GREENBELT – Jason Flanagan juggled family, school, multiple jobs and night work in an armored truck to earn a degree in English.

He went to work for the Gazette newspapers in 2006 for $27,000 a year, before landing at the Baltimore Examiner a year later with a $6,000 raise. Even then, supporting his wife and two young daughters in a two-bedroom apartment in Greenbelt was not easy.

Pinched by the cost of school, rising expenses of a growing family, and never seeming to earn enough, he depended on credit cards for gas and school supplies. Creditors started threatening legal action, he said.

“A lot of times it was just basically trying to deal with who was being the most threatening, who was going to take me to court or take part of my salary,” Flanagan said. “It’s kind of hard to deal with creditors when you have no money.”

His marriage disintegrated.

“Money was a huge factor in my divorce. I wasn’t making enough of it. I couldn’t really support them well,” Flanagan, 31, said.

Then in the midst of the country’s worst recession, the Examiner closed and he found himself out of work.

“It was almost as if someone had touched the reset button for you, and you’re not ready, and you have to do it all over again: find another job, and find a place to live, and deal with creditors,” Flanagan said.

Jason Flanagan cooks dinner at his apartment in Greenbelt. Photo by Karl B. Hille.

Unable to pay his creditors, he landed in court a second time in 2009.

He found work soon after the Examiner closed in March, teaching English at Oxon Hill High School in Prince George’s County. However, the school year didn’t start until August, meaning the first paycheck was still more than five months away.

“It was certainly a scary time,” Flanagan said.

The economy is improving, but many working families, like Flanagan’s, are still recovering from the effects of the downturn.

He works extra jobs — with hockey leagues at two ice rinks, besides extra duties at school like coaching — to make ends meet.

Teachers salaries have been frozen for three years, including one year with a freeze and furloughs, resulting in a net loss of earnings, said school board member Donna Hathaway Beck, District 9.

Flanagan said he, like many teachers, already pays for school supplies out of his own pocket: $600 a year for paper, pencils, note pads, copying fees and technology the school system does not cover. His student newspaper is published online-only to save money.

Flanagan said he “maybe” earns $50,000 a year before deductions, but with two young children to support, “it’s still not enough for me to live comfortably, like if I wanted to save money. I can’t do that. I have no savings.”

He would like to move to a two-bedroom apartment to make his daughters’ visits more comfortable, but for now he sleeps on an air mattress in the living room when they are with him.

He doesn’t have cable, but the 5-foot-10, 200-pound Flanagan allows himself one luxury: League fees to play ice hockey run $120 in the summer and $200 for the longer winter season — with employee discounts.

“Hockey is one thing that I do to keep me from being super-depressed or going insane.”

GAITHERSBURG – Dennis and Stephanie Bradshaw of Gaithersburg took on a hefty hospital bill when they brought home their second son in July 2010. And while credit cards served as a quick fix, they couldn’t pay down their growing credit card debt without help from family.

The bill for Grant’s birth, which was without complications, came to about $10,000. Dennis Bradshaw had insurance through his account managing job at a high-volume printing company, but it only covered $6,000 of the bills. Rising health care costs had forced a reduction in coverage, he said.

The family entered into a monthly payment plan with the hospital but soon found that the extra bill was too much to manage. So they started using their credit cards to meet their expenses.

“To make up for the $200 dollars a month, you have to put gas or whatever on the credit card,” he said. He was also charging for the family’s food and other necessities.

“Obviously, I was charging for diapers, which was a huge expense,” he said laughing.

Things were different when the Bradshaws’ first son, T.J., was born in August 2008. That was before his employer had to make cutbacks because of the recession.

Dennis Bradshaw had savings and was making about $22 an hour. Stephanie Bradshaw had a good salary as the director of a child care center By early 2009, the medical bills were paid, he said, but the savings were gone.

That summer, Dennis Bradshaw took an 8 percent pay cut. The company also began paying him a salary instead of an hourly rate, so he lost overtime opportunities. He estimates that he lost five to 10 hours of overtime a week, which he said hurt his finances worse than the pay cut.

The reduced income was not enough to cover the growing family’s costs and medical debts. Both children were old enough for day care that year and Dennis Bradshaw estimates that they were spending about $2,900 monthly on basic costs including rent, food, gas, day care, auto insurance and life insurance.

Those costs were on top of health insurance payments taken out of his salary and a monthly payment on a Rav4 he bought before the recession hit his company.

The family kept using credit cards to cover their bills and, in April 2011, Bradshaw was paying a total of more than $1,000 a month on five different credit cards at interests rates of 6 percent to 17.1 percent.

