Doug, in looking at your U.S. poverty rate time series, it looks more like the poverty rate peaked in 1993 and then began to decline, albeit in a somewhat "sticky" fashion. It doesn't look like poverty has increased with the growth we've been seeing. This seems on its face rather consistent with what economists would predict coming out of a recession - labor markets would become increasingly saturated, and even poorer-skilled workers would find employment and be lifted out of poverty. As a housing and homeless policy planner in Berkeley, I observe a more complicated picture (as I know many others on this list would suggest). The extent to which people actually _experience_ a reduction in their poverty depends to a significant degree on how much of what income they receive is spent for housing. With the end of strong rent control in Berkeley, Berkeley's Rent Board reports that the rents of newly occupied rental units (hence, a new rent ceiling gets recorded) is up 25 percent over last year at this time. That means a studio apartment renting last year for $600 would fetch $750 for its owner this year from the rental market. The Contra Costa Times reported from the California Association of Realtors this morning that Berkeley's median home sales price jumped 35 percent since a year ago, to $352,000. At a conference last week, I heard it said that in some California rental markets, something like 80 percent of the tenants pay more than 50 percent of their incomes in rent. (Until I get the reports from which this is quoted, please, everyone on the list, consider this factoid second-hand hearsay.) If that's true, then the poverty rate doesn't tell the story in California, hardly at all. The housing boom in Berkeley is a direct result of the housing boom in San Francisco, which is a direct result of the booming regional economy in finance and high tech in the Bay Area. The Times article states what many realtors have observed, that buyers who have been priced out of SF come to Berkeley to make that buy - and they come here with extra cash from failed attempts to purchase in SF. As I see it, the poverty rate indicates where people's incomes are with respect to a government-established poverty (income) threshold; however, it doesn't appear to me to account for the purchasing power of their incomes the way a measure like the rent or housing cost burden (as % of household income) does.
