Concentrated Poverty in the US

Posted on November 4, 2011 by townsend

• Bay Area’s five poorest neighborhoods show up in study, By Matt O’Brien, November 3, 2011, San Jose Mercury News: “The Bay Area has fewer concentrations of extreme poverty than a decade ago, according to a report released Thursday. That may not console the people living in the Bay Area’s five poorest neighborhoods. In five census tracts, four of them in the East Bay, more than 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line, according to the Brookings Institution report. The neighborhoods are in downtown Berkeley, uptown Oakland, Alameda Point and parts of West Oakland and San Francisco’s Hunters Point. Two are business districts where many homeless congregate; one, the area around Oakland’s Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, has been central in the Occupy protests. Others are residential areas with well-kept public housing. The Uptown Oakland area, which includes some of downtown and the plaza, is a study in contrasts: Despite a glut of new condos meant to attract young professionals, more than 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line — which for a single person means making less than $11,000 a year…”
• Poor Chattanooga neighborhoods have more than doubled in 9 years, By Judy Walton, November 4, 2011, Chattanooga Times Free Press: “The number of extremely poor neighborhoods in Chattanooga and the region — those with poverty rates above 40 percent — more than doubled from 2000 to 2009, a new report shows. The number of people living in the poorest census tracts in the Chattanooga region grew by more than 4,200, to 10,535, in the period, according to ‘The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty,’ from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. The Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institute is a liberal-leaning nonprofit that researches social issues. ‘We lost ground against concentrated poverty in the 2000s,’ Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior research associate at Brookings and lead author of the report, said in a news release. ‘More people are living in areas that are extremely poor, and concentrated poverty now affects a greater swath of communities than in the past.’ In the release, Kneebone noted that the federal poverty level in 2010 was $22,314 annually for a family of four…”