Columns

Our helpers need help as middle class slips

By DIANE STEINLE
Published January 21, 2007

Karen Fitzpatrick is in the business of helping people who are at the end of their rope. Efficient, passionate, empathetic, she greets them at the door of the Safety Harbor Neighborhood Family Center, where she is the executive director, and tries to stem their panic and lift their spirits. They may have an empty bank account, they may be facing foreclosure on their home, they may not know where to turn, but Fitzpatrick offers them hope and help, because that's her job.

But who, she wonders, will help her?

Fitzpatrick and others who operate social service agencies in Pinellas County have reported a stunning increase in the number of middle-class people asking for help. These are people who have jobs and a place to live, but the cost of living here has gone up so much and wages have remained so stagnant that they can no longer pay their bills.

Fitzpatrick understands exactly how they feel. Her own home is for sale; she can't afford to keep it.

At age 52, this college-educated executive is starting over. She expects to rent an apartment - something she hasn't done since her 20s - and try to figure out a future based on the new realities of life in Florida. She didn't expect this kind of uncertainty, this kind of risk, this kind of U-turn at this point in her life.

She's worried, too, about the staffers at her center and other social service agencies in Pinellas. Social work doesn't pay well, so what will happen, she wonders, if they can't hang on? They are society's helpers. Who will help if they leave?

"We just need to sound the alarm," Fitzpatrick said. "We need to look at how much the regular Joes - the social workers, the firefighters, the police - are hurting. We're not even able to budget. We don't have five-year plans anymore. We're scrambling around in our little anthill, trying to make this work. But I'm seeing fewer and fewer opportunities to make it work."

Workers try to find second jobs, or they move to an outlying area to save on housing, but then they have long commutes that separate them from their families and are exhausting, too. All that stress can lead to domestic abuse, divorce, anger and use of drugs and alcohol.

"When you have done everything right and you still go under, there are consequences," Fitzpatrick said.

The middle-class families who come to the Safety Harbor center usually have tried hard to avoid asking for help.

"They don't eat out anymore. They don't have HBO. They don't have any (magazine) subscriptions. They walk in here, and they are horrified at what my staff is going to think of them," she said. "So when they are sitting here humiliated, and they are going through their story, I share some of my story, because I have one."

Fitzpatrick was a career firefighter who also owned a preschool in Colorado before moving to Pinellas almost five years ago. The mother of two sons in their 20s, she got a job with Family Resources so she could utilize her helping skills and work on children's programs. Two years ago, she was hired as the executive director of the Safety Harbor Neighborhood Family Center, funded primarily by the Juvenile Welfare Board to help children and their families.

Fitzpatrick noticed that the center's clientele began to change after two devastating hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005. Gas prices went up. Property insurance premiums skyrocketed. At the same time, property values in Pinellas bubbled up, and property tax bills went up with them. Rents rose. And the middle class began to slip. The consequences could be far-reaching.

"The middle class provided the balance in our society," Fitzpatrick said. "The low-income lifestyle isn't balanced, and the high-income lifestyle isn't. The middle class was the balance - it was the pulse you could count on. This was the template for our society, but it's eroding. So where's the new template?"

The Florida Legislature must respond energetically to this social crisis, Fitzpatrick said, and local governments need to react, too.

"They need to do something right now - right now," she said emphatically, her fist clenched. By not acting, "they are pushing people into mental illness, into self-medicating."

People use antianxiety drugs and alcohol to dull their tension, and drunken driving arrests are common.

"Why is everybody drinking? They have no hope," she said.

While she thinks the government has a big role to play in bringing the cost of living down and returning balance to our lives, she doesn't expect the government to do it all. We all need to be meeting in forums and developing strategies to help lift one another up, she said.

Fitzpatrick knows that people are worried about the future - she is, too, enough that she put aside embarrassment to go public with her own personal challenges - but her positive nature helps her see a ray of hope.

"We're bright, we have talent, we can do this," she said. "But we can't do it three years from now, because by then, a lot of good people will have left the county. Let's make a plan, just do it, and work out the kinks as we go along."

Diane Steinle can be reached at (727) 445-4184 or dsteinle@sptimes.com.

[Last modified January 21, 2007, 00:29:23]