Being poor in the land of plenty: almost 33 million Americans are poor--a third of them children under 18. In a world dominated by mall culture, what's it like for teens who must struggle to make ends meet?

• Author: Fountain, John W.
• Position: Cover Story

In the last fringes of daylight, 13-year-old Marcus Anthony turns somersaults with his brothers on a mattress in their front yard. Marcus lives in Pembroke Township, a small Illinois farming community about an hour's drive south of Chicago. Some residents live in crumbling shacks with floors of dirt, windows of plastic, and no running water; the lines at a local food pantry quickly exhaust their supplies each month, and poverty is everywhere.

Marcus's family of 11 is poor by government standards, but not in spirit.

"What I think poverty is, is when you have absolutely no place to stay, nothing to wear, nothing to eat, and nothing to sell or trade," says Marcus, who helps plant and harvest vegetables on his family's modest six-acre farm. He also cares for the guineas (a kind of poultry), hogs, sheep, rabbits, peacocks, and a horse.

"If you have lots of food you can get all the time, and you have a place to stay," he says, "well, even if you don't have any money, I don't think you're poor."

Marcus and his family are among 32.9 million Americans living in poverty--11.7 million of them under 18 years old. In the current economy, with large numbers of people losing jobs due to layoffs, many more Americans teeter on the brink of poverty.

The federal government measures poverty according to family size and total household income. A yearly income of $18,400 is now considered the poverty line for a typical family of two adults and two children under 18.

But many poverty experts argue that the formula for calculating the figures is out of date and does not take account of the vastly different costs of living in various regions of the country. Further, they say, many people technically above the poverty line are poor nonetheless.

"The poverty line isn't an adequate threshold to measure a family's economic hardship," says Lawrence Aber, executive director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University. "Once you get above the poverty line, you're still very far away from economic self-sufficiency." At twice the poverty line--or $36,800 for a family of four--a family is much closer to meeting its minimum needs, Aber says.

During the economic boom of the 1990s, the poverty rate fell slowly over eight consecutive years. But in 2001, according to the most recent census data, the rate began rising again, to 11.7 percent--an increase of 1.3 million people. That's three times the population of Las Vegas, Nevada.

The majority of Americans who live below the poverty line, 22.7 million, are white. Another 8.1 million are black, and 8 million are Hispanic. The numbers represent less than 10 percent of whites, but are 22.7 percent of blacks and 21.4 percent of Hispanics.

The rise in poverty is not confined to small rural towns like Pembroke Township or to inner cities. "The vast majority of poor families don't live in the worst urban neighborhoods or the poorest rural areas," says Greg J. Duncan, director of the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research. "Poor families are scattered around."

Increasingly, poverty is sprouting alongside the suburban neighborhoods that make up the core of the American middle class. "In some parts of the country, there's very little difference between poverty in the cities and poverty in the suburbs," says Alan Berube, co-author of a Brookings Institution report that analyzed the 2000 census.

Numbers may tell where American poverty exists, but they do not convey what it is like to be a teenager facing poverty in a society dominated by mall culture. Without the cash to shop for new CDs or the latest version of NBA Live, access to what is cool is denied.

"The kind of sensitivity that [teens] have to their circumstances, and the extent to which peers matter a lot more ... probably makes them quite a bit more sensitive to this problem," Duncan says.

three teenagers, three different circumstances

While Marcus Anthony lives in a rural town of just 2,784 people, where most roads are unpaved sand and...