America's 'near poor' are increasingly at economic risk, experts say

The Abbotts date their tailspin to a collapse in demand for the aviation-related electronic parts that Stephen sold in better times, when he earned about $40,000 a year.

He lost his job in late 2001, unemployment benefits ran out over the next year and he and his wife, Laurie, along with their teenage son, were evicted from their apartment.

They spent a year in a borrowed motor home here in the working-class interior of Orange County, followed by eight months in a motel room with a kitchenette. During that time, Ms. Abbott, a diabetic who is now 51, lost all her teeth and could not afford to replace them.

''Since I didn't have a smile,'' she recalled, ''I couldn't even work at a checkout counter.''

Americans on the lower rungs of the economic ladder have always been exposed to sudden ruin. But in recent years, with the soaring costs of housing and medical care and a decline in low-end wages and benefits, tens of millions are living on even shakier ground than before, according to studies of what some scholars call the ''near poor.''

''There's strong evidence that over the past five years, record numbers of lower-income Americans find themselves in a more precarious economic position than at any time in recent memory,'' said Mark R. Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of ''One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All.''

In a rare study of vulnerability to poverty, Mr. Rank and his colleagues found that the risk of a plummet of at least a year below the official poverty line rose sharply in the 1990's, compared with the two previous decades. By all signs, he said, such insecurity has continued to worsen.

For all age groups except those 70 and older, the odds of a temporary spell of poverty doubled in the 1990's, Mr. Rank reported in a 2004 paper titled, ''The Increase of Poverty Risk and Income Insecurity in the U.S. Since the 1970's,'' written with Daniel A. Sandoval and Thomas A. Hirschl, both of Cornell University.

For example, during the 1980's, around 13 percent of Americans in their 40's spent at least one year below the poverty line; in the 1990's, 36 percent of people in their 40's did, according to the analysis.

Comparable figures for this decade will not be available for several years, but other indicators -- a climbing poverty rate and rising levels of family debt -- suggest a deepening insecurity, poverty experts and economists say.

More people work in jobs without health coverage, including temporary or contract jobs that may offer no benefits or even access to unemployment insurance. Medicaid is offered to fewer adults (though to more children). Cash welfare benefits are harder to secure, and their real value has eroded.

About 37 million Americans lived below the federal poverty line in 2004, set at $19,157 a year for a family of four. But far more people, another 54 million, were in households earning between the poverty line and double the poverty line.

''We don't track this group of people, and they are very vulnerable,'' said Katherine S. Newman, a sociologist at Princeton University who studies low-end workers.

•	America's 'near poor' are increasingly at economic risk, experts say The New York Times, Monday, May 8, 2006 Byline: Erik Eckholm

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