The struggle to make ends meet in Centre County

UNDER THE SURFACE OF PROSPERITY

By Anne Danahy and Chris Rosenblum

Part one of "paycheck to paycheck" series.

Judy Corman once had a steady paycheck and a home. Then both disappeared, and she joined the ranks of Centre County residents struggling to support themselves.

After 18 years at a circuit board manufacturer, Corman lost her job to company downsizing and changes in the market.

“I never even thought about retiring. I thought, ‘I’ll be here when I retire,’ ” said Corman, 64, who grew up in Bellefonte.

She looked for factory work but couldn’t find any. She wondered if her age was a factor.

“I was too young for retirement, too old for anybody to hire me,” Corman said. “I was between a rock and a hard place, and I had to get welfare until my Social Security kicked in.”

The county’s unemployment rate is consistently one of the lowest in the state, and the area has the trappings of a vital economy — new, palatial houses, population growth, employment growth in some fields, and steady jobs based in the economic engine, Penn State.

But beneath the prosperity lie challenges Corman and others in the local work force struggle with: finding an affordable place to live, landing a job that does more than just barely cover rent, paying large medical bills or shouldering living costs that are spiraling upward faster than salaries.

Known to friends as O.B., Corman ended up working at Central Pennsylvania Community Action in Bellefonte before going on medical leave earlier this year because of worsening leg ulcers. In 2004, a fire destroyed the Bellefonte Academy, where Corman had lived for 40 years, forcing her to find a new home. One apartment she looked at had plants growing in a crack in the wall. Another had a filthy carpet. “It just gave me the willies,” she said.

She found an apartment but will soon move to another with an elevator, which she’ll need after recovering from surgery. While she receives Social Security, her drop in income has left her trying to live on a tight budget, a dilemma that county human-services workers say an increasing number of county residents face these days.

Ellen Mayer, case manager for the State College Salvation Army Corps, said poverty in Centre County isn’t as obvious as street people or slums. Instead, the area has “invisible poor.”

“They’re not in chronic need usually,” she said. “They’re one crisis away from eviction, a termination of power, or not having a car to go to work. It’s paycheck to paycheck.”

Despite their circumstances, they often don’t see themselves as poor. Most interviewed by the Centre Daily Times consider themselves hard-working, forgoing some luxuries while trying to succeed in the face of escalating prices for food, gas, housing, medical care and household goods.

Their plight has many faces. In this series, you’ll meet:

•Todd and Heather Keller-man, a young couple from State College who are trying to stretch modest wages from his job at a box factory while raising two young sons.

•Eli and Elizabeth Halter-man, who balance dual lives as college students and the parents of a toddler. They rely on student loan refunds and part-time earnings to make ends meet as they study for a better future.

•Jeff and Betsy Snyder, a Howard couple with two children who found themselves in crushing credit card debt after the costs of living exploded while their income did not. They are working extra hours and living by a budget to gain control of the situation.

•Rose and Dave Fritts, of Union Township, who both work long hours to pay the mortgage on a home that, for years, they didn’t think they would ever own.

•Jackie Christiansen, who suffers from narcolepsy but didn’t have health insurance benefits even when she worked. Now unemployed and searching for another job, she can’t afford private plans and must seek free medical care.

They and other county residents share a problem — their dollars don’t go as far as before.

Rising heating oil and gas prices this winter may make life especially tough for workers in low-paying service and retail positions, which now dominate a local economy that has lost many of its higher-paying manufacturing jobs.

“One of the things that I think is troubling is that we have lost 55 percent of our industrial jobs, our manufacturing jobs, since 2003,” county Commissioner Steve Dershem said.

On the bright side, wages in Pennsylvania have been climbing steadily over the years, and the median family income in Centre County in 2006 was $61,700, according to the state Department of Labor and Industry.

But that’s no comfort to an employee in the retail trade, one of thousands in the county making an average of $365 a week, according to the state. Those in the health care and social assistance fields may be doing better at $673 a week on average, but they still fall in the bottom half of county workers.

Amy Glasmeier, a professor of economic geography at Penn State, said the bulk of jobs being created are low-wage.

“What you see are jobs that pay non-living or at-living wages with no flexibility or benefits, or professionalized employment in health care and educational services. Beyond that, not a lot are paying living wages,” Glasmeier said.

At the same time, she said, some people are giving up and leaving the job market because their skills don’t match the jobs available and because the jobs that are available are too low paying to make them worthwhile.

Glasmeier said those two factors — low wages and skills that are incompatible with the job market — rarely occur simultaneously as they are now.

The county’s unemployment rate, Glasmeier argues, is an increasingly ineffective measure of labor-force participation and economic well-being. People opt out of the job market and others have nonregistered jobs, such as landscaping or cleaning homes, rather than commute long distances.

Some cash-strapped residents make other choices.

They go without medications or even pull out their own teeth rather than pay a dentist. They max out their credit cards and sink into debt. Or they pay for utilities or car repairs, then find they have little left over to stock their shelves and fridge.

A State College mother of two had a well-paying job until she had to go on disability two years ago. Out-of-pocket medical bills ate up her savings.

“I’ve gotten behind, and it’s been catching up to me over the years,” she said.

The woman, who asked not to be named, said that for a long time she didn’t think she would need to get help from groups such as the Salvation Army. But this year, she signed up for the Christmas Angel program, which provides gifts for parents to give their children.

“There is help out there,” she said.

One of those programs, the Food Bank of the State College Area, provided groceries and household products to 200 families in June, a monthly high for the organization.

Executive Director Linda Tataliba said that since then, the number of people served by the food bank monthly has dropped slightly, but more families than last year still use the service. Some families had made six visits, the number typically allowed in a year, by summer.

“I think the biggest comments we’re getting from clients are just the cost of housing and the continued low-wage jobs,” Tataliba said. “Every facet of the cost of living has gone up tremendously.”

That includes home heating fuel. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, retail gas has seen a 150 percent price increase over the past 10 years and the cost of natural gas has more than doubled.

As the price of heating a home climbs, the number of people in Centre County receiving help through the state’s Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program grows, too. The state Department of Public Welfare approved 2,487 applications for the program last heating season, compared with 1,660 in 2001-02.

“It’s getting worse. We see more people that are working and still need our services,” said Robin Knepp, coordinator of the Community Action Center in Philipsburg.

The center is assisting a steady stream of clients, including Walter Fleck, a longtime Philipsburg resident who works for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. He said he can’t afford the high price of fuel.

“Everything goes up except my wages,” he said.

He’s not alone. Others are wondering what it takes to earn a living.

Melissa Stamus, 39, of Stormstown, moved back to the area after a long relationship dissolved. She held part-time retail jobs, at one point working long days for both a clothing store and a home-care service.

Yet, because her jobs lacked benefits, she had to go to Centre Volunteers in Medicine, a clinic that provides free medical and dental care for uninsured local residents.

“I like to work, but I like to get paid for my work,” she said. “Retail, I tell you, I worked hard and got very little.”