Globe takes you to the busiest "restaurant" in town:
"Middle class eroding, gap widening in Bristol, R.I.; Yachts and a food pantry in uneasy juxtaposition" by Megan Woolhouse | Globe Staff April 23, 2014
BRISTOL, R.I. — With its sweeping views of Narragansett Bay, this quaint sailing town boasts waterfront mansions, postcard-perfect New England inns, trendy gastropubs, and a museum to the America’s Cup yacht race.
Yet a few short blocks from the seaside parks and granite docks is another side of Bristol not found on the tourist maps. On weekday mornings, people stream into the basement of a former rubber mill where the town’s food pantry does a brisk business.
Like many other places in America, Bristol is increasingly a community of extremes, home to both great wealth and a shrinking middle class as more residents slip closer to poverty.
Related(?): The wealthiest philanthropists did not give as much in 2013 as they gave before the Great Recession, even as a "strong stock market and better business climate have continued to concentrate American wealth in the top 1 percent of earners."
And nothing on the horizon, be it the political or economic sphere, is going to be changing that $tatu$ quo; in fact, it is only accelerating and being here covering and commenting on what is coming from the paper of corporate wealth and eliti$m, well, we would call that a waste of time. Globe did it's job, gave it a one-day wonder, and now it is on to the next of thousands upon thousands of American communities that this has happened.
Nearly one of every 10 households in Bristol County uses food stamps, more than double the number just a few years ago, representing one of the largest increases in New England.
“I feel like I’m trapped,” said 32-year-old Christy Watkinson, a stay-at-home mother collecting free potatoes and cabbage from bins at the East Bay Food Pantry with her 1-year-old daughter, Sage.
“We try to make things work, but it’s really hard,” said Watkinson, whose partner works as a landscaper in summer and snowplow driver in winter. “It gets tight.”
We all feel that way, and at least he(?) has work.
Hundreds of families like Watkinson’s visit the food pantry each month as good paying jobs remain scarce and the cost of necessities like food, gas, and housing, particular during tourist season, climbs. “If you’re willing to work at Dunkin’ Donuts for $7.50 an hour, that’s what’s available,” said Ashley Cheatom, a 30-year-old mother of four who collected fresh and canned food at the food pantry recently.
Gotta go to Wall Street or have connections in certain circle$ for that.
Related: “The story for the Massachusetts economy, if you ignore high levels of unemployment and inequality, is the economy has been performing very well.”
I hope you can $ee why you only get a link. I'm sick of lies.
Bristol is the seat of Bristol County, which has a population of nearly 50,000. The town sits on a peninsula between Providence and Newport, a slice of Americana best known for its 200-year-old Independence Day parade along Hope Street, with the growing divide between rich and poor often invisible to the tourists who flock here to take in the views.
Over the years, jobs in manufacturing and fishing that paid middle-class wages vanished or were replaced by lower-paying service jobs catering to tourists and wealthy retirees.
Related: The Vanishing Middle Class
Also see: The American Dream is Dead
It's a nightmare when you finally awake.
The number of households receiving food stamps in Bristol County soared to 1,700 in 2012 from about 700 in 2009 — a jump of 130 percent, more than double the 56 percent increase for all of New England, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
“Hidden poverty is becoming more obvious and it’s going to become even more obvious as income inequality grows,” said Kaili Mauricio, a Boston Fed policy analyst.
Downtown, Bristol’s harbor overlooks mansions and summer estates on an exclusive stretch known as Poppasquash Neck, where a gated, newly built mansion recently sold for $5.2 million, one of the most expensive sales in the state so far this year. Nearby are residences of the likes of the former chairman of Texaco and the late actor Anthony Quinn.
Yet less than two miles away, Bristol’s first food pantry opened in 2009. Visits to the pantry, which is just blocks from Bristol’s commercial district and Hope Street, have jumped 34 percent, to 4,300 in 2013.
More than one-third of the households using the pantry have more than one wage-earner. One in five families using the pantry are two-parent households with children, according to the food pantry.
“This is a community of extremes,” said Daniel Barron Randall, pastor at Bristol’s First Congregational Church, who founded the food bank because a growing number of people were asking him for food. “Part of the middle class has slipped into poverty.”
I think they were pu$hed.
In what was once a community of rubber factories and textile mills, many of the old factory buildings along the waterfront have been converted to shops and condominiums.
All off-shored and outsourced.
Tourism has become a major source of revenue, but Rhode Island was hit especially hard in the last recession and places like Bristol were affected when consumers cut back discretionary spending on items like vacations, restaurant meals, and shopping.
You don't build -- pun intended -- an economy on "touri$m." That's Third World, Americans!
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An influx of wealthier retirees has also made Bristol a more expensive place to live, putting an even tighter squeeze on middle- and lower-income families struggling with unemployment, underemployment, and stagnating wages....
How can that be after five years of a roaring recovery and stock market? Unless that narrative is nothing but a corporate and government lie, 'eh?
--more--"
Related: Globe Takes a Trip to North Adams Emergency Room
Also see: Berkshire Medical Center agrees to buy former North Adams hospital building
Apparently, having an emergency room within reachable distance isn't that much of an emergency.
Maybe I should have stayed in Boston for breakfast because once again I'm feeling a bit ill after reading a Globe.
