Though Far From Poor, a Family Struggles Daily
The scrapbook tucked under the bookshelf in Rudy Basurto's living room isn't full of family portraits -- just photos of cabinets.
The one with the opaque windowpane doors is the pantry he built for Jamie Lee Curtis. The Mission-style one, in mahogany, is in Bruce Willis' place in Malibu.
Basurto is 48 years old. He makes about $20 an hour building cabinets but can't afford to buy a home in his Highland Park neighborhood. He has bartered his labor to put his three teenage children through Catholic school. They're on their own for college.
Basurto's family is far from poor, by the official measure. The federal poverty level for a family of five is $21,959. Last year, Rudy and his wife, Maryellen, together earned more than twice that: $45,000.
In many parts of the country, they might be middle class. But in Los Angeles, they are struggling. Like roughly a third of the county's population, they live somewhere between where poverty ends and prosperity begins.
The Basurtos cram their children into makeshift bedrooms created in a dining room and a finished porch. They eat dinner on trays in the living room, where their daughter pecks away at a homework assignment on an aged computer.
Every weekday at 6:15 a.m., Maryellen packs her two youngest children into a 17-year-old Subaru GL station wagon that needs a new engine, drives 32 miles round-trip to drop them off at school, then goes to the first of her two part-time jobs.
Rudy departs at the same time in his 16-year-old van, driving to the palatial homes of clients on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, in Malibu, in Beverly Hills. He has no health insurance, no pension plan and little savings.
The Basurtos' lives are a precarious mix of bargain, barter and hope. Daily, they make choices -- home-cooked pasta versus takeout Subway sandwiches, a mortgage versus private-school tuition.
The Basurtos are neither destitute nor desperate. They have no debt, do not go hungry, and have managed to put three children through Catholic school. Yet their grip on the bottom rung of the middle class is precarious.
By the local cost of rent, by what it takes to commute to work, by the price of food at the local store, by the cost of clothing and healthcare, a family like the Basurtos would need more than $40,000 to make ends meet in Los Angeles. Families with younger children and day-care expenses would need closer to $70,000.
