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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Cassie Stromer, a petite seventy-six-year-old woman with bottle-blond hair and off-blue eyes, lives in Mount Vernon House, a pleasant four-story red brick apartment complex in Alexandria, Virginia. She has good memories of a colorful past--three husbands, numerous boyfriends, five children, lots of jobs--but her current life is not so good. She was reared in rural Tennessee, and first came to Virginia to work when she was fifteen. She never finished high school. For a short period after separating from the father of her children, she went on welfare, but she found it demeaning. For a while, she worked two full-time jobs, from which she got home at midnight. Cassie doesn't brood over a past marked by poverty. She liked her jobs--at drugstores, at doughnut shops, waiting on tables in restaurants, serving as a hostess at hotels, working in the advertising department of a local newspaper, babysitting.
Cassie is fortunate to live at Mount Vernon House, which opened in 1983; it is one of the few privately owned and operated buildings in northern Virginia subsidized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. To apply for an apartment there, a single person must be at least sixty-two or disabled and have an annual income no higher than $30,450. Cassie was sixty-eight when she moved there, in 1996. This year, her income will be $9,654--$686 from Social Security every month and a monthly pension of $118.51 from the newspaper, for which she worked for twenty years.
Last year, Cassie's rent was seventy-two dollars a month. "That's on the low end of what our hundred and forty-one residents pay," the property manager for Mount Vernon House, La-Rita Timberlake, says. "As a general rule, residents pay about thirty per cent of their income minus medical bills for rent. hud makes up the difference."
Cassie Stromer's income puts her in the lowest third of women over sixty-five living alone in America. The official poverty level is $9,310 a year. As it happens, Cassie would be better off if her income were considerably below that amount, rather than some three hundred dollars above it, because her income is regarded as too high for her to receive full Medicaid benefits.
Cassie suffers from neuropathy, a dysfunction of the peripheral nerves, which typically causes numbness or weakness. The neuropathy began in Cassie's big toe ten or twelve years ago; it has spread to her legs, arms, and hands. "I can't do much with my hands," she says. "I can't peel potatoes. When water hits my fingers, they hurt. I can walk, but standing hurts. The tops of my feet feel like people are pouring hot water on them and the bottoms feel like I'm stepping on coals."
In 2003, this is where Cassie's monthly income of $790.51 went after she paid her rent: about $66 for electricity; $50 for her telephone; and $45 for her cable TV. (Television is Cassie's primary form of recreation: she watches several daytime soaps, listens to the news, sometimes looks at the country-music channel, and in the evening watches one or two favorite shows, like "NYPD Blue" or "Law & Order.") Her prescription-drug bills averaged $328 a month. These expenses left Cassie with $230, which was supplemented with ten dollars a month in food stamps, the amount given to individuals who have a net income between $434 and $1,236 a month. Ten dollars has been the monthly minimum payment since 1978; advocates for the poor have been trying, without success, to raise it to twenty-five dollars.
In Alexandria, the Rising Hope United Methodist Mission Church and the United Community Ministries provide bags of groceries for residents who sign up. Still, Cassie estimates that she spends more than a hundred dollars a week on food and other products not covered by food stamps--paper towels, Kleenex, toilet tissue, laundry and cleaning products, toothpaste, shampoo, deodorant, vitamins, and other personal-care items.
"I've gotten away from eating bacon and eggs in the morning," Cassie says. "But I have to start the day with breakfast-type food, like cold cereal. I try to eat a nutritious dinner." She likes to drink juice and milk--and one cup a day of Dunkin' Donuts coffee--and to eat fresh fruit and vegetables, salads, and meat or chicken several evenings a week. A recent dinner consisted of a baked potato with sour cream, a can of asparagus, and some fresh tomatoes (the vegetables were donated by Rising Hope and the United Community Ministries). When her prescription bills and her medical co-payments are on the low side in a given month, she has ten dollars a week to spend on quarters for the washer and dryer, and bus fare. A friend drives her to church most Sundays, and she puts...
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