http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/us/california-today-poverty.html 2016-09-20 10:17:19 California Today: Haves and Have-Nots in the Golden State Monday: Californians and “desperate poverty,” the Los Angeles Rams win their return-home opener, and picking up your discarded cigarette butts. === Good morning. Welcome to California Today, a Tell us about the Want to receive California Today by email? Quentin Hardy It’s official: California leads the pack in a very troubling category: desperate poverty. U Poverty in America is complex. Earning $25,000 a year in Mississippi is different from the same rough income in California. There are things like state and local taxes to consider, along with vastly different housing costs, child and health care and commuting expenses. There are different benefits, too, like nutrition assistance or child support payments. The Census Bureau tries to smooth out some of these differences with what it calls a measure of “supplemental poverty,” which adds many of those other costs and benefits to the standard poverty rate. Only the District of Columbia, with 22 percent of its population in poverty under the adjusted figures, ranks higher than California. That is a relatively small place, with 147,000 people in this hard strait. The California population in “supplemental poverty” is close to eight million people. The census adjustment from standard poverty numbers increased our count by 5.6 percentage points, or 2.2 million people. California, of course, is a populous and varied state, but rents are sky high in the most dense areas, and taxes are usually high relative to other places. These costs have much to do with this sorry result. But there is also unimaginable success here. If you came to much of the Bay Area or Los Angeles and bought a house, there is a good chance you became a millionaire, at least on paper, simply by paying your mortgage bill. The very poorest Californians, by comparison, are in the agricultural areas, not cheek by jowl with the opulent. But here are still plenty of places where the contrast is closely stark: In 2014, the Census Bureau put per capita income in Palo Alto at $75,257, while adjacent East Palo Alto was at $18,527. And that’s not adjusting for the area’s sky-high housing costs. In Los Angeles, the per capita income of Beverly Hills was $81,788, while Bell City came in at $12,031. They are 20 miles, and several worlds, apart. • • New data show that Irvine may now be the largest city in the continental United States with an • A • • After 27 years abroad, rediscovering a land of sustainable pot and sleek Teslas in • • • How a • The segregation that was a vestige of slavery caused many to leave New Orleans. • Two Silicon Valley veterans have been helping Stanford students “Game of Thrones and “Veep” The host Jimmy Kimmel Check out the • Senator Tim Kaine, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, will be in the Bay Area on Wednesday, raising money in • • The three-day • The • Tens of thousands of volunteers turned up on Saturday for the annual California Coastal Cleanup Day. And just as they do every year, cigarette butts topped the list of most common trash items found along beaches, waterways and lake shores, the event’s leaders said. More than seven million cigarette butts have been collected during the cleanups since 1989, according to the The primary source of the discarded cigarettes traces back not to beachgoers, but rather urban smokers, people in, say, Riverside, who flick a butt to the curb, where it is swept into storm drains, out to the ocean and up on to the shore. “Really lightweight, smaller items of trash are the ones you find the most because those are the ones that make their way easily through our aquatic system,” said Julia Williams, cleanup director with Part of the solution lies in making sure that smokers understand where used cigarettes end up when they are discarded in a gutter or out a car window, environmentalists say. An awareness campaign created by the coastal commission this year used posters with images of cigarette butts on a beach alongside phrases like “Flicked along Highway 5” or “Flicked along L Street.” “Most people have understood for some time the damage cigarettes can do to human health,” Eben Schwartz, the coastal commission’s marine debris program manager, said in a statement. “What we are trying to shed more light on is the incredible harm they cause in our environment as well.” California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a third-generation Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U.C. Berkeley.