Dana Brown-Toure, 52, says her life is in a place “somewhere between drowning and surviving.”
A former health aide living on disability benefits, Brown-Toure contends with diabetes that threatens to blind her, while rising bills continue to overwhelm her. Brown-Toure shares an arduous existence with her two children, ages 8 and 21, in the house they rent in Camden, made harder by her former husband’s recent stroke, which hampers his ability to contribute money.
Still, despite their troubles, the family takes in enough money to place Brown-Toure just above the official federal poverty level.
That the U.S. government does not consider her to be living in poverty is hard for Brown-Toure to believe. “Life’s a struggle,” she said Monday. “I would say this feels below the poverty line.”
So would the Poverty Research Institute (PRI) of Legal Services of New Jersey, a statewide legal aid nonprofit that has released a new report asserting that the actual rate of poverty in the state is about triple what the U.S. government calculates.
That means, the report says, the official number of residents living in poverty in New Jersey in 2024 — the latest statistics available — was close to 3 million, rather than the federal figure of 859,000. Brown-Toure did not want her exact income to be disclosed, but the federal poverty level for a family of three such as hers in 2024 was just over $25,000.
A person living below the official poverty level can more readily qualify for various assistance programs, such as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), Medicaid, Head Start, and school meals. The problem, experts say, is that even people with incomes that are twice the poverty rate need help, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The government “severely understates poverty for high-cost states like New Jersey,” PRI director Shivi Prasad said.
New Jersey’s cost of living ranks third-highest among states, behind California and Hawaii, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis in the Department of Commerce. It also has the highest real estate property taxes in the United States, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit that analyzes tax policy. The average annual tax bill in the state exceeds $10,000, compared with a national average of around $3,119, the foundation said.
As the issue of affordability continues to plague Americans, thrusting many deeper into poverty, it’s becoming clear that the government‘s methods to measure deprivation are inadequate, PRI explains.
The report, released in June and titled “2024 Poverty Data at a Glance: How the Federal Measurement Falls Short for New Jersey,” says that “the hard reality is that poverty remains deeply entrenched with millions left behind — a paradox for a state considered among the wealthiest in the nation.”
The PRI measures what it calls True Poverty Level, described as the minimum income working families need to afford basic necessities without any public or private support, without making tradeoffs such as eating less to make rent payments.
The basic flaw of the official federal poverty level, according to the PRI and other experts, is that it is a simplistic standard based on computations from 1964.
“It’s a super-inadequate measure, like the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour,” said Laura Napolitano, a sociologist at Rutgers University-Camden. “We’re looking at a dated calculation that’s been unchanged for years.”
Back in the mid-1960s, poverty thresholds were derived by taking the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s calculation for the minimum cost of food, then multiplying it by three to account for other family expenses. The thinking was that food was one-third of a family’s budget. Each year, the poverty level is updated to keep up with inflation, but the equation has remained the same for more than 60 years.
Importantly, Prasad said in an interview, as the decades have gone by, the federal poverty level has not accounted for the actual costs of housing, childcare, food, transportation, healthcare, and other aspects of everyday life. And the federal poverty level does not allow for geographic differences in cost across the nation. For example, the average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan ($5,746) is vastly higher than it is in Omaha ($1,441), according to Apartments.com.
“We look at all these realistic costs to see how much a family really needs to make it,” Prasad said. “We want to see how much you’d need to survive on your own, without help from the government or from family.”
To determine how much basic survival costs in New Jersey, Prasad noted that an average monthly rent in the state is around $1,800 for a two-bedroom apartment. That would make a year’s rent more than $21,000.
Now look at childcare, Prasad said, where the maximum monthly rate that can be charged for a toddler is $1,417, according to the New Jersey Department of Human Services, which comes to around $17,000 a year.
With rent and childcare adding up to almost $40,000 annually, even if you are making $50,000 — almost twice the federal poverty rate for a family of three — “you really don’t have enough to survive,” Prasad said.
And that says nothing about skyrocketing food costs, she added. The Food Bank of South Jersey reported that over the last four years in Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, and Salem Counties, the number of meals distributed to compensate for increasing food expenses grew by 34%.
“More of our neighbors are turning to us amid an affordability crisis that’s hitting a high-cost state like New Jersey harder than poverty measures may show,” Jane Asselta, the food bank’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.
For a more detailed analysis of the area the food bank serves, Prasad focused on South Jersey data for The Inquirer. In Burlington County in 2024, the true poverty rate was 27.2%, Prasad said. Similarly, Camden County’s true poverty rate was 38%, while Gloucester County’s sat at 29%. All rates as calculated by the PRI were more than three times the federal poverty levels for the counties in 2024, figures show.
Ultimately, Brown-Toure said, no matter how the government classifies poverty, the one constant she endures is that life’s hardships are wearing her down.
“I’m feeling depressed,” she said. “I miss working and my weekly paycheck. And the dream I once had to own a house is all gone.
“There’s a lot of struggle right now, a lot trauma. It’s hard. And the hardship never stops.”