CLEVELAND -- Poverty did not grow in Northeast Ohio last year, but the specter of poverty spread. Thousands of people found themselves pulled ever closer to a desperate edge.

The number of near-poor has climbed steadily in the region in recent years, according to an examination of census data by The Plain Dealer.

People living on incomes just above the poverty line grew by 10 percent between 2000 and 2008. Theirs is now a community of nearly a quarter of a million people.

The U.S. Census Bureau will announce today that 13 percent of residents in the Cleveland-Akron metro area were poor in 2008, a rate virtually unchanged from 2007. But the number of people with a new fear of poverty is growing in city and suburb.

"Right now, what is poverty?" asked Stacey Miller, the food pantry coordinator at Affinity Baptist Church in Cleveland's Lee-Miles neighborhood. "I think we all feel it a little bit."

Her pantry in a largely working-class neighborhood has seen its lines grow in recent months, often with people who never before visited a hunger center.

"Most of them do work," Miller said. "But they need to pay for a medication. Or the rent went up. Or their hours got cut. Everything has increased but their income. They need a little help making ends meet."

According to The Plain Dealer analysis, nearly 224,000 people in the region are treading anxious waters. They are not officially poor but stand too close to the abyss for comfort.

The federal government set the poverty line at $17,330 for a family of three in 2008. If the family earned less than that, the government defined them as poor. About 13 percent of America was poor last year, 13.4 percent of Ohio and 13.1 percent of Northeast Ohio.

The near-poor are often defined as people living on less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. That income topped out at $25,995 for a family of three in 2008.

At the start of the decade, the near-poor numbered about 200,000 people in the eight-county region. By July of 2008, another 23,000 people had joined an income group especially vulnerable to layoffs, pay cuts, forced furloughs and other ravages of recession.

"When you're working at the bottom rung of the ladder, any kind of drop in your income is a disaster," said Elliott Huff, who helped launch the food pantry at Affinity Baptist in August 2007. Since then, the numbers of families served by the pantry has grown from about 40 to more than 150 three Saturdays a month.

A rising class of near-poor, while the poverty rate remains constant, is a hallmark of recession, said Claudia Coulton, co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change at Case Western Reserve University.

"A recession hurts people who were working," she said, "especially people in the lower-middle income range."

The danger is that near-poor families can easily tumble into the ranks of the poor, as they are now more susceptible to the primary causes of poverty, Coulton said.

Stress could fracture a family, for example, or a worker could find they no longer possess the job skills needed in the regional economy.

From such afflictions come an underclass.

In 2008, 30.5 percent of Cleveland residents lived in poverty, up from 29.5 percent in 2007 and 26.9 in 2006. The recent data comes from the 2008 American Community Survey, which provides a snapshot of American life from July 2007 to July 2008.

Among America's 71 major cities -- those with more than 250,000 people -- Cleveland ranked second poorest behind Detroit for the second straight year.

Among cities with populations greater than 65,000, Cleveland was America's 15th poorest city last year, behind Greenville, N.C.

Ohio had six cities among the nation's poorest. Youngstown ranked eighth nationally and first in Ohio with a 33.5 percent poverty rate. It was followed in Ohio by Cleveland, Dayton, 29.2 percent, Canton 27.3 percent, Lorain, 25.4 percent, and Cincinnati.

While the census survey captures part of the current recession -- which officially began in December 2007 -- much of urban poverty is not affected by economic cycles, experts say. Rather, high rates of single parenthood and low levels of education guarantee high poverty rates in many cities.

One-third of the region's single-parent families were poor in 2008, The Plain Dealer found. Among married couple families, less than 4 percent were poor.

"The bulk of poverty is a long-term, structural problem," Coulton said. "When you have a modest education, you need two workers in the labor force to get above the poverty line."