Can You Imagine a Family of Three
Making Ends Meet on $485 a Month?
TANF families are asked to try
Jenny lives in Augusta with her two young children. She feels very lucky that she found an apartment where she gets a break
in her rent for helping with chores around the building. Most of her friends aren’t so lucky. But she still pays $450 a month for her
small two bedroom apartment. This expense eats up nearly all of her monthly TANF check.
She’s left with less than $100 a month to pay for all of the rest of her bills that include lights, heat, laundry, gas and
repairs to keep her car on the road, and the food and other household items that her food stamps don’t cover. Her building is
for sale and she worries that her rent may soon go up. Jenny is in the ASPIRE program and is looking for work, but needs to find
a job that’s flexible enough for her to take one of her children to medical appointments three times a week. So far she’s had no
luck, but she keeps trying.
Jenny’s story is sadly familiar to many single parents who try to make ends meet on a TANF check. Maine’s monthly TANF benefit for a
family of three is $485. If the family has to pay more than 75% of their income for rent like Jenny does, then they also qualify for
an additional $50 “Housing Special Needs” (HSN) payment.
This special housing payment hasn’t increased since 1994. In fact, in 1994, it was actually cut from $75 a month to $50.
We all know that housing costs have increased dramatically since then. Only about one-quarter of Maine’s TANF families qualify for the
HSN payment. Those who don’t still struggle to pay housing costs that eat up a large share of their monthly income. These families must
try to make ends meet on just the basic monthly benefit of $485. This benefit also hasn’t increased for 6 years.
Maine’s TANF benefit is the lowest in New England. It is $143 a month below the average of the other 5 New England states. Even
when the housing allowance is added in, Maine’s TANF benefit is nearly $100 a month below these other states. In 1979, Maine’s basic
TANF benefit brought families up to 60% of the federal poverty level. Today the benefit raises families to only 34% of the poverty
level. Even when we add food stamps, TANF families still live 30-40% below the poverty level.
We have failed to increase TANF benefits on a regular basis unlike most other programs that help people meet their basic needs
(e.g. Social Security or SSI). This means that a TANF check buys much less today than it did in the past. Today, a TANF check for
a family of 3 would have to equal $836—$351 more than it does now—to buy what it did in 1979.
The Census Bureau released new poverty data in August. The data shows high levels of child poverty in Maine. Poverty among Maine
children has increased from 10.4% in 2001 to 16.7% in 2007—the steepest increase in New England. The data also tells us that the percent
of all Maine people living in deep poverty has also increased in recent years. Our state has the highest percentage of people living in
deep poverty in New England.
We should be ashamed of these rankings. The time has come to do something about them. The nearly 25,000 children living in TANF
families are the faces behind this data. They are the reason that we need an increase in Maine’s TANF benefit and Housing Special Need
payment. This would be an important first step to help improve the economic security of these families.
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