Food stamps and the politics of poverty, By Shereen Marisol Meraji, October 30, 2012, Marketplace: “Andrea Waterstreet is 44, single and doesn’t have children. She grew up in middle class suburbia and worked for 25 years, mostly as a waitress. But when she was diagnosed with a chronic illness and became too sick to work, she quit her job. That was in 2008. ‘I’ve been working since I was 14 or 15,’ says Waterstreet. ‘And this is something I never thought would happen.’ She covered her bills using unemployment benefits until they ran out in 2009. Waterstreet says she lives simply in a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco with roommates, doesn’t have a car and has a pay-as-you-go cell phone. ‘It’s been a couple of years of living off nothing at all,’ she says. Nothing but a few hundred dollars from her parents for rent. And food stamps, though she doesn’t use that term…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty