In 1998, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a paper, “Places Left Behind.” It was an analysis of cities that had not profited from the economic boom of the ’90s. Along with three other cities, Madera was featured. That drew the attention of the PBS station in San Francisco, and, in 1999, it did a feature called “A Pocket of Poverty” on our town.
Among other locals, Jim Taubert (then executive director of the Madera Redevelopment Agency) and I (author of a Pulse of the Heartland column about the phenomenon) were interviewed. The gist of the program was two-fold. First, we were saddled with a very high rate of poverty. Second, we lacked forward-looking leadership.
25 years later
Now, here we are in 2024, a quarter century after the HUD report was issued, and what is our current status? We lost our hospital, department stores, and excellent restaurants. We now have at least 30 percent of our population living below the poverty line, and 12.4 percent of those impoverished people have incomes that fall 50 percent below the poverty threshold. Moreover, children between the ages of 12 and 17 live in households that are the poorest of the poor.