Executive Summary

Even before the recent economic downturn, older industrial cities in Ohio and Pennsylvania faced many challenges in revitalizing their economies. While some of the cities within the region were beginning to find new industries during the last decade, as a group they had not fully recovered from the economic devastation they experienced in the 1980s. Almost without exception, cities and towns within our industrial heartland continued to face declining populations and stagnant economies. Unable to fully leverage their assets and disadvantaged by federal policies that encouraged sprawl, their market strength had already been eroded by such factors as:

• Loss of home value and equity.
• Diminishing tax base leading to fewer public amenities and services.
• Large-scale vacant and abandoned property.
• Concentration of poverty and loss of social networks.
• Lower median income.
• Decreased public school quality.
• Entrenched trends of slow population growth.
• Graying of the population.

Each day of recession takes back precious progress we in these communities have made. Each day of the recession is increasing the number of people who are hungry and faced with eviction or foreclosure. Our story is not captured in the headlines. This is Main Street, not Wall Street, and the stories are told in human suffering, not dollars and cents. But our needs are no less real. These needs are basic to the survival of individuals and families: obtaining adequate food, clothing and shelter.

In response to the groundswell of need, our communities, oftentimes led by their community foundations, are attempting to buffer some of the suffering. Individual, corporate and foundation funds are being directed to agencies delivering basic-need services to our residents. Unfortunately, the gap is simply growing faster than we can possibly address on our own. Our community based service providers are staggering under the weight of new demands and a pre-existing decline in funding. It is imperative that Congress and the new Administration consider the unique challenges our communities face when considering how best to address the impact of this downturn on real people in real American communities.

Community foundations have long leveraged their dual roles of engaging individuals to support their wide array of charitable interests and maintaining a long view of the community to drive significant community change. Struck by upheaval in their communities, several community foundations in five weakened urban communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania have joined forces to create a snapshot, in the form of this report, detailing:

• The “real time” increase in needs in Ohio and Pennsylvania due to the recession.
• The amount of funding necessary to support the fraying safety net being stressed by first-time users in their communities.

Our research design attempted to identify and isolate indicators of increased need for assistance in the basic-needs categories of food, shelter, utilities, child care and transportation over the time period from 2007 to 2008. Upon inspection, we found that the cost of the safety net is inextricably linked to the number of unemployed people in a given community. Using this insight and the national unemployment projections for 2009-2010, we can derive the approximate cost of the safety net in a particular community for the next two years. We believe our conclusions regarding the level of need and funding estimates are modest at best given that future unemployment projections for 2009-2010 may underestimate the actual levels of joblessness. We have already seen that the national unemployment rate of 7.2% in December is significantly higher than the 6.9% forecasted by a group of over 30 leading economists in a survey published by the Wall Street Journal online.FP1PF The amount that the true unemployment level in December exceeded estimates represents nearly one half-million more unemployed people nationwide.