Nowhere else in the nation saw a greater narrowing of the gaps in poverty levels between Latinos and whites than Colorado.
Maria Bocanegra Tejeda awakens as the rising sun lights her room. Her room. In the house her family owns. That fact is still capable of surprising her, so far removed it is from her cousins’ crowded trailer in the crowded mobile home park where she spent nearly half of her 22 years.
In the decade that followed in this, one of the fastest-growing communities in one of the nation’s fastest-growing states, the Bocanegra Tejedas worked their way from renters to homeowners, from a one-earner household on the poverty line to two earners with a monthly cushion big enough to ensure their mortgage did not devour them. Maria, the eldest of four, became the family’s first high school graduate, its first to enroll in college.
That thriving is the engine of Colorado’s future. Population projections show growth will be led by younger Latinos and African Americans, and more Coloradans of color will enter the workforce as aging white workers retire.Progress was tempered by the reality that in the last decade a Black or Latino Coloradan was still twice as likely to live in poverty as their white neighbors, and Black median household income was two-thirds that of white.
Progress was also tempered by the nature of the decade itself. The economy rose from the trough of the Great Recession and its lopsided decimation of Black and Latino income and wealth to settle into a historically long, slow expansion that brought low unemployment, gradual wage increases and huge gains in home equity. Then the pandemic struck.
“If the gap represents me on one side of the Grand Canyon and whites on the other side of the Grand Canyon, and they’re saying, ‘Just jump. The gap is not as large as it was before,’ well, I’m still going to fall to the bottom,“ Phillips says. “And that’s the way I look at this. It doesn’t matter that is less. The challenge is that it’s there.”Pastor Del Phillips, with members of civil rights groups, speaks during a rally inside the City and County Building in Denver on Feb. 17, 2015.
Data also shows a greater percentage of people have moved above what the federal government defines as poverty. That is not the same thing as being self-sufficient, stable, flourishing. The family’s best hope for homeownership lay in the Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity with its $500 down payments, lower-than-conventional interest rates, and mission to serve families like theirs. The organization wants its homeowners to stay homeowners and build generational wealth, so it requires that no more than 30% of before-taxes monthly income go to the mortgage. For the Bocanegra Tejedas, the line between enough and not enough was too thin for comfort.
But the headwinds of this current decade are strong. Both inflation and the raising of interest rates to combat it exact a greater toll on Blacks and Latinos, he says, “and those are the groups less able to sustain an economic shock … because they have less wealth, less money in the bank.”, recently released its annual Pulse poll of nearly 3,000 state residents and found the rising cost of living and housing a top concern across race and ethnicity.
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