The family cut back on expenses and shopped smarter, but it wasn’t enough. “We switched from Pampers to the Target brand. We just try to cut costs that way,” Bradshaw said. “It’s just watching what we spend and thinking about what we’re going to eat, and instead of going to McDonalds for lunch, we bring our own food.”

To make ends meet, Stephanie Bradshaw asked her grandmother for financial support and she was able to contribute a large gift. Dennis Bradshaw’s mother also helped out with a series of gifts. His tax return went to paying off credit card debt.

At the end of the month, Bradshaw should finally be able to pay off his Bank of America card. When things were at their worst in 2010, he owed $6,000 on it. It carries an interest rate of 12 percent.

He still owes on the other four cards, but with the help he received and by limiting his expenses to the minimum, the family is slowly coming out from under the burden of debt.

“We haven’t used our credit cards hardly at all this year. If I need to use it I will definitely have it as a backup, I just hope I don’t get to that point,” Bradshaw said.

So Campbell, 21, says she’d be delighted to work at Walmart when a new store opens in Denton, Caroline County, this fall — even at wages of less than $12 an hour.

“I’ve never made anything over $7.55,” Campbell said. “A $12 wage? Hell yeah.”

Around the country, anti-Walmart campaigns have condemned the giant retailer for paying low wages.

But Denton, the Caroline County seat, needs jobs. The unemployment rate is higher than the state average and empty storefronts plague downtown. Walmart will offer 600 jobs. And Campbell wants one of them.

“My little brother makes $13 at Wawa. He’s made more than I’ve ever made,” Campbell said. “If Walmart had that wage, that’d be awesome, even if it’s not that much in the long run.”

On its corporate Web site, Walmart says its pays full-time employees in Maryland an average hourly wage of $11.83.

A recent study found that an adult living alone in Caroline must earn $11.34 an hour to pay for the basics, which include food, housing, transportation, health care and other essentials but not cell phone or cable. The basic wage needed goes up to $17.68 for one working adult with a preschooler. Add an infant, and it’s $21.81.

This study, known as the Self Sufficiency Standard, was conducted by researchers at the University of Washington School of Social Work.
Making Change at Walmart, a national campaign supported by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, disputes Walmart’s assertion that it pays its Maryland full-time workers an average of $11.83 an hour.

“An employee who works Walmart’s definition of full-time (34 hours per week) makes just $15,500 per year,” the union says. “That means hundreds of thousands of people who work full-time at Walmart still live below the poverty line.”

Walmart declined repeated requests for interviews.

“Walmart always pays very low wages. I guess that’s better than no wages,” said former Maryland Gov. Harry Hughes, who lives in Denton. “But it would be much better if they pay more.”

Last year, Caroline County’s unemployment rate was 8.8 percent, compared to 7.0 percent for the state as a whole.
Caroline County is landlocked, without any waterfront to attract business and tourists — and money. Much of the county’s land is used for farming and industry. Denton, a small, rural town with historic buildings, rests on a hill overlooking the Choptank River.

According to census data, Caroline County’s median household income is just under $60,000. But more than 11 percent of the population earns less than the federal poverty level of $19,090 for a family of three.

“The state’s doing better than us on unemployment and a lot of other things in general,” Denton Mayor Dennis Porter said. “I mean, we’re not the most affluent area here.”

Some observers are skeptical of wage estimates such as those in the University of Washington self-sufficiency study.
“Quite honestly, when you look at that county, that wage is just not realistic,” said Memo Diriker, the founding director of the Business, Economic, and Community Outreach Network, a business and economic research and consulting group at Salisbury University.

“You’re not going to find that wage in that county unless you’re highly skilled. Those kind of jobs in rural areas do not exist,” Diriker said. “There’s no way that I can imagine in Caroline County an organization that is going to give $17 an hour” for unskilled labor.

But the author of the Self-Sufficiency Standard, Diana Pearce, said her research is not based on salaries paid. “We do not set the standard at what the employer pays for people with few skills,” Pearce said. “We set it at the minimally adequate level to meet basic needs, so we are ‘blind’ to what employers are paying when we set it.”

For comparison, Maryland’s Department of Business and Economic Development determined that Caroline County customer service representatives and secretaries earned a median hourly wage of $14 an hour in 2011. Bookkeeping and accounting clerks earned $15.75 an hour.

Don Mulrine, Denton’s town administrator, says he welcomes Walmart and its jobs, no matter the wages. They can serve as “fill-in jobs,” he said, until employees find better careers elsewhere.

Walmart, he said, has “very good jobs, and they can work up the ladder to be assistant managers, department managers, and so on, where they can get the higher values of dollar skills per hour, as well as the benefits that they are attributed to.”

