As economy improves, recovery slow to reach DC's low-income residents

WASHINGTON — In the nation’s capital, the talk these days is of an economy that Democrats boast and Republicans begrudgingly admit is rapidly on the mend.

The June jobs report, released Thursday, bolstered the claims of the optimists with more encouraging figures: 64 straight months private sector job growth. 12.8 million jobs created in that time, and a national unemployment rate that dipped to 5.3 percent—the lowest level since spring of 2008, just before the onset of the recession.

But the picture inside the borders of the District of Columbia is more complicated, especially for some of the city’s poorer residents and low-wage workers, who make up nearly one quarter of the population. For them, the economic slump that other parts of the country has shaken off remains a more chronic condition and persistent challenge.

Every day, you can find Mark Stoney, 56, at the job center run by the city’s Department of Employment Services in northeast Washington, taking classes on job readiness, participating in apprenticeship programs and working to improve his computer skills. His last job was as a temporary food service worker serving government buildings and offices, before the contract ended.

Stoney admits that steady work has always been a challenge for him, before the recession and now, because of a criminal record.

“A lot of times employers don’t like to hire people like me. That’s why I’ve been flip-flopping from temp work to volunteering to whatever just trying to prove my worth,” he said. “You have to stay hopeful and work to improve your worth—hope that somebody gives you a second chance.”

Tawanda Robinson, 49, has similarly been out of work for a year since a temporary housekeeping job ended. She took time off to care for an ailing family member but has been actively on the hunt for several months, filling out 10 to 15 applications a day and walking the city by foot to look for openings. 

“You just have to be consistent — you really have to get out there and hump,” she said. “It’s been hard, but I have good family, thank God.”  

Marina Streznewski, executive director of the D.C. Jobs Council, said the image of Washington as a city of lawyers, power brokers and lobbyists obscures the struggles of residents on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale and the contradictions of a city where inequality has soared in recent years. Median income in the district for instance steadily increased from 2002 to 2012, even in the midst of the recession, and currently stands at $65,000, well above the national average, according to recent Census figures. Nevertheless, 18 percent of residents fall below the poverty line.

“We may be the city with the highest number of people with degrees. At the same time we also have a really bad high school graduation rate,” Streznewski said. “We have a lot of affluent people we have a lot of poor people, and not a lot of people in the middle.”  

The unemployment rate in Washington was 7.3 percent in May, higher than any of the 50 states, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although on par with other mid-sized cities like St. Louis and Philadelphia. In the predominantly African-American wards east of the Anacostia River, however, joblessness is mired in the double digits, as has long been the case.

Some of Washington's economic and job market challenges are common characteristics of urban areas, said Stephen Fuller, director of the Center of Regional Analysis at George Mason University, who noted that the overall economic picture in Washington metropolitan area remains strong, especially as the federal workforce rebounds from the belt-tightening of the past few years.

“Cities tend to have a populated concentration of a workforce that has a lower level of education,” Fuller said. “Many of the new jobs being created require more education.”

Monica West, program manager of workforce services at Washington’s Department of Employment Services, said as the job market has rebounded for certain segments of the population, the city has turned its attention to serving those who suffer from inherent disadvantages.

“At one point, we were seeing people with J.D.’s and MBA’s, everybody across the board, to those that didn’t have high school diplomas coming in for job services. Now it’s a much more targeted group of candidates that we’re serving, and that would be low-skilled workers—people with no high school diploma, those who have various barriers to employment.” she said. “It’s harder for them to find employment. Something like a construction job used to very easy to get. Now it’s much more competitive.”

Wages too have been slow to rise for working low-income residents, according to a January report from the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute that look at both income and employment for district residents. While high-earners at the top of the income ladder saw their wages increase $6 an hour from 2007 to 2013, and middle-income earners gained an additional $3 an hour in the same period, the wages of low-income workers stagnated at $12 an hour, one percent below the average in 2007.

“These findings, based on Census Bureau data for 2007 and 2013, show that what appears to be a strong economic recovery in the District is really just a recovery for a small number of residents,” the report’s authors wrote. “Even those with some education or training beyond high school have seen wages fall and unemployment rise. Only those residents with the most advanced education are making economic progress.”

Streznewski noted the city has launched a battery of programs to address these issues, from increasing the minimum wage to discouraging employment discrimination for those with criminal records to looking at ways adults with low literacy and education levels could receive additional skills training while earning an income.

‘That requires a lot of labor intensive services — that’s what’s going to help people,” she said.