“I used to spend $160 every two weeks for food. Now it’s $50 every two weeks,” said Glenn Garrett, 36, a laid-off construction foreman with three children. “But I’m still a dad, and it’s still my responsibility to put food on the table.”<\/p>\n
Here in southwest Riverside County, where foreclosures and unemployment have taken an enormous toll, one of the biggest casualties has been the middle class, which is rapidly becoming the new poor.<\/p>\n
“This is more of a middle-class recession than any before because of the housing component and because the shutdown of the financial system has spread into the service and construction sector where you have a lot of the better jobs,” said John Husing of Economics & Politics Inc., a regional economic research firm. “Recessions usually fall on those at the bottom, but now all tiers of society are being hurt.”<\/p>\n
Few places illustrate that better than Murrieta, a tidy city of about 100,000 with a median family income of $85,439, according to the 2007 census.<\/p>\n