Editor’s Note: For the last few months, RANGE has been working with the junior and senior students at The Community School to help each of them develop a piece of journalistic writing about a local or recent news topic that interested them. As they reached the end of the capstone project, we selected a few articles that we professionally edited and will be publishing on our website in the coming weeks as part of a series we’re calling The Young RANGE. Through this project we’ve been constantly in awe at the level of student engagement, the quality of work and the RANGE of topics the youth were passionate about. We’re beyond excited for the final piece in the series, a close-to-home personal narrative by Nicolai Jagger about poverty in Spokane. – Erin Sellers
Imagine that you make minimum wage — $16.28 an hour in Washington. You’ve barely been scraping by, hovering just below the poverty line, but recently, things seem to have settled and you are beginning to feel more stable financially.
Things are looking up at work — your boss offers you a pay increase of $3 an hour. Obviously, you accept, because that raise will help you, and it’s a sign that you are valued at your workplace. But as soon as that $3 raise hits, you’re hit with a shock: you now make too much to qualify for state medical insurance, yet you don’t make enough to afford private insurance.
The extra $3 an hour also puts you just above the cap to qualify for food stamps, and you’re left having to choose between buying groceries or paying the electric bill. In the worst case scenarios, you could lose your rental assistance. You might have to make a difficult choice between paying for the roof over your head, or paying for medication you need to survive. If you choose medication over rent, you could end up couch-surfing, living out of your car or homeless. Your work might suffer, your boss might fire you if he finds out you don’t have a permanent address.
This spiral can be a silently vicious one, and it’s one I’ve experienced. In our household, my father is the primary provider. After being on food stamps and state medical insurance for most of my life, my dad finally began earning enough to stay afloat. Very quickly though, our food stamp benefits were revoked.
We’ve always had a meal on the table, with the help of organizations like the Women and Children’s Free Restaurant (WCFR), which has a drive-up and walk-up program for free supplementary groceries and prepared family meals, but losing food stamps was a big blow to our bills.
While receiving food stamps, my dad had a monthly take-home income of around $1,860. When our food stamps were revoked, he had a monthly take-home income of around $2,340. There was a $480 difference in his paychecks. According to my mother, we spend around $900 a month on groceries. The benefits we received were around $250 a month. So now, we were spending around $900 a month instead of the previous $650 with the help of food stamps. Though my family was able to survive this ordeal, others haven’t been so lucky.
Recently, due to another small pay increase, my parents were taken off of their state medical insurance. With my 18th birthday fast approaching, and my own paychecks not measuring up, I know I’ll be on state medical insurance for a while once I move out and become a household of one. But I worry about my parents: what if my mom can’t pay for her medication or my dad needs a tooth extracted or they need a trip to the emergency room? Or, God forbid, a terrible accident happens and my dad can’t work?
It’s not like I felt poor growing up. I knew my lunch was free, and we went to a local teaching clinic for medical issues. I could see where other kids got their clothes versus where my mom got mine. But there was always food on the table, always someone home. On my birthday, my parents made sure I received what I asked for, even electronics.
Still, I could sense the weight my parents were carrying. I couldn’t understand it half the time, yet they seemed so worried. I could see it in my mom’s eyes as we got gas. My mom would have me block the view of the cardreader in Target so the person behind us couldn’t tell we were using food stamps.
As I grew up and understood where money came from — how little value a dollar had — I got it. I understood why we got Great Value instead of Market Pantry. I knew I was supposed to be embarrassed of the help we received, and that my parents already were.
In Spokane, we claim that, “ We All Belong. ” Yet our culture continues to cultivate shame and hatred toward those struggling, toward mothers paying for their groceries. We refuse eye contact with beggars on the street, and blame the opioid crisis for the state of our city. And still, systemically, we make it nearly impossible to climb the economic ladder (see: Spokane City Council deferring an ordinance that would have made it illegal for employers to discriminate against potential employees because of their housing status.)
The presumed goal of state assistance is to one day no longer need it. But how can one be expected to rise above needing assistance, when the lack of it brings the bills higher than they were? Data from 2016 to 2020 shows that in Spokane county, 13.4% of the population was living below the poverty line, which is nearly 4% above Washington’s 9.5% poverty rate over the same time period.
Only 63% of Americans say they could afford a $400 emergency, according to the 2023 Economic Well-Being of US Households report by the Federal Reserve in May 2024. A 2023 Forbes Advisor survey showed that 40% of respondents said they live paycheck-to-paycheck.
For these folks, a missed paycheck or an unexpected expense can begin a chain reaction that lands them on the street. While that thought may seem far away, it’s often too close for comfort: if not you, then a family member, close friend, coworker or peer could be struggling without assistance. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states that only around 16% of Americans received multiple venues of government assistance. 65% of the population is on private insurance, usually employment-based, and 36% are on public plans. 7.9% of people aren’t even insured, according to the 2022 Census report .
Oftentimes, the parameters for these programs are very limited. To qualify for Apple Health — state medical insurance — one person has to be making $1,732 monthly, or less. If you’re making minimum wage and working 40 hours a week, you’d have a gross income of around $2,600 per month, before taxes, which would disqualify you from Apple Health. If you’re the sole provider for a family of three, you would just barely qualify for state insurance.
So in accepting that $3 pay raise, you’d have a gross income of around $3,100. That’s only a $500 difference, but now you make about $150 too much for state insurance. The average cost of an Emergency Room visit in Washington was around $1,841 in 2020 — not including further treatment. Does that $3 pay increase feel like enough now?
I don’t have the answers, but I do know that what my family goes through on a daily basis has shown me that we need to have empathy for those struggling with poverty and work towards creating long term solutions that help break these downward spirals.
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