Joanne Spillman, 50, grew up in a large home in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood, never wanting for anything, and never anticipating she would achieve anything less in her life.
“We were middle class, and our needs were met,” Spillman said. “I always figured I would grow up and live the same lifestyle.”
But Spillman has struggled her whole adult life to reach the standard of living she once knew, a struggle that the recession and weak recovery have made much tougher.
Nearly three out of 10 Americans, 28 percent, born in the middle class drop out of it as adults, according to a recent study on economic mobility from The Pew Charitable Trusts.
The study defines middle class as those families making between $32,900 and $64,000 in 2010 dollars, which ranks between the 30th and 70th percentiles of income.
The 30th percentile was used as a cut-off point because it is where families typically stop relying on government support to get by, said Erin Currier, project manager for Pew’s Economic Mobility Project.
The study looked at what participants earned in the years before the recession started versus what their parents made at a similar age in 1979.
What the study shows is that growing up middle class, although it may confer many advantages, doesn’t mean a person will remain middle class, Currier said.
Nearly one in five people, 19 percent, made less than their parents did at the same age in inflation-adjusted dollars.
The study’s snapshot of incomes was taken before the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a downturn that more than two years after it officially ended has left 14 million unemployed and pushed the poverty rate above 15 percent.
Median household incomes in the U.S. last year were at 1996 levels after adjusting for inflation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“It is reasonable to assume with the economic downturn, the percent of people who are struggling and may be downwardly mobile could be much higher than what our study found,” Currier acknowledged.
“Not hopeful for my future”
Spillman knows that too well. In her peak earning years before the recession, she was making more than $60,000, most from her work as an adjunct faculty member at Westwood College.
But two years of unemployment, broken up by part-time and temporary positions, have left her with a fraction of her previous income and destroyed her credit.
Since June, Spillman has been looking for full-time work again. She lives with her sister in Parker. The car she shares with her son, who lives in Aurora with his father’s parents, is falling apart. The two of them haven’t taken a vacation since 2005, and she has unpaid student loans and medical bills.
“I am not hopeful for my future at all,” Spillman said. “But for my son, I am hopeful. He is the only thing that keeps me going.”
Things weren’t that way growing up. Spillman’s father was a property manager at the Cheesman Realty Co. for 35 years and her mother a secretary.
Children of the Depression, they had a stability in their lives that Spillman, a baby boomer, now longs for.
“My parents were very financially aware of what they were doing and very careful about where their money went,” Spillman said. “I was never like that.”
Her parents put her and her siblings through college. Spillman boasts three degrees, including a master’s in adult education.
Looking back on her life, Spillman points to two mistakes that contributed to her current predicament.
“My biggest regret is not getting my teaching certificate,” she said. “I would have been set by now.”
She pursued other careers that promised higher pay but proved more volatile.
The second mistake, monetarily speaking, was in who she married. Her husband struggled financially during their marriage and failed to provide support for their son after the divorce.
Spillman said her desire to achieve what she knew growing up never went away and also contributed to her financial problems.
In 2000, she bought a home in Park Hill, her childhood neighborhood, and lost $25,000 after the real estate market went sour.
“When I drive into Park Hill and east Denver, I am bitter,” she lamented. “That is what I wanted.”
Sociologists define mobility in two ways. One is relative, or how a person or family is doing compared with everyone else around them.
The other measure is absolute — how households are doing compared with earlier generations.
Pew uses the analogy of an escalator to explain the difference. People can change positions up and down, which is relative mobility. Absolute mobility is about what direction that escalator is moving — up or down.
It represents the ability to look back and see you are doing better than your parents and to look forward and expect your children will move higher than you.
The mobility study found several factors will push a person’s relative ranking down on the escalator. Chief among them, especially for women but also for men, is getting divorced or not getting married.
Given that most households now rely on two incomes to get by, having one income can be a big disadvantage, Currier said.
Other downward drivers of relative mobility include drug use, lack of a college education and lower scores on aptitude tests.
Although people have always moved up and down on the income escalator, what appears to be taking place on a level not seen since the 1930s is that the escalator may be heading down.
Since World War II, the country has grown fast enough to double living standards every 29 years — translating into bigger homes, more cars and consumer goods, and more trips and meals out than previous generations enjoyed.
But with real economic growth of 2 percent and population growth of around 1 percent, it could take two generations for living standards to double.
Many people tried to keep up their living standards by borrowing when incomes couldn’t keep pace, said Amanda Miller, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Central Oklahoma.
“There were a lot of people able to live the lifestyle on credit,” she said.
But the credit crisis put that to an end and created a wider economic dislocation that has rocked people who thought they were doing everything right.
American dream vanishes
Although Brighton resident Alfred Sánchez has known poverty, he never imagined the middle-class life he achieved would be at risk.
His father came from Mexico as a legal immigrant in the 1950s, a farm laborer in the Bracero Program.
He brought his family over, including Alfred, who remembers growing up poor but happy.
“I think my dad made $300 a month, and we lived in farmer-provided housing,” Sánchez recalls. “We didn’t have televisions and telephones. We had a coal stove.”
By 1969, his father switched to construction work and made enough to buy a home in Brighton for his family.
Everyone worked, and the family found a way to get the kids through college and launched into a better life.
Sánchez graduated salutatorian of his high school class and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in the same year.
Sánchez worked through college and completed a business degree from Bob Jones University and eventually got into the insurance industry. He married a librarian, had kids, bought a house, built his retirement savings.
And then it all changed in August 2010, when he unexpectedly lost his job.
“I went through a lot of bitterness, a lot of anger with the company that let me go,” Sánchez said. “I was angry with God. I asked, ‘How could you do this to me?’ “
People at his tight-knit church tried to console him, and friends and family offered advice.
But it is hard for those who have had nothing change to truly understand those who have had the floor drop out from under them, Sánchez said.
People have a deep need to believe if they do all the right things, they will have economic security, they will be OK, Miller said.
“When we hear about someone’s misfortunes, we look at things we can point to to say it was their fault,” Miller said.
Individual choices are an important influence on a person’s economic success in life. But larger societal and economic forces are at work, like a credit crisis and global competition, that can overwhelm them.
Sánchez, 55, searched for months in his old field and suffered through several dark weeks before deciding to trade in his white collar for a blue collar.
He took an $8-an-hour job this March in a warehouse.
He has changed jobs two more times and boosted his wage each time in the process. But the family is making only 60 percent of what it did before he lost his insurance job.
To pay the kids’ college tuition, preserve the house and keep creditors at bay, the family is drawing down $5,000 every two months from Sánchez’s retirement plan.
The family has cut out the extras that once seemed so important, such as eating out and having cable television, and yet Sánchez knows in a year, maybe longer, that money will run out.
“It is changing our ability to continue our lifestyle and provide a good education for our kids,” he said. “I am very worried about our future if I can’t find a way to make more money.”
Watching the turmoil in Greece and Europe, he expects things will get worse before they get better.
And in quieter moments, Sánchez can’t shake the feeling that he has somehow let down his parents, who sacrificed so much to give him a better life.
They tell him otherwise.
“My parents are wonderfully supportive,” he said. “It is no shame to them that I am not in insurance anymore. They taught us growing up to not be afraid of work. If you have to go out and dig ditches, dig ditches.”
Sánchez just hopes if he digs enough, he can find a way out of the financial pit that the economic downturn has put him and millions of other people in.
Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410, asvaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/aldosvaldi