But, he also said the management team for the new store is coming from outside the county. Future managers have already been selected and are being trained at other Walmarts nearby.

Construction of the 152,888-square-foot store began on Legion Road in September 2011, and Walmart is set to open at the end of October off Route 404, less than two miles from Market Street, Denton’s main street.

Eight vacant storefronts sit there now in downtown Denton. Merchants, including Michael Owens, owner of Color ‘N’ Clay, think reviving downtown will help residents achieve their financial goals.

A December 2009 study by Arnett Muldrow & Associates, Ltd. analyzed Denton’s economic potential and proposed a new marketing strategy that main street manager Ann Jacobs has already launched with the help of local businesses.

“There’s more to having a small business and being involved in the community than just earning wages. We have a responsibility to the community,” said Owens, who was named the 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year by Caroline County Chamber of Commerce.
Diriker, at Salisbury University, said he understands that some people view Walmart as a challenge to Denton’s retailers.

“Some smaller stores that cannot compete may have to leave,” Diriker said. “But the community is in no position to thrive if it says no to Walmart.”

Mark Peach, 48, who is self-employed, has lived in Denton since 2000. He said he would “cut my two legs off” before taking a job at Walmart because of the company’s “animus” toward unions and low wages. Twelve dollars an hour doesn’t go far, even in a rural area like Caroline County, he said.

“If you’re looking to add a supplemental income to what you already have, that’s fine. If you’re retired and you want to add to your income, that’s fine too,” Peach said. “But I don’t think people could live off that.

But for Danielle Smith, a senior at North Caroline High School in Ridgley, Walmart would be fine for a summer job.
“I would absolutely love $12 an hour,” she said. “It’s close to my house and it would be a raise up from $8.10 I get at Subway now.”

STEVENSVILLE – Queen Anne’s County, which has seen basic living costs nearly double in 10 years, has so many residents seeking help with housing that it has closed its waiting lists. Some families on the lists will be waiting up to eight years for openings in housing programs, county officials say.

“We are in tough times, and people are losing their homes and their jobs and they need assistance,” said Mike Clark, director of housing and family services for Queen Anne’s.

Heather Focht, 34, a Queen Anne’s resident who lost her job last year, said that she and her 2-year-old daughter had to move in with her mother while Focht looked for jobs and took classes at University of Maryland University College.

“It is just hard,” she said. “I honestly just can’t afford to live on my own right now.” Clark said that residents who have applied recently to services including the Rental Allowance Program include people who had no need to ask for assistance before. They tend to be unfamiliar with the process, he said, and also are reluctant to ask for help.

The Rental Allowance Program, which provides help with rent for a year, has a waiting list of six to eight years. The county subsidizes the rent for the units, which range from rooms in private homes to apartments and single-family homes, through funds provided by the state. But the county only has enough money to cover about 20 families a year and that has contributed to the long waiting list, Clark said.

Queen Anne’s population is 47,798 — with 5.5 percent living below the poverty level.

“When you only have enough money to serve a certain number of people but the demand is high, the list starts to add up,” Clark said.
A recent study, the Maryland Self-Sufficiency Standard for 2012, found that the cost of basic needs for a family of three living in Queen Anne’s almost doubled from $33,855 in 2001 to $65,072 in 2012.

The study also found that housing costs went up 110 percent. Queen Anne’s County has the fourth-highest foreclosure rate in Maryland, with a rate of 1 in 959.

The unemployment rate for jobs within the county has increased over the past five years and has led to an increase in residents who commute outside of the county to work. Five years ago, 60 percent of residents left the county for their jobs. Today, that figure is 85 percent.

GERMANTOWN – Elliot Cruz and Angella Camacho began married life last year in the living room of a one-bedroom Gaithersburg apartment.

Cruz’s roommate had the bedroom. And when she moved out, Camacho and Cruz struggled to pay the $1,100 rent on their own.

Camacho was out of work and Cruz’s full-time job as a computer technician paid $12 an hour. After the rent, they barely had enough to cover food, bus fare and the phone bill.

“We were living paycheck to paycheck,” Cruz, 29, said.

Things got worse in August. Cruz was laid off from his job as a computer technician, and they had to live on his unemployment benefits of $350 a week. Camacho, 22, did some baby-sitting. They went to a food bank once a month.

“There were no ways to get a car. There were no ways to get health insurance,” Cruz said. “We had public transportation nearby, but the cost of the location drained all your money.”

They began looking for a cheaper place to live, but Montgomery County has the one of the highest housing costs in the country.

In December, they found a two-bedroom basement apartment for $700 a month about four miles north in Germantown.

