(Video Incl.)More scars on the wounded Goliath…Poverty report: Oakland County sees 77% increase

Greetings, It is more evident now that she is suffering a death by a thousand cuts. High unemployment, massive homelessness, growing hunger, growing dissatisfaction, a great division of the people, debt on top of debt on top of debt, and a host of many other problems, she is hurting and by degrees succumbing to the whiplashes of fate and time. From Detroit to D.C., and from Atlanta over to Houston Texas, we see poverty and misery mounting. The weight of these plagues have become too heavy for even the so-called world’s only super power to carry. Therefore she must fall!

   Poverty report: Oakland County sees 77% increase

  Poverty in Detroit’s suburbs has skyrocketed — up 77% in affluent Oakland County — during the Great Recession years of 2005-12, said key social-service executives at a news conference today in Pontiac.

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The shift makes it important to change how services are delivered in order to maximize the impact of the limited resources available to help metro Detroit’s poor, said John Ziraldo, CEO of Lighthouse of Oakland County. The non-profit agency in Pontiac today released a 10-page report on the increase in suburbanites now mired in poverty. ■ Raw Data: Michigan ZIP codes with the highest average adjusted gross income Being poor in suburban Detroit is different, and in some ways more challenging, than for those in a large city, Ziraldo said. He cited Oakland County’s spotty mass-transit service and its traditional safety net that has been concentrated in Pontiac as the area’s long-time urban core. The report is “mind-numbing” for people who’ve been oblivious to poverty amid their own suburban affluence, said Gilda Jacobs, a former state senator from Huntington Woods and now president of the Michigan League for Public Policy. Jacobs called for federal lawmakers to restore the earned-income tax credit, to boost the fortunes of those who work at low wages. She also championed raising the minimum wage along with other steps she said would alleviate poverty, she said. Bridget Agnello, 49, told listeners she’d become homeless and a resident of the two-year housing program at Lighthouse, after losing her job and then her Ferndale house. “I guess I am the new face of poverty” in Oakland County, said Agnello, a Wayne State University graduate and former marketing manager at several Fortune 500 employers. “It’s not somebody in the deepest part of Detroit or Pontiac. It’s somebody standing next to you at the grocery store who can’t afford the broccoli.”

 

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