Day 4 was filled with cravings. Several times throughout the day I found myself mindlessly opening the fridge looking for a snack to eat, only to remember that I did not have the room in my daily budget for one. I started craving sugar and juice. When I went out to run an errand, with the car windows down on a beautiful spring day, my trip past a row of restaurants did not help my cravings one bit. I was finding I couldn't keep my focus for very long, and focusing on some email by after dinner was nearly impossible.
How do families survive on so little food for an extended length of time? On $1.25 per day, nearly 80 percent of a family's income is spent on food. The Washington Post estimated that in 2011 1.65 million U.S. households had an income that fell below the in $2 a day per person; after transfers from the government safety net, the number of households in extreme poverty comes out to 613,000—1.6 percent of non-elderly households with children in the U.S. Especially in urban areas, those without access to income or government transfers can look to charity for support. While the numbers are still unacceptably high, they show how living in urbanized areas and access to concentrated networks that cities provide can help alleviate the worst parts of extreme poverty.
This is not a situation that applies just to the U.S. In 2013, the World Bank found in The Global Monitoring Report: Rural-Urban Dynamics and the Millennium Development Goals that extreme poverty rates are lower in urban centers, and 76 percent of the world's poor live in rural areas. Cities produce 80 percent of global goods and services, the report continues, meaning that the poor have greater access to cheap transportation, support networks, internet access, and employment opportunities.
The urban poor are also more likely to live within 5 minutes walking distance of a grocery store, although this becomes less likely the smaller and less concentrated a city is. In the United States, for example, 72 percent of New Yorkers live within a 5 minute walk of a grocery store. Cities more dependent on car ownership to get around see lower numbers, like Seattle at 31 percent or Dallas at 13 percent. Oklahoma City and Wichita ring in at only 5 percent each.
Food deserts cover the United States. Without close access to grocery stores, obtaining food becomes an exhausting chore for the urban poor, requiring longer trips on foot, which then must either be done more frequently with fewer groceries or by carrying larger loads of groceries home in few trips. Public transportation, if available, can help to ease this, but a poor mother struggling to keep up with the rising cost of food may find the rising price of a bus ticket reaches out of her budget.
An increasingly popular solution to the food desert problem is through urban gardening. Small and mid-sized garden plots are set up in open urban areas, particularly areas affected by blight and poor nutrition due to low incomes, making productive use of otherwise vacant land. These often community-run areas provide neighborhood residents with access to low cost vegetables—improving their nutrition and overall health—as well as education and a purpose for urban youth. Urban gardens provide urban dwellers that postage stamp of land that I was so lucky to have in this challenge, and innovations in vertical farming from highly dense cities like Singapore and Los Angeles will be able to increase the impact these types of gardens can have on urban poverty.
Outside of the U.S., the urban poor often live in areas with less infrastructure, including unpaved roads, no waste collection, and unstable electricity supplies. Jos Verbeek, World Bank economist and lead author of the Global Monitoring Report, said in a statement upon the report's release: “Urbanization is helping pull people out of poverty and advancing progress towards the MDGs, but, if not managed well, can also lead to burgeoning growth of slums, pollution, and crime." Too often, urban poverty is hidden in the vast activities of a large city, and the desperation of extreme urban poverty does not become apparent until a crisis. The Arab Spring protests that spread across the Middle East in 2011 was centered in densely populated urban areas, and partially triggered by an increase in the price of food.
But also, urban poverty outside of the developing world is less researched than rural poverty. Of course, if three-fourths of the world's poorest are in rural areas research will be concentrated there, but urbanization is picking up the pace. As cities grow, so will urban poverty.
***
I started my day very early, doing Skype interviews with people in London and Nigeria, so the cup of coffee seemed necessary to kickstart the day. The Challenge is catching up to me, though: by the end of Day 4, I was still hungry before bed. Luckily I had enough wiggle room to eat another egg before going to sleep. One more day!
Day 4 Menu
- Morning Coffee: 8 ounce glass = 9 cents
- Breakfast: 3 eggs (10 cents each) with a bit of hot sauce for flavor = 32 cents
- Lunch: ramen (18 cents) with 1 egg (10 cents), 2 ounces chopped carrot (14 cents), just under 2 ounces cucumber (8 cents), garlic (no cost) = 50 cents
- Dinner: Spicy White Bean Soup, adapted from this Poor Girl Eats Well recipe (31 cents per serving, see Day 1), with 2 white corn tortillas (4 cents) and 2 eggs = 45 cents
- Daily Total: $1.46
From Monday, May 5th to Friday, May 9th, Diplomatic Courier managing editor Chrisella Herzog will be taking the challenge to live below the line, and blogging about her experiences each day. Follow the Diplomatic Courier's Twitter and Instagram or follow Chrisella at @Chrisella #BelowtheLine for updates. She is raising money for The Water Collective here.
Photo: Brian Talbot (cc).