Since then, both Camacho and Cruz landed new jobs. She is working full time as a recruitment coordinator at a Rockville marketing research company. He returned to the medical-supply manufacturing company that laid him off. He also started a floor installation business on the side.

They’re working long hours but saved $4,000 to buy a used car — cutting out the 20-minute walk to and from the bus stop. And they expect to bring in $66,000 this year. Even so, they are planning to stay in the basement apartment with its inexpensive monthly rent so they can afford to finish school.

She is returning to college this fall to get her bachelor’s degree. Cruz wants to complete an information technology certification program.

Children are out of the question until both of them make more money, Camacho said.

Camacho considers the basement apartment a safety net now.

“One can never know if they are going to get fired or not,” she said. “Whatever savings we have, we are trying to stretch it to grow as much as possible. We have to be ready for anything.”

BALTIMORE – Twenty-five years ago, the area around Baltimore’s Harbor East was dominated by empty warehouses, a chemical factory that was about to close, and environmental problems. Today, Harbor East is filled with luxury hotels and condos, restaurants, and upscale boutiques that draw tourists and Baltimoreans alike.

“A net plus in jobs and taxes,” said M. J. Brodie, president of the Baltimore Development Corporation.

What Harbor East has not done, however, is replace the thousands of middle-class jobs that were the hallmark of Baltimore’s industrial harbor and that supported nearby neighborhoods filled with middle-class families.

In Baltimore as in many cities around the country, as manufacturers have closed factories and shed jobs, they’ve largely been replaced with service sector jobs that tend not to pay as well.

“These service-type jobs, they are good jobs,” said James Kraft, Baltimore city councilman for District 1, which includes Harbor East. “We need those jobs, particularly for folks who don’t have higher education or more sophisticated job skills.

“Unfortunately, in many cases you can’t raise a family on them.”

Jobs in leisure and hospitality industries in Baltimore pay an average of $27,500 a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Baltimore’s manufacturing jobs pay an average of $53,000, the government says.

“Harbor East in Baltimore is an example of what has been happening throughout our nation,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. “The middle class is disappearing as manufacturing jobs, which paid good wages, have disappeared.”

A Brookings Institution study released last month found that “Greater Baltimore is not generating enough quality jobs” and that it must find a way to create more “middle-wage” jobs.

From 1980 to 2007, the eve of the recession, job growth in high-wage industries in Baltimore was three times slower than the national average, according to Jennifer Vey, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Job growth in middle-wage industries in Baltimore also lagged behind the national average.

The economic shift began decades ago.

From 1980 to 1985, four waterfront area manufacturers shut down–Allied Chemical in Fells Point, Bethlehem Steel Shipyard, Western Electric, and the American Can Company, in Canton. They took 5,900 union jobs with them.

Bethlehem Steel in Sparrows Point, in Baltimore County, farther to the east, cut an additional 8,500 jobs during that time, according to research done then by David Harvey, a former professor of geography at Johns Hopkins.

This is not a story unique to the Baltimore waterfront. Good-paying manufacturing jobs have been disappearing for decades, a result of a changing economy, globalization, and other trends largely beyond Baltimore’s control.

Today, the employers in Harbor East vary widely, but almost all of them fall within the service sector. There are restaurants and hotels; universities, both for-profit (Laureate) and not for-profit (Johns Hopkins Carey Business School); and large banks and financial advisors.

“Harbor East has been incredibly, in fact, overly successful in bringing attractive Class A office space, attractive retail, and attractive hotel space to the city,” said Richard Clinch, the director of economic research at the University of Baltimore, who has worked with Harbor East developers.

Clinch says Harbor East has become a second downtown, taking businesses from other parts of the city.

“Hotel development has traditionally centered on the convention center,” Clinch said. “But where did the Four Seasons go? Where did the Marriott go? To Harbor East, because they could get newer buildings in a newer, better environment.”

That also holds true for many of the higher-paying office jobs located in Harbor East. The financial giants Morgan Stanley and Legg Mason, both had huge new headquarters built in Harbor East.

“They’ve relocated jobs from the traditional downtown,” said Michael Evitts of the non-profit Baltimore Downtown Partnership. “We would have been worried had it not been for backfilling,” Evitts said, referring to the process of abandoned office space being reused or repurposed.

The four largest hospitality employers in Harbor East — Marriott, Whole Foods, Four Seasons, and Hilton — combined employ about 950 people, according to their human resources departments. That’s a lot of jobs, but not enough to replace the thousands that were lost in the early 1980s.

And as the jobs in the area have changed, the neighborhoods have changed as well.

