The Fort Collins, Col­orado became a very afflu­ent area in the last 20 years. Busi­ness was boom­ing as peo­ple came up from Den­ver for sub­ur­ban liv­ing with nearby national forests. But the recent hard times have turned some who live in the area poor. It’s a prob­lem that many may not even know is there.

The orga­ni­za­tion Path­ways Past Poverty received a write up today in the Fort Collins Col­oradoan, The group has iden­ti­fied 12 issues that peo­ple need to solve in order to rise above the poverty line. The arti­cle focuses on afford­able child care and finan­cial edu­ca­tion. For our snip­pet, we point to some sta­tis­tics and reac­tion from Path­ways to Poverty. Writer Sara B. Hansen filed the story.

Accord­ing to results released this fall from the Amer­i­can Com­mu­nity Sur­vey, the poverty rate in Larimer County has increased by about 39 per­cent since 2000, peak­ing at 12.8 per­cent in 2007. That means more than one in 10 peo­ple in Larimer County is liv­ing on an income lower than the national poverty guideline.

Poverty as defined by the U.S. Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices in 2008 was a fam­ily of four earn­ing less than $21,200 a year. For an indi­vid­ual, the poverty line was set at $10,400.

And those stats were com­piled before the cur­rent reces­sion hit North­ern Colorado.

In 2009, Larimer County lost 4,500 jobs. Other work­ers were hit with pay cuts, fur­loughs and reduced hours.

Demand for ser­vices at the Food Bank for Larimer County climbed 30 per­cent in the past year. Neigh­bor to Neigh­bor served 30 per­cent more peo­ple, and the Home­less­ness Pre­ven­tion Ini­tia­tive pro­vided rental assis­tance to 56 per­cent more people.

The need is there, but many peo­ple in Larimer County don’t rec­og­nize it.

“A lot of peo­ple don’t want to believe poverty is an issue in Larimer County,” said Mar­ija Weeden-Osborn, Path­ways Past Poverty coor­di­na­tor and com­mu­nity invest­ment associate.

“Because we don’t see peo­ple sit­ting on the cor­ner, it’s eas­ier to believe they’re not there,” she said.

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