Severity and Concentration of Persistent High
Poverty in Nonmetro Areas
Calvin
L. Beale
Robert
M. Gibbs
The incidence of poverty is commonly
used as an indicator of economic well-being for
places or groups of people. But a simple dichotomy
of poor versus not poor at a given time may conceal
much that would broaden our understanding of poverty.
For example, the poverty rate does not reveal the
degree of severity or concentration of poverty,
or the size of the population whose income is only
marginally above the poverty level. Nor does it
show whether an area’s poverty level is an
unusual and temporary condition or a longstanding
pattern.
ERS defines counties as persistently high poverty
areas if 20 percent or more of their population
had poverty-level incomes in each of the four decennial
censuses since 1970. The Census Bureau establishes
the poverty threshold, which varies by the number
and age of persons in a household and is adjusted
from census to census to account for changes in
the cost of living. The poverty threshold in the
2000 Census for a family of four, with two children
under age 18, was an annual income of $16,895 in
1999. For an individual under age 65, the threshold
was $8,667.
Areas of Persistent High Poverty
Of the 340 nonmetro counties with
persistent high poverty in 2000, the overwhelming
majority were in parts of the U.S. where poverty
primarily reflects conditions among racial/ethnic
minority groups or the predominantly White population
of the Southern Highlands (mostly Allegheny and
Cumberland Plateau counties of Kentucky and West
Virginia, plus parts of the Ozark Plateau and Ouachita
Mountains west of the Mississippi). These counties
contained a fourth of the total nonmetro poverty
population in 2000.
In the persistent high-poverty counties, 26 percent
of the total population in 2000 were in households
with incomes below the poverty line, with 12 percent
in “severe poverty” (a term used to
define those with incomes less than 50 percent of
the official poverty threshold). Thus, nearly half
of the poor in these counties were not merely poor
but severely poor, even after accounting for any
possible receipt of cash public assistance or Supplemental
Security Income.
A corollary condition in persistent-poverty
areas is that many persons with incomes above the
poverty level had incomes only moderately above
this threshold. Just 48 percent of the population
in persistent high-poverty counties in nonmetro
areas lived in households with incomes at least
double the poverty threshold, compared with 66 percent
in all other nonmetro counties. Thus, even among
households with incomes above the poverty level
in persistent high-poverty counties, there is a
relative lack of households with incomes high enough
to provide personal savings, local capital, or substantial
consumer spending power.
Although the characteristics of racial/ethnic minorities
in persistent high-poverty counties vary from group
to group, the incomes of these minority groups as
a percentage of the poverty level are rather similar.
The one notable exception is that Hispanics were
less likely than Blacks or Native Americans to be
severely poor, and they had a slightly higher inclusion
at each income group above the poverty level. All
three minority groups in persistent high-poverty
nonmetro counties had overall poverty rates of 32-40
percent—more than double the U.S. nonmetro
rate of 15 percent—with an additional 17-19
percent in “near poverty” (a term used
to define those with incomes 100-149 percent of
the poverty level).
Concentration of Minority Poor
Among all nonmetro poor people,
minority populations are much more likely than non-Hispanic
Whites to be concentrated in areas where the overall
poverty level is persistently high. Over half of
all nonmetro poor Blacks and Native Americans live
in such areas, as do nearly 30 percent of all poor
Hispanics. But only a seventh of poor non-Hispanic
White households live in a milieu of widespread
and persistent poverty, notwithstanding the regional
concentrations of White poverty in the Southern
Highlands. Thus, the local economic and social context
of poverty may be more difficult and limiting for
the nonmetro minority poor than it is for poor non-Hispanic
Whites.
The population of metro counties that have persistently
had high poverty is smaller than that of chronically
poor nonmetro counties (about 4.7 million versus
6.4 million). Because the total metro population
is so large, the percentage of poor metro residents
living in counties with persistently high poverty
rates (4.4 percent) is much smaller than the percentage
of nonmetro residents who live in persistent high-poverty
counties (24.2 percent). The metro counties of Orleans
Parish, LA (New Orleans), and El Paso County, TX,
were the only counties of 400,000 or more people
in 2000 that had persistent high poverty.
The County
Typology page of the ERS Briefing Room on Measuring
Rurality
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