“It’s not the same as when the canning industries and the automotive industries and the shipping industries were all stretched along the water and the people all lived in those working-class neighborhoods,” Kraft said. “That’s just not the case any longer.”

Today, while some employees live nearby, an informal survey shows that they tend to be young and single. People with families tend to live in other neighborhoods.

Tony Rieger, 21, works the front desk at the Courtyard by Marriott on Aliceanna Street and attends Stratford University one day a week. He likes his job and says he is paid well, and gets great benefits. But “the Harbor East area is definitely a little out of my reach.” Rieger said. “Anyone that works in this area usually lives elsewhere.”

Joaquin Torres, 32, has been a bellman at the Homewood Suites by Hilton on South President Street for almost three years. He says he likes his job “about 20 times better” than his previous one, working for a painting company, and that with tips, his pay is excellent, although he declined to be more specific.

Torres lives in nearby Little Italy with his mother and his three-year-old daughter. He says he lucked into an affordable apartment because he speaks Italian and has a rapport with the landlord.

“I’m the only one who can walk to work,” Torres bragged, with a smile. “Harbor East is more exclusive. Little Italy is a neighborhood.”

While salaries can vary widely depending on position, new workers at Hilton make about $12 an hour, according to Edypa Milonas the director of human resources at the Hilton Garden Inn in Harbor East.

One-bedroom apartments in Harbor East buildings tend to rent for more than $2,000 a month, according to real estate listings. That’s more than the monthly earnings of the average new Hilton employee.

Bruce Carter, 35, is a front-office agent at the Marriott Waterfront hotel on Aliceanna Street. He is working toward a degree in kinesiology at Towson University and lives between Fells Point and Canton.

Carter says a lot of the families who once lived in those neighborhoods have moved to suburbs like Towson and Catonsville for more space and lower rents. “Everyone around here is my age, 25 to 40,” Carter said. “When you start having a family this isn’t the place.”

Clinch says that manufacturers aren’t coming back and it’s unfair to compare the jobs they provided with those in Harbor East. “It’s a straw man that makes no sense. It isn’t a question of a great union manufacturing job versus a crappy hotel job. It’s a question of a job versus no job for city residents.”

Jennifer Vey, at the Brookings Institution sees Baltimore’s economic future in five export-based industries–manufacturing, bioscience, information technology, “green” jobs, and transportation and logistics.

“What I ultimately found was that these five industries have a greater share of workers in occupations making a middle-wage or higher who don’t have a four-year college degree,” Vey said.

“That’s not at the exclusion of everything else,” she said. “Certainly you want amenities, and tourism-based industries, and retail, but you can’t be putting all your stock into those types of industries if you want to be growing middle- and higher-wage jobs.”

Kate McGonigle contributed to this article.

SILVER SPRING – Blanca Oliva, 61 years old, laughed remembering the first time she saw snow. It was 1988 and she had recently arrived in Silver Spring, after fleeing her native El Salvador during the country’s civil war. She had found a job cleaning a store at nights.

“I went to clean the store in a snowstorm,” she said. “Imagine the first snow I’ve ever seen! I had to walk in the snow. I only had sneakers, and I lost one in the snow.”

Oliva arrived in the U.S. with her daughter after a harrowing trip overland through Central America and Mexico, including 23 days lost in the desert along the Mexico-Texas border. She could not swim, so she crossed the Rio Grande in a makeshift raft made of a large tire.

She worked various temporary cleaning jobs before finding a permanent one in 1990 cleaning in a large apartment complex. She had no benefits or health insurance and she only got one week of vacation per year. Still, she was happy to have the job. She had a work permit at the time and obtained permanent residency in 2001.

Last June 23, Oliva was laid off and has been out of work since. She started receiving unemployment benefits in July but does not know when they will run out. She gets $680 every two weeks — about $450 less per month than what she had been making — but she considers herself lucky.

“Thank God I make almost the same as I did with my job,” she said.

She worries because her husband works in construction and his company is beginning to lay off workers.

Oliva cannot afford health insurance and can rarely afford to see a doctor for her chronic illnesses: hypertension, asthma, diabetes, gastritis. She rolled up her sleeve to show a large rash on her arm. A doctor at the clinic had told her to see a dermatologist, but she cannot afford it. Though she has been employed almost continuously since coming here more than 20 years ago, Oliva has only had health insurance for one short period, when an employer provided it.

An estimated 49 million Americans were uninsured as of 2010, and 76 percent came from working families, according to a Kaiser Commission report. Oliva is too poor to buy her own insurance, yet not poor enough to be covered by a government safety net.

