Number of Americans Living in Extremely Poor Neighborhoods Up in Recent Years
Detroit, Michigan
A new Brookings Institution analysis notes: “13.5 percent of the nation’s poor population faced the double burden of being poor in a very poor place.”
The number of poor people living in U.S. neighborhoods characterized by extreme poverty rose to about 6.3 million following the Great Recession, an increase of roughly 2.2 million compared to the years leading up to and through the downturn, according to a new analysis.
Researchers at the Brookings Institution looked at changes in “concentrated poverty rates” in neighborhoods throughout the United States, meaning the share of poor residents living in extremely poor places. Their analysis involved comparing American Community Survey data from 2005 to 2009, which included the recession, the three years of economic growth that led up to it and the 2010-2014 time period, when an uneven recovery occurred.
Between the two timeframes the researchers found that key measures of concentrated poverty not only went up overall across the U.S. but also increased sharply outside of urban centers, in suburbs and smaller metropolitan areas. Places, they noted, that often lack “infrastructure, safety net supports, and capacity to address” issues tied to poverty.
The research, published online on March 31, was authored by Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.
“The rapid spread of poverty and its increasing concentration outside of the urban core, particularly following the Great Recession, challenges long-held assumptions about where poor people live and where distressed neighborhoods are located within regions,” they wrote.
In the 2010-2014 period, they found an estimated 13,977,291 people were living in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 40 percent or more, an increase of about 59 percent from 2005 to 2009. Of the overall 2010-2014 population, about 6.3 million people were poor. “Put differently, 13.5 percent of the nation’s poor population faced the double burden of being poor in a very poor place,” the Brookings researchers wrote.
Across the two time periods, the number of neighborhoods mired in extreme poverty also went up—to 4,181 from 2,832. That’s an increase of roughly 47 percent.
Prior research has shown that concentrated poverty can negatively affect things such as crime rates, school dropout rates and the duration of time people remain poor.
The findings of the analysis, Kneebone and Holmes explain, “underscore the uneven ways in which poverty clustered in declining and distressed places as it grew over the course of the 2000s.” They also point out: “For poor Hispanics and African Americans, concentrations of poverty rose even more sharply, particularly in the post-recession period.”
Over 70 percent of all poor individuals living in extremely poor neighborhoods were in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas in the 2010-2014 timeframe, according to the analysis. And among the 100 largest metro areas in the U.S., 67, or about two-thirds, saw concentrated poverty grow in the post-recession period compared to the earlier one.
Meanwhile, striking changes took place outside of urban centers.
The number of suburban poor people living in concentrated poverty went up in the 2010-2014 timespan to an estimated 1,183,481. That’s nearly double the 596,207 figure for the 2005-2009 period and almost three times where the number stood in 2000.
Extremely poor suburban neighborhoods, the analysis says, tend to defy picket fence stereotypes.
Instead, they are more likely to be located within older industrial regions of the Midwest and Northeast; smaller cities like Paterson, New Jersey or Pontiac, Michigan; or in semi-rural portions of poorer metro areas in states like California and Texas. More recently, they’ve popped up in faster-growing parts of the South and Intermountain West.
The full report from Kneebone and Holmes includes interactive map data for neighborhoods in cities around the country and can be found here.
Bill Lucia is a Reporter at Government Executive's Route Fifty.
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