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Living Below the Line Day 4: Urban Poverty
May 8, 2014
Day 4 was filled with cravings. Several times throughout the day I found myself mindlessly opening the fridge looking for a snack to eat, only to remember that I did not have the room in my daily budget for one. I started craving sugar and juice. When I went out to run an errand, with the car windows down on a beautiful spring day, my trip past a row of restaurants did not help my cravings one bit. I was finding I couldn't keep my focus for very long, and focusing on some email by after dinner was nearly impossible.
How do families survive on so little food for an extended length of time? On $1.25 per day, nearly 80 percent of a family's income is spent on food. The Washington Post estimated that in 2011 1.65 million U.S. households had an income that fell below the in $2 a day per person; after transfers from the government safety net, the number of households in extreme poverty comes out to 613,000—1.6 percent of non-elderly households with children in the U.S. Especially in urban areas, those without access to income or government transfers can look to charity for support. While the numbers are still unacceptably high, they show how living in urbanized areas and access to concentrated networks that cities provide can help alleviate the worst parts of extreme poverty.
This is not a situation that applies just to the U.S. In 2013, the World Bank found in The Global Monitoring Report: Rural-Urban Dynamics and the Millennium Development Goals that extreme poverty rates are lower in urban centers, and 76 percent of the world's poor live in rural areas. Cities produce 80 percent of global goods and services, the report continues, meaning that the poor have greater access to cheap transportation, support networks, internet access, and employment opportunities.
The urban poor are also more likely to live within 5 minutes walking distance of a grocery store, although this becomes less likely the smaller and less concentrated a city is. In the United States, for example, 72 percent of New Yorkers live within a 5 minute walk of a grocery store. Cities more dependent on car ownership to get around see lower numbers, like Seattle at 31 percent or Dallas at 13 percent. Oklahoma City and Wichita ring in at only 5 percent each.
Food deserts cover the United States. Without close access to grocery stores, obtaining food becomes an exhausting chore for the urban poor, requiring longer trips on foot, which then must either be done more frequently with fewer groceries or by carrying larger loads of groceries home in few trips. Public transportation, if available, can help to ease this, but a poor mother struggling to keep up with the rising cost of food may find the rising price of a bus ticket reaches out of her budget.
An increasingly popular solution to the food desert problem is through urban gardening. Small and mid-sized garden plots are set up in open urban areas, particularly areas affected by blight and poor nutrition due to low incomes, making productive use of otherwise vacant land. These often community-run areas provide neighborhood residents with access to low cost vegetables—improving their nutrition and overall health—as well as education and a purpose for urban youth. Urban gardens provide urban dwellers that postage stamp of land that I was so lucky to have in this challenge, and innovations in vertical farming from highly dense cities like Singapore and Los Angeles will be able to increase the impact these types of gardens can have on urban poverty.
Outside of the U.S., the urban poor often live in areas with less infrastructure, including unpaved roads, no waste collection, and unstable electricity supplies. Jos Verbeek, World Bank economist and lead author of the Global Monitoring Report, said in a statement upon the report's release: “Urbanization is helping pull people out of poverty and advancing progress towards the MDGs, but, if not managed well, can also lead to burgeoning growth of slums, pollution, and crime." Too often, urban poverty is hidden in the vast activities of a large city, and the desperation of extreme urban poverty does not become apparent until a crisis. The Arab Spring protests that spread across the Middle East in 2011 was centered in densely populated urban areas, and partially triggered by an increase in the price of food.
But also, urban poverty outside of the developing world is less researched than rural poverty. Of course, if three-fourths of the world's poorest are in rural areas research will be concentrated there, but urbanization is picking up the pace. As cities grow, so will urban poverty.
***
I started my day very early, doing Skype interviews with people in London and Nigeria, so the cup of coffee seemed necessary to kickstart the day. The Challenge is catching up to me, though: by the end of Day 4, I was still hungry before bed. Luckily I had enough wiggle room to eat another egg before going to sleep. One more day!
Day 4 Menu
- Morning Coffee: 8 ounce glass = 9 cents
- Breakfast: 3 eggs (10 cents each) with a bit of hot sauce for flavor = 32 cents
- Lunch: ramen (18 cents) with 1 egg (10 cents), 2 ounces chopped carrot (14 cents), just under 2 ounces cucumber (8 cents), garlic (no cost) = 50 cents
- Dinner: Spicy White Bean Soup, adapted from this Poor Girl Eats Well recipe (31 cents per serving, see Day 1), with 2 white corn tortillas (4 cents) and 2 eggs = 45 cents
- Daily Total: $1.46
From Monday, May 5th to Friday, May 9th, Diplomatic Courier managing editor Chrisella Herzog will be taking the challenge to live below the line, and blogging about her experiences each day. Follow the Diplomatic Courier's Twitter and Instagram or follow Chrisella at @Chrisella #BelowtheLine for updates. She is raising money for The Water Collective here.
Photo: Brian Talbot (cc).