She looks for work constantly, but she faces several barriers. She does not know how to use the Internet, so she walks the streets of Silver Spring and Langley Park, looking for job openings. She is older and thinks this makes her less appealing to employers, as they always ask her age in interviews, she said. She speaks poor English and had only six formal years of schooling in El Salvador.

The odds are stacked against her: while the national unemployment rate in 2010 was 8.2 percent, the rate for Latinos was 10.8; for Latinos without a high school diploma such as Oliva, the unemployment rate was more than 13 percent.

Since she lost her job she has limited her spending. She and her husband never go out to eat and have not taken a vacation in over three years, even to the beach. She used to send money to her son in El Salvador but can no longer afford it.

They are unable to save money and she is concerned about their mortgage. They are only able to make payments on the interest. Since 2006 she said the house has lost half its value.

Oliva is an optimist at heart. “Us poor, we are always in battle with suffering,” she said. In spite of all this, and all the struggles she has had since fleeing El Salvador, she considers herself fortunate. “I believe there are many people with more problems than us,” she said. “There are people without anything.”

“We have a land of riches, but have a portion of the population that is still struggling to be included in that wealth,” said Robin Finnacom, who runs a local community development nonprofit.

The Patuxent River Naval Air Station has been at the center of high-end employment for St. Mary’s residents since it was built 70 years ago, but its highly paid positions require a degree. Many county officials say more education and training for the lower-skilled residents is the solution to closing the income gap.

After major expansions in the 1980s and 90s, the air station employs more than 15,000 county residents, said Gary Younger, the base public information officer.

Base employees make an average of $100,000 a year, according to the county’s 2012 Technology Handbook. In addition, more than 200 defense contractors have offices in the county and pay an average salary of about $76,000.

That makes the defense industry the engine behind the steady rise in the county’s median income to more than $80,000. Those incomes have shielded thousands of residents from the brunt of the economic recession.

But those salary statistics mask the financial problems of a substantial share of the population that is barely getting by.

About 70 percent of St. Mary’s residents 25 and older lack a college degree. That means they are not eligible for many jobs on the base, where Younger said three out of four employees have at least a bachelor’s degree.

The next largest employers after defense in St. Mary’s County are retail and tourism, said Donna Sasscer, the county’s agriculture manager, who works with the county’s Department of Economic and Community Development.

Jobs in food preparation and serving account for 7.7 percent of the workforce. Those jobs pay on average $9.76 an hour, or about $20,000 a year, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Costs have risen. For example, rents increased about 25 percent, while rents in Maryland increased about 21 percent.

“People who can’t compete are in a double bind,” said Finnacom, who is president of St. Mary’s County Community Development Corporation, which aims to increase employment opportunities through commercial and residential redevelopment. “The cost of living has gone up to meet market demands of a more affluent population, and they get left behind,” she said.

The corporation helps county residents obtain better jobs through their Jobs Connection Program. Low-wage employment is often a dead-end, so the program provides workshops and training to assist St. Mary’s residents in starting careers that have room for promotion.

The income disparity between higher- and lower-educated residents has existed for decades, since the base began expanding, said Tony Jones, the county’s public information officer. The skills needed for jobs at the base and contractors are so specialized that many people don’t qualify.

“We find the reason why folks are not able to qualify for jobs is they simply don’t have the skill,” Jones said. “The answer is education.”
In 2010, men with only high-school diplomas nationally made a median annual income of $40,060, and women made $29,860, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Men with bachelor’s degrees had a median earning of $63,740, and women with degrees earned $47,440.

In St. Mary’s County, even an undergraduate degree may not be enough. “Today, the bachelor’s degree is what the high school degree used to be,” said Mel Powell, executive director of the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center, which offers mainly graduate education and high-tech training programs. “More and more employers are looking for higher levels of skill.”

The center was established with funding from the state, Southern Maryland counties and universities around the country in the mid-1990s in direct response to employers’ needs for an even more educated and skilled workforce, Powell said.

Many county employers pay for their workers to take classes at the center, which partners with 14 universities, 10 of which are in Maryland. Before the center, employees would have to commute 200 miles round-trip to universities as far as Towson.

Yet the center, like the defense industry job market, is out of reach for most of St. Mary’s residents, who have neither a bachelor’s degree nor employers willing to pay for their education.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland doesn’t fill the need either. Most students at St. Mary’s College are full-time and enter immediately after high school. The college looks for students with high SAT scores and heavy involvement in extracurricular activities. The cost was nearly $24,000 for in-state students last school year. The college estimates another $3,500 is spent on books and other expenses.

The region’s community college, the College of Southern Maryland, provides two-year training programs for higher-skilled jobs that are cheaper and take less time to complete.

