More North Coast residents are sliding under the poverty line, many pushed below an already low marker of economic well-being by a recession and persistently slow recovery.
U.S. Census Bureau data scheduled for release Thursday shows that 13.1 percent of Sonoma County residents, or slightly more than one in eight, were living in poverty in 2010. That's compared to 8.9 percent in 2007, the year before the economy collapsed under the weight of a credit and housing market crisis.
The federal poverty line in 2010 was $22,113 for a family of four and $10,890 for a single person.
The rise in poverty has occurred in tandem with the county's unemployment rate, which has climbed since 2007 from 4.3 percent to as high as 10.5 percent this year.
"The economy did it," said Scott Wimmer, 41, of Santa Rosa, a Gulf War veteran who got laid off from an armored car company in 2009. He said he was homeless for a year before finding part-time work at a storage facility in May.
"They've been great to me," he said of his employers at Storage Master, where he makes $13 an hour.
Mendocino and Lake counties, with lower income levels and smaller, less diverse economies, have fared even worse. In Mendocino County in 2010, 20 percent of residents were below the poverty line. Lake County's poverty rate was 22 percent.
Of the 62,908 Sonoma County residents in poverty in 2010, about 40 percent, 25,816, were Latinos, who make up a quarter of the county's population. Of Latino families, 17.3 percent, or 4,088 families, were poverty-stricken.
But most of the extremely poor, 31,881 residents, were white, reflecting the county's demographic makeup. And 4,171 white families in the county, 5 percent of the total, lived below the poverty line last year, Census data show.
Social services providers said that they are daily seeing evidence that the net of poverty is taking in a greater range of residents than those traditionally living on the margins.
"At the day labor center in Healdsburg...we are getting a whole slew of people from various populations," said Amber Twitchell, economic development director at the California Human Development Corporation, or CHDC, which has had to expand the services it traditionally provided to farmworkers.
The number of people seeking help at the nonprofit's Healdsburg center has climbed 78 percent since 2007.
"Our numbers of Anglo Americans have gone way up, teachers, insurance brokers, people with bachelors degrees who can't find work," Twitchell said.
The gauges of increasing distress are seen in requests for help.
In 2007, there were 2,010 Northern California veterans who turned to the Vietnam Veterans of America for job training and housing assistance. Last year, 2,311 veterans sought such help, said Don Werstler, site director at the North Bay Veterans Resource Center in Santa Rosa.
In Sonoma County, applications for food stamps rose from 797 in July 2007 to $1,683 in June 2010.
There were were 9,372 county residents on food stamps in July 2007; in July 2010, there were 19,925. This July there were 24,274. Much of that growth is attributable to increased effort by agency workers to sign up area residents who qualify for assistance.
"This is affecting our whole community, all of our neighbors, all of our friends," said Jo Weber, the county's Director of Human Services. "People are coming in who never would have imagined coming in before."
Sonoma County's poverty rate was significantly lower than the state's, which was about 16.3 percent last year.
Demographics and the local economy's structure, which has a large supply of retail and service jobs, account for the difference, said Robert Eyler, who directs the Regional Center for Economic Analysis at Sonoma State University.
"We offer quite a few relatively low skill jobs at relatively high wages. They're being paid better in Sonoma County than in Butte or the Central Valley," he said.
"Also we have a large breadth of those kind of jobs because there is a relatively large mass of relatively high income folks here," he said.
That's of little comfort to Forestville resident Mike McNamara, who lost his $30,000 a year job as a vineyard mechanic a year ago and joined the ranks of the county's impoverished.
Now, he said, his income is "zero," though he does odd jobs when he can find them.
On Wednesday he and his 23-year-old daughter, who is also now unemployed, went to the county's human services department office on Paulin Drive to apply for food stamps and other financial assistance.
"Inadequate," he said, summing up how he feels about being jobless after a lifetime of employment.
News Researchers Janet Balicki and Teresa Meikle contributed to this story.
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