Brookings just published a new study analyzing data on neighborhood poverty from the 2005–09 American Community Surveys and Census 2000, and here are some of the very depressing findings:
- Over a ten-year span, the number of Americans in poverty has grown by 12.3 million reaching a historic high of 46.2 million. By the end of 2010, over 15% of the nation’s population lived below the federal poverty line—$22,314 for a family of four in 2010.
- At least 2.2 million more Americans, a 33% jump since 2000, live in neighborhoods where the overall poverty rate is 40% or higher.
- Housing bust and the mass loss of manufacturing and auto industry jobs during the two recessions in the study period hit the Midwestern and Southern metro areas the hardest. Midwest saw its concentrated poverty nearly doubled from 2000 to 2005–09, while Southern metro areas experienced an increase by one-third.
- Although poverty remains more of an urban phenomenon with more than two-thirds of extremely poor neighborhoods still in cities such as Chicago and Detroit, the number of Americans in extremely poor suburban neighborhoods are growing more than twice as fast--rising by 37%, vs. the 16% growth in cities.(Screenshot below, full interactive map available on Brookings.edu )
- Black residents continued to comprise the largest share (45%) of the population in these extreme-poverty neighborhoods, and over two-thirds of residents had a high school diploma or less.
|
|
|
|
The Census Bureau already released its result in September that not only showed the number of people living in poverty was the highest in the 52 years, since the agency started tracking the statistics, but also that U.S. household income fell to its lowest level in more than a decade in 2010. Bloomberg noted that the Census data also showed roughly one in 16 American workers made less than half the poverty rate in 2010, a 12.6% increase from 2007.
This just illustrates how deep this recession has cut into the American middle class.
Read on ByEconMatters
Related Reading-A Lost Decade into The Great Middle Class Poverty?