The school tries to cater to what the major employers are looking for and “gear up those programs because most students are local and want to stay in the area. They want to get a job here,” said Brad Gottfried, president of the College of Southern Maryland. “We’re working closely with local employers more than we have before.”

For example, the college is developing a program with a local nuclear power plant to train nuclear energy technicians, he said. It’s also “working directly with Patuxent River” by growing its engineering programs.

But studying here still costs money. An associate’s degree in engineering technology at the College of Southern Maryland costs $7,900, not including books or other expenses. Residents are in a position where they have to spend money to make money.

The college’s enrollment last school year was 12,035, up about 8 percent from the 2008 school year. Almost every student is local, Gottfried said.

Nearly 40 percent of enrolled students applied for financial aid last academic year, according to College of Southern Maryland records. In 2008, about a quarter of students applied.

The average student is about 26 or 27 years old and takes evening classes while working.

More people are going back to school so “they’re able to compete in the job market,” Jones said, a trend seen nationwide.

Alexandra Daniello contributed to this article.

It’s 1 in the afternoon, and after an eight-hour night shift and a three-hour nursing class, she should be sleeping. But it’s laundry day. She needs a lot of quarters to wash a lot of clothes. She’s a single mother of a 15-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter.

Michelle Church at her home in Glen Burnie. Photo by Sophie Petit.

“It’s hard,” Church said. Even though she spends up to 12 hours a day, not including studying, at work and school, she can’t make enough to support her family without government or community help.

She gets to spend only two to three hours during the work week with her children. When they get out of school at 3, she’s sleeping.

If she wants to see them or cook dinner on a weekday, she must sacrifice sleep. She tries to cook three times a week. Last night she made spare ribs. She’s a good cook, like her mother who raised six daughters on her own.

But she’ll keep working and studying and applying for all the assistance she can. “I don’t want to go back,” she said.

Two years ago, Church was addicted to drugs, jobless and then homeless after eviction from a public-housing unit in Annapolis. She and her children landed in a single room at Sarah’s House, a homeless shelter in Fort Meade.

For the first time, Church didn’t have anywhere to live. “I had let myself and my children down,” she said. At 40 years old, she knew she had to change her life.

With the help of a caseworker at the shelter, she stopped using drugs, got a full-time job, earned her high school diploma, enrolled at Sojourner-Douglass College and saved enough money to move into the apartment in Glen Burnie off Tall Pines Court Road.

She plans to graduate as a licensed nurse practitioner by New Year’s, if she can keep the grant covering her $5,000-a-semester tuition.

She must reapply for the grant each semester. If she doesn’t qualify next semester, she’ll take out a student loan. If she can’t get a loan, she can’t finish school. If that happens, she doesn’t know what’s next, she said.

Before attending class in Baltimore for three-and-a-half hours, Church works from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. at Arundel Lodge, an adult psychiatric rehabilitation center in Annapolis. She earns $10 an hour — $1,600 a month before taxes.

A single parent with a school-age child and a teenager needs to make at least $26 an hour — $4,640 a month — to make ends meet living in Anne Arundel County, according to the 2012 Self-Sufficiency Standard. That study, by University of Washington researchers, calculated the cost of basic needs for low-income families by looking at the local price of necessities like housing, food and childcare.

She pays $960 for rent. Church applied for rental assistance through the Anne Arundel County Housing Authority four years ago. She’s been stuck in spot No. 14 on the waiting list for the past year, she said.

She sets aside $300 to $400 to pay for bills: electric, water, cable, car insurance and cell phone. She keeps the lights off during the day to save on the electric bill. She only allows the TV to be on for two hours a day.

She considered selling her car, but relying on public transportation to commute to Annapolis and Baltimore every day would only make her life harder, she said. Her children ride buses to school.

Church applied to every assistance program she could. She is on Medicaid and receives about $300 a month in government food assistance.

She saves on child care costs by having her teenage son watch her daughter after school. She also has a 21-year-old daughter who lives in the same neighborhood and comes over when she can.

At the end of the month, Church has about $50 to $150 a month to spend on gas, taking her kids skating or to the movies on Saturdays and getting her hair styled every now and then. That, she said, helps cut down on stress and depression.

“It’s a struggle, but I make ends meet,” she said.

Church shares a bedroom with her daughter, who sleeps on an air mattress on the floor. They used to share a bed, until Church applied for furniture donations a month ago through social services, which sent her request to a local charity. A man came one day and gave her a bed. They held hands and prayed for her.

Church’s son has his own bed and room because “he’s a boy and he’s at that age,” she said.

Everything else they own are donations, mostly from Sarah’s House. Two TVs, beds, dressers, all of their clothes and shoes, her daughter’s Build-a-Bear and play-make-up set, Church’s two Coach purses.

