(CSA) - The scrapbook tucked under the bookshelf in Rudy Basurto's living room isn't full of family portraits — just photos of cabinets. The one with the opaque windowpane doors is the pantry he built for Jamie Lee Curtis. The Mission-style one, in mahogany, is in Bruce Willis' place in Malibu. Basurto is 48 years old. He makes about $20 an hour building cabinets but can't afford to buy a home in his Highland Park neighborhood. He has bartered his labor to put his three teenage children through Catholic school. They're on their own for college.
Basurto's family is far from poor, by the official measure. The federal poverty level for a family of five is $21,959. Last year, Rudy and his wife, Maryellen, together earned more than twice that: $45,000.
In many parts of the country, they might be middle class. But in Los Angeles, they are struggling. Like roughly a third of the county's population, they live somewhere between where poverty ends and prosperity begins. The Basurtos cram their children into makeshift bedrooms created in a dining room and a finished porch. They eat dinner on trays in the living room, where their daughter pecks away at a homework assignment on an aged computer. Every weekday at 6:15 a.m., Maryellen packs her two youngest children into a 17-year-old Subaru GL station wagon that needs a new engine, drives 32 miles round-trip to drop them off at school, then goes to the first of her two part-time jobs.
Rudy departs at the same time in his 16-year-old van, driving to the palatial homes of clients on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, in Malibu, in Beverly Hills. He has no health insurance, no pension plan and little savings. The Basurtos' lives are a precarious mix of bargain, barter and hope. Daily, they make choices — home-cooked pasta versus takeout Subway sandwiches, a mortgage versus private-school tuition. The Basurtos are neither destitute nor desperate. They have no debt, do not go hungry, and have managed to put three children through Catholic school. Yet their grip on the bottom rung of the middle class is precarious.
By the local cost of rent, by what it takes to commute to work, by the price of food at the local store, by the cost of clothing and healthcare, a family like the Basurtos would need more than $40,000 to make ends meet in Los Angeles. Families with younger children and day-care expenses would need closer to $70,000. That estimate, called a self-sufficient income, is an emerging measure of economic health seldom used in the calculus of poverty.
Policymakers still measure progress in the war on poverty using the federal poverty level, despite decades of quarrels over its shortcomings. Developed in the 1960s, the poverty level is based on a food survey from 1955. It tells only how much is too little to live on, not how much is enough to get by on.
"What it means is there are a lot more people without an adequate income in California than the federal poverty level would indicate," said Diana Pearce, director of the Center for Women's Welfare at the University of Washington and a pioneer in calculating self-sufficiency. By the federal benchmark, 13% of Californians are poor, according to the Census Bureau. By the self-sufficiency standard, 30% don't make enough to get by.
In California, the definition of "enough" varies widely. A family of four with young children could get by on $39,318 in Fresno County. In the Bay Area, the same family would need $69,000, according to a report by Pearce and the National Economic Development and Law Center. The center is an advocacy group based in Oakland that is lobbying to reorient social policy along lines of affordability, not poverty.

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