Thursday, October 8, 2015

Most major U.S. metro areas continue to face higher poverty rates than when the recession began

Most major U.S. metro areas continue to face higher poverty rates than when the recession began: http://brook.gs/1L56kP5 
The latest poverty data from the U.S. Census Bureau underscore the uneven nature of the economic recovery since the Great Recession. While some major metro areas are slowly starting to make progress, for most regions poverty rates and poor populations continue to outstrip their pre-recession levels. An analysis of 2014 American Community Survey data on people living below the federal poverty line (e.g., $24,230 for a family of four in 2014) in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas finds:

Between 2013 and 2014, the major metro area poverty rate fell slightly for the first time since the onset of the Great Recession.

Taken together, the poverty rate for the 100 largest metro areas edged down by three-tenths of a percentage point between 2013 and 2014—from 15.0 to 14.7 percent—which means the poor population fell by 274,000 to reach 30.5 million. Both the poverty rate decline and decline in poor population were statistically significant.
However, the modest decline in the poverty rate was largely driven by just 14 metro areas, including Greensboro-High Point and Jackson in the South; Denver, San Jose, and Seattle in the West; and Chicago and Detroit in the Midwest. And only 12 of those regions registered a statistically significant decrease in the number of poor residents: Houston and San Francisco’s poverty rates fell because the poor population held steady while overall population grew. (See the appendix for detailed data.)
Only one region—the Nashville metro area—experienced an uptick in both the poor population and poverty rate between 2013 and 2014. The Bakersfield and Austin regions also saw their poor populations grow, but broader population gains kept their poverty rates unchanged.
For most major metro areas (85 of the top 100), 2014 brought no significant change to their poverty levels compared to the year before.
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2015/09/17-acs-poverty-data-kneebone-holmes?cid=00900015020089101US0001-09301
 

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