Documenting Poverty, Economic Distress and Challenge in North Carolina

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Dear friends: We are pleased to attach Documenting Poverty, Economic Distress and Challenge in North Carolina-a new report from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. An electronic version is also available at www.law.unc.edu/documents/poverty/publications/documentingpoverty_finalreport.pdf The last two years, of course, have been difficult ones for North Carolina. Skyrocketing unemployment, a steep rise in the uninsured, breakdowns in our mental health system, a chasm of revenue shortfalls and excruciating budget cuts have presented daunting challenges. As this report demonstrates, these upheavals take place against a backdrop of profound transformation. The Tar Heel state has, on many fronts, made remarkable progress. We have experienced significant, even dramatic, growth-fueled largely by domestic migration. Educational advances are among the most notable in the country. Our improvement in completed high school education levels over the last four decades, for example, is the second greatest relative increase in the nation. Still, much remains to be done. Our educational attainments are plagued by both racial and regional disparity. Our high school graduation rate is unacceptably low, and the percentage of our residents obtaining college degrees does not approach those of the most competitive states. Poverty has proven more stubborn. Roughly 15 percent of North Carolinians live below the federal poverty standard. Fully a third of our families fall below more meaningful "living wage" measures. Poverty is disproportionately marked by age, by sex, by race, and by geography. Nor is our poverty only rural. Urban census tracts in Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-Salem-containing over 100,000 persons living in extreme poverty-experience higher poverty and unemployment rates, and lower per capita incomes, home ownership and graduation rates than even highly-distressed rural counties. Deep recession, following on years of economic dislocation, has also hit some parts of North Carolina remarkably hard. The Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton metropolitan area, for example, has experienced one of the steepest increases in unemployment in the nation over the past eighteen months. So educational advancement is a necessary, but insufficient, tool in our fight against economic distress and marginalization. We are required to invest in both our people and our places. Our efforts should focus not only on our chronically-poor rural counties, but on the highly-distressed neighborhoods of our generally more prosperous urban centers, and on communities plagued by the situational poverty resulting from economic change and dislocation. As we work to rebuild North Carolina's economy, we must make sure that we provide a path to economic sustainability for all North Carolinians, including those working families who are unemployed or do not earn a living wage. Only then will the doors of opportunity be opened to all North Carolinians. Sincerely, Leslie Winner, Executive Director, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation Gene Nichol, Director, UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity