Waters represents 753,696 people in the 43rd
District which includes much of southern Los Angeles, as well as portions of
Gardena, Inglewood, Westchester, and Torrance. Under Waters tenure she has
maintained the 43rd district as one of the poorest areas in the
United States. Waters is only 1 of 4 Congress members that lives outside her district;
she instead lives in a multi-million dollar home in a wealthy L.A. suburb.
As a member of the Democratic Party, Waters is currently in her
15th term in the House. She is the most senior of the twelve black women
currently serving in Congress, and she chaired the Congressional Black Caucus
(a.k.a. Cuckolds) from 1997 to 1999. She is the second most senior member of
the California congressional delegation after Nancy Pelosi. Waters is currently
the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee.
After moving her family to Los Angeles, California, in 1961, Waters worked several different jobs before being hired as an assistant teacher with the Head Start program in Watts in 1966. Later in 1973, Waters went to work as chief deputy to City Councilman David S. Cunningham, Jr., she then was elected to the California State Assembly in 1976, and ascended to the position of Democratic Caucus Chair for the Assembly, before being elected to Congress in 1991.
Known as 'Auntie Maxine' by her supporters and as 'The
Poverty Queen' by her detractors, Waters has consistently maintained large scale
poverty, homelessness, high school dropouts, and police corruption. Currently
an approximate 106,643 people live below the poverty line in Waters 43rd
district, 40,230 of those impoverished are children/teenagers.
The so-called “poverty line” that the those living in the 43rd
district knows all too well, was determined in the mid-1960s by calculating the
amount of money it costs to buy a basic basket of food and then multiplying
that amount by three. Each year the line is updated to account for inflation.
The current poverty line is $12,760 for a single person and $26,200 for a
family of four. If a person lives in a household whose income is less than that
amount, he is considered poor.
For over five decades the so-called ‘War of Poverty’ has only calculated food cost when determining who is poor, while openly ignoring the full consumption needs of families, including housing cost and regional variation, which experts suggest as a more accurate measure of household income needs to survive in America.
Waters 43rd district is comprised of mostly working class families that are barely making ends meet, individuals living in her district earn on average just $16.67 an hour per capita, an hourly wage that is 20% less than the California state average. According to economists, Californians need an hourly full-time wage of $32.68 just to afford a two-bedroom rental home.
In contrast, the vast majorities of the residents in Waters 43rd district are renters, with only 40% of those living in her district owning and occupying homes. The remaining 60% of residents are paying rent each month, and have no ownership. Approximately 133,735 families living the in the 43rd district earn less than $75,000 a year, making it virtually impossible for those families to afford the cost of purchasing a home within the district. The median home price in the 43rd district is $607,200, as compared to the national median home price of $320,000. Yet Waters has done little or nothing at all to help lower this absurd housing cost so that her constituents can live and thrive in their own district, instead each year thousands of residents are forced to move out of the 43rd district in search of higher wages and lower cost housing.
When it comes to education, Waters 43rd district
is among the highest in the nation in terms of High School dropouts. Only 78.2%
of district residents have attained a High School Diploma/GED or higher,
meaning 109,908 residents have no Diploma/GED, resulting in low skilled workers
being forced to labor at low wages slipping further and further into poverty,
unable to afford basic necessities such as food and housing.