpaper and families split the rent by sleeping in walk-in closets, laundry rooms and bathtubs.

This city at the heart of the richest farmland in the world has been poor for so long, no one can remember it otherwise. Last month, when the Brookings Institution issued a report that said a higher proportion of poor people in Fresno lived in areas of concentrated poverty than in any other major city in the country -- pre-Katrina New Orleans was number two -- no one here was surprised.

But fighting poverty in Fresno (which ranks 16th among the nation's largest cities in terms of its overall poverty rate) may prove more than daunting. Unlike the other cities the Brookings report found with the most concentrated poverty -- New Orleans, Louisville, Miami and Atlanta -- Fresno is still, in many ways, a farm town. The city's dominant industry, agriculture, depends on a cheap, seasonal work force that keeps renewing itself as successive new waves of immigrants arrive.

Rising rents are sending full-time workers to soup kitchens. Poverello House estimates that 70 percent of the average of 1,200 meals it serves each day are to people with minimum-wage jobs who cannot get by without help.

The Fresno Rescue Mission, which operates the largest homeless shelter in the region, providing 300 beds a night, has found the lines longer at its soup kitchen and the demand for shelter greater than ever. About one quarter of the people who now come to the mission for meals work full time but cannot pay all their bills. "Apartments that were $400 two years ago are now $800 to $900 a month," said the Rev. Larry Arce, director of the mission.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/20/AR2005112001018.
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