Oregon’s Poor Working Families Have More Company

More Oregon families that have at least one working parent are living in poverty, according to a study released Tuesday by the Oregon Center for Public Policy.

The Portland-based research center reports that 19.6 percent of the state's poor families had at least one full-time worker in 2009, the official end of the Great Recession. In 2015, that number had increased by almost a third, to 25.9 percent. An additional 44.7 percent have at least one parent working a part-time job, meaning that seven out of 10 poor Oregon families are working families.

Gender and racial disparities are also at play: single working mothers are twice as likely to be living in poverty than single working fathers, and there are twice the number of poor Latino families with full-time workers than poor white families. (Researchers didn't have a large enough sample size to make conclusions about poor African-American families and how they compare with the overall population.)

"Work — even full-time work — is no sure path out of poverty," the report reads.

The report notes other factors that weigh on poor families.

According to a 2015 report from Child Care Aware of America, the cost of child care in Oregon relative to median income is among the highest in the nation — particularly for infants, where Oregon was second only to Minnesota for least affordable child care.