How Close to Poverty Are You?
Photograph; New York Times | Mapping Poverty in America
By John Light | Originally Published at Bill Moyers HQ. January 7, 2014
By John Light | Originally Published at Bill Moyers HQ. January 7, 2014
Where can you find concentrated poverty in America? The New York Times put together an interactive map which reveals that almost all American cities have some neighborhoods with poverty rates over 40 percent. And 80 percent of Americans live in urban centers, which means that for those Americans who aren’t living below the poverty line themselves, the poor are right next door.
In many of our more prosperous cities, poverty is concentrated away from downtown. In New York, it’s clustered in pockets in northern Manhattan and throughout the outer boroughs — most notably the Bronx and Central Brooklyn. In San Francisco, another famously unequal city, the poor are scattered in pockets south of the city center and across the bay, in nearby Oakland.
Jennifer Donald — whose family receives money from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program also know as food stamps — makes dinner with her daughter Jayla, 10, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
But in less-prosperous cities, the poor aren’t similarly out-of-sight. One residential area near downtown Cleveland shows a poverty rate of 80 percent. Other cities across the country have similar tracts.
Outside of urban areas, we see pockets of deep poverty throughout the Appalachians and the South, and in Western counties that are home to American Indian reservations. Look, for instance, at Shannon County in
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