By JOHN MAKEIG
Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle
A national study shows the number of Houston children living in poverty jumped by 13 percentage points between 1979 and 1989, a total expected to increase when government cuts in welfare go into effect this year.
In fact, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation study of 50 large cities, almost a third of children here reside in poverty.
Local health and child poverty experts would not be surprised to see the child poverty level surpass the 40 percent level that has existed in Detroit, Atlanta, Cleveland, Miami and New Orleans since at least 1989.
Using Census statistics and more, the Casey Foundation paints a dreary picture of life in Houston for children:
But compare Houston to other cities studied by the Casey Foundation and the image improves. It improves, to be more exact, in the sense that a lot of places are a lot worse.
The 68 percent of births to unwed teens here seems small compared to the 96 percent rate in Detroit. Houston's juvenile violent crime rate of 397 arrests per 100,000 is much smaller than Dallas' 829 arrests and Detroit's 1,234. The 9 percent figure for kids in "distressed neighborhoods" seems insignificant when likened to Detroit's 62 percent sum.
It would be easy to scan the study's data and conclude that Houston has rather average problems when the figures appear between the favorable rates found in Honolulu, Omaha, Neb., and Virginia Beach, Va., and the horrible rates for Detroit, New Orleans, and the District of Columbia.
But Jim Mickelson, head of Houston's Children at Risk organization, said it would be a mistake to compare Houston with Detroit, which has the worst statistics for children living in poverty.
"Houston is not Detroit. They're landlocked and we're not," he explained. "When you start condensing people, you have more problems."
In Houston, during the economic boom of the 1980s, numerous people moved here, and most of them were hardly impoverished. "Since the boom, the growth has been minorities -- the poor and the working poor," Mickelson said.
He had no available figures for Houston, but of the 900,000 children in Harris County, Mickelson figures 240,000 are residing in poverty. That totals up to around 30 percent, close to the figure cited by the Casey Foundation study and an earlier one done by the National Center for Children in Poverty. "We agree that it's at that level,"Mickelson said. "With the welfare reform coming, the 30 percent rate is going up. We're going to see some real problems here."
Houston's Health Department director, Mary desVignes-Kendrick, a pediatrician, likewise fears a worsening of the poverty rate with all its attendant problems -- juvenile crime, youth unemployment, a high school dropout rate and health woes -- when welfare benefits decline next summer.
She said it is now possible to find households in Houston where both the mother and father have full-time jobs -- and still reside in poverty.
What desVignes-Kendrick wants are programs to prevent kids from leaving school without diplomas and job training programs to help dropouts and others survive in an era of expanding poverty.
Increases in poverty lead to more unemployed people without health insurance and larger numbers calling on the city's health clinics. DesVignes-Kendrick fears an increase in the numbers of poor people and their children trickling into clinics seeking medical help.
The Casey Foundation study suggests that of five Texas cities surveyed, Austin has the fewest poverty problems. Austin did not fare as well as some American cities with small minority populations, but in most categories it came out well ahead of Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and El Paso.
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