Cities Hit Hardest by Extreme Poverty

Columbus, Ohio, is one of the most economically segregated metro areas in the United States. More than 15% of the metro area’s impoverished population lives in neighborhoods where at least 40% of residents live in poverty.

Due to several environmental factors, such as unemployment, upward social mobility is limited in concentrated poverty neighborhoods. Across Columbus’s poor neighborhoods, the 12.2% jobless rate is more than double the 4.9% unemployment rate in the remaining parts of the metro area. Additionally, the 26.4% homeownership rate in the metro area’s concentrated poverty neighborhoods is less than half the 63.5% homeownership rate in the rest of the metro area.

There are 14 Census tracts or neighborhoods in the Winston-Salem metro area where at least 40% of residents live below the poverty line. As of 2017, over 17,000 people, or 15.4% of the metro area residents who live on poverty level income, lived in one of those neighborhoods. For reference, 11.3% of Americans living below the poverty line are in similarly poor neighborhoods.

Despite the relatively high extreme poverty rate, Winston-Salem has improved considerably in recent years. The metro area’s most recent extreme poverty rate marks a 9 percentage point improvement from the 24.4% rate in 2011.

In the Tucson metro area, nearly 28,000 people live on poverty level incomes in poor neighborhoods. The metro area’s poor communities are characterized by widespread joblessness with 18% of the labor force unemployed, compared to a 7.7% unemployment rate in the metro area’s other neighborhoods, where fewer than 40% of the population lives in poverty.

Incomes tend to rise with educational attainment, and just 68.3% of adults in Tucson’s poor neighborhoods have completed high school, well below the 89.2% of adults who completed high school in the city’s other neighborhoods.

Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton is not an especially poor metro area. Just 11.1% of the population lives below the poverty line, a considerably smaller share than the 14.6% national poverty rate. Still, the metro area is one of the most economically segregated in the United States. Of those living in poverty, 15.6% live in neighborhoods where at least 40% of residents also live below the poverty line.

Incomes tend to go up with educational attainment, and a relatively small share of the residents in Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton metro area’s poorest neighborhoods have a college education. In metro area neighborhoods where 40% of the population lives in poverty, fewer than one in 10 adults have a bachelor’s degree, compared to nearly 30% of adults in the rest of the region.

In the New York City metro area, the largest in the country, over 430,000 people live on poverty level wages in poor neighborhoods. Nationwide, minorities are more likely to live in extreme poverty conditions than white Americans. The New York metro area is a notable exception. Nearly one out of every five white metro area residents earning poverty level wages live in extreme poverty neighborhoods, compared to 18.7% of poor Hispanic New Yorkers and 12.6% of poor black New Yorkers.

Homeownership is one of the most common ways for Americans to build intergenerational wealth. In New York’s poorest neighborhoods, the homeownership rate is just 8.8% compared to over 50% in the rest of the metro area.