AGENDA: Craft an urgent agenda to lift all working families out of poverty and onto the path to self-sufficiency and homeownership.

In-Depth: Invest in Working Families

Buttressing the stability of working families represents an essential task for strengthening the community’s productive capacity and social fabric.

Beyond Merger noted Louisville Metro’s relatively high number of working poor families and challenged its leadership to focus on increasing the economic stability of those families. Initiatives like the Asset Building Coalition and efforts to ensure that eligible families file for Earned Income Tax Credits and child-care credits secure important cash resources that can make a tangible difference for families.

The key graphic shows the distribution of family incomes for Louisville Metro in 2000, as well as the median family income. It also indicates the average pay among local elementary school teachers, nurses, and a few other sample occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The cost of a median-priced home, a year of child care, a year of college expenses (including room and board) for a Kentucky school, and other basic living expenses are lined up for comparison.

Among its peer cities, Louisville Metro ranked 11th in median family income in 2000, after surpassing Kansas City and Jacksonville over the last decade.

Another analysis – the “shape of the curve” for household income – confirms The Brookings Institution’s observation that Louisville Metro includes a higher percentage of households that struggle to make ends meet. Indicator #3 shows how closely Louisville Metro mirrors the nation as a whole in its income distribution. If all U.S. households are divided into five equal groups, and Louisville households are sorted into the resulting income tiers for comparison, a slightly higher percentage of Louisville Metro households fall in the low, lower-middle, and also in the highincome groups. The percentages in the middle and uppermiddle income categories are slightly lower than the nation as a whole.

Other indicators point to increasing economic pressures on working families. The rise in the number of employed workers and their families who do not have health insurance is a mounting national crisis. Although solid data on the local number are scarce, market research conducted for Norton Healthcare, the community’s largest provider of hospital care, found that the number of residents in the Louisville region who do not have health insurance coverage grew by almost 10 percent in three years and now stands at over 100,000 people.