“It was amazing,” she said.

Framed pictures of Church and her children and her nephews and nieces cover the surfaces around the apartment. When Church talks about her kids she smiles, showing the empty space where one front tooth is missing.

Church’s son wants to be an accountant, she said. “My daughter wants to be everything. She always says, ‘Mom, when I grow up, I’m going to take care of you. I’m going to get a good job.’”

LANDOVER -Now scattered shoes of different sizes and styles greet visitors in the foyer.

Space is tight. Ali’s older sister crammed all her belongings into the room where she and her children, 6 and 4, have beds. Ali’s room used to be a small office.

Mana Ali, right, moved back in with her father and stepmother last year after she realized she could no longer afford to live in the townhouse she was sharing with her cousin. Then, her older sister and two children (one at left) joined them. Photo by Maria Pia-Negro

Sometimes, she said, she wishes for more privacy. But, like many other Marylanders, she’s found she cannot afford to pay rent on her own.

The high cost of housing is putting an economic strain on many people in Maryland. Housing officials and advocacy groups report a sharp increase in people doubling up with relatives or friends. Meanwhile, homeless shelters report an increase in families seeking help.

Nationally, about 19.7 million households doubled up in 2007, or included at least one additional adult. Last year, that number climbed to 21.8 million, census data shows.

Doubling up — where relatives or friends move in together to share the cost of housing — is a national trend. The recession saw a disproportionate increase in the number of doubled-up households compared to the increase of total households, according to a census working paper prepared by Suzanne Macartney, a census poverty analyst.

Young, unmarried adults aged 25 to 34 — which includes Ali — and people who were not in the work force were more likely to live in shared households, the census reported last year.

“People often pay more than 60 percent of their income on their rent, which makes it difficult to afford everything else,” said Pam DeCicco, the program director at Bridges to Housing Stability, a non-profit organization in Howard County that helps working families struggling with housing costs.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition listed Maryland as the fourth most expensive jurisdiction for housing in the United States. It would take about 3.4 full-time, minimum-wage jobs to afford a two-bedroom apartment here, the coalition reported.

Renters living alone in Prince George’s County and Montgomery County must make $28.96 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the “fair market” monthly rate of $1,506, the coalition reported. In Baltimore County, Howard County and Anne Arundel County, where the average rents are cheaper, workers must earn an hourly wage of $23.67.

Housing counselors in Howard and Montgomery County noticed the increase in the number of doubled-up households after the recession started in 2007.

The high cost of housing is also one of the reasons more families end up homeless, the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness reported. According to a 2009 Housing and Urban Development survey, Maryland had about 1,675 homeless families on a given night. That was a 17 percent increase in homeless families from the 2005 count.

The largest concentrations of homeless families are in highly populated areas with high foreclosure and eviction rates, such as Baltimore, Montgomery County and Prince George’s County, the institute reported.

Julie Maltzman, the deputy director for programs at the Montgomery County Coalition for the Homeless, said doubling up after someone loses their home is often a first step toward homelessness.

She said the federal definition of homelessness was expanded last year by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to include those who could no longer double up. These people would be eligible for increased programs and benefits.

“Then comes a time when the people who have the lease or own the property run out of patience, and sometimes (the renters) become at risk of losing their housing because of the overcrowding,” Maltzman said. “The reasons definitely include code enforcements or lease violations, or too many people for a subsidy such as the Section 8 Voucher Program.”

After the recession began, housing subsidy programs in several counties saw more families struggling to pay for housing. Prince George’s County has 5,100 people waiting for county-owned public housing units and Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers. Howard County has 5,215 people waiting to see if they qualify.

The lack of vacancies, higher demand and a reduction in federal funding drove up the numbers on the waiting lists.

The wait for a voucher in Montgomery could take many years. More than 26,000 households are on the waiting list but only 400 units open every year, said Doug Ryan, of Montgomery’s Housing Opportunities Commission.

Macartney’s census analysis suggests that sharing a household reduces the impact of poverty. Young adults who live with their parents had a poverty rate of 8.4 percent, because the income of the whole family is taken into account, according to the census. If their income alone were considered, more than 45 percent of those same young adults would be considered to be living in poverty.

For Ali, moving in with her father has advantages and downsides. She is working on a doctorate in psychology at Howard University, and sometimes it’s hard studying at home, with the children playing around the large dinner table. With seven other people in the house, it feels crowded, and she wishes she could find some quiet moments.

Ali plans to move within a year and said she wants to live in a place like Waldorf where she could get the same benefits — being close to Washington and Baltimore — that Prince George’s County has to offer, but at a more affordable price.