SACRAMENTO — The number of young children living in poverty in California climbed dramatically over the last two decades, leaving nearly one in three impoverished by 1996, according to a Columbia University study released Thursday.
The state's rate of poverty increased by 24%--12 percentage points higher than the national average--mirroring similar upswings in other populous states, researchers found.
The new statistics represent a big change for California, they said, because 20 years ago it was not a high-poverty state and the number of poor children did not exceed the national average. Since 1996--the year of the most recent statistics--the economy has improved, but that may not greatly improve the child poverty picture, researchers said.
The study examining poverty rates among children under 6 found wide variations across the country. California, Texas and New York showed huge increases while Vermont, New Jersey and Delaware recorded significant drops.
The sharp divergence surprised researchers, and they were unsure of the causes. However, they noted that the states experiencing an upsurge in child poverty often had high rates of immigration and high numbers of preschoolers who lived with single mothers with little education.
"The differences between states were much greater than we thought they would be," said Julian Palmer, the editor of the report at the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia. "We found everything from a 53% increase to a 39% fall. That is a tremendous variation."
Nationally, the number of children living in poverty jumped from 4.4 million in the early 1980s to 5.9 million in the mid-1990s. Palmer said that means poverty touches nearly one in four young children in the United States.
Much of the rise, the study found, could be attributed to three populous states--California, New York and Texas--where the combined number of poor children rose from an average of 1.2 million in the early 1980s to an average of 2 million in the mid-1990s.
California alone has nearly 1 million children under 6 who live in poverty, the study found. And nearly half the children in the state live in or near poverty.
"There are huge numbers of families in California," Palmer said, "that are just one or two paychecks away from poverty."
Although the study did not examine federal data after 1996, Palmer said he does not believe the economic upturn will change the picture.
