Persistent Poverty Plagues More Than 300 American Counties | Healthiest Communities Health News

More than 1 in 10 U.S. counties have experienced persistent poverty over the last 30 years, a new government report shows.

According to the report, published this month by the U.S. Census Bureau, a county was considered to be in persistent poverty if it maintained a poverty rate of 20% or higher at each of four touchstone periods reflected in the bureau’s data collection: 1989, 1999, 2005-2009 and 2015-2019.

The U.S. was home to 341 counties that met the criteria, accounting for 10.9% of the country’s more than 3,100 counties overall. Such counties have been concentrated particularly in the Southeast, central Appalachia, the Southwest and along the nation’s border with Mexico.

Very few persistent poverty counties were located in the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes region or the Northeast. Notably, all three of the persistent poverty counties in the Northeast – Bronx and Kings counties in New York and Philadelphia County in Pennsylvania – are among the country’s top 1% of counties in terms of population size.

Yet on the whole, counties afflicted with this type of long-term economic strife have tended to be less populous, as Census Bureau statisticians report that the roughly 11% of all U.S. counties experiencing persistent poverty were home to about 6.1% of the nation’s population in 2019.

Even in counties that did not experience persistent poverty, the Census Bureau observed the issue within thousands of census tracts – small subdivisions that tend to average a population of around 4,000 people. In fact, over 74% of persistent poverty census tracts were found in counties that did not suffer from persistent poverty, and every state, along with the District of Columbia, was home to at least one census tract in persistent poverty.

Overall, among the more than 73,000 census tracts across the country, about 11.3% – or 8,238 – experienced persistent poverty. These areas were home to around 9% of the U.S. population in 2019, ranging from nearly a quarter of the population of Mississippi to less than 1% of New Hampshire’s population.

Census Bureau researchers noted that people living in areas experiencing a high level of poverty can face barriers to well-being even if they themselves are not poor, and that exploring where elevated levels of poverty have persisted can give government agencies an opportunity to boost support for such places.

The poverty rate in the United States ticked up in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and hit 11.6% in 2021, but has largely come down in recent years from a 21st-century high of 15.1% in 2010, according to nonpartisan data center USAFacts.

Yet poverty rates vary broadly across demographics, with stark disparities by race and ethnicity. While the poverty rate for non-Hispanic white Americans was 8.1% in 2021, rates were much higher for American Indian and Alaska Natives (24.3%), as well as for the Black (19.5%) and Hispanic populations (17